You can't do business without your vendors. They support critical elements of your organization, from cloud storage services to payment processing to physical items like office supplies or physical components. Your vendors make your organization run more efficiently – but sometimes at a risk to your financial, reputational and operational resiliency.
In November of 2021, we described several techniques used by attackers to deliver malware through infected Microsoft Office files. In addition to exploits like CVE-2021-40444, these infected documents frequently abuse VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to execute their techniques, regardless of the final payload. Attackers also often use extra layers of protection to evade signature-based detections, like constructing PowerShell scripts and WMI namespaces at runtime, as done by Emotet.
2022 feels a little different, doesn’t it? Every day I’m prepared to hear something new, something scary, or something exciting. These last couple of years have made it seem like we just never know what is coming next. It’s no different for financial services companies who have to be prepared for the unexpected, including disruptive technologies that can challenge their core businesses.
Several years ago, a global investment bank embarked on an ambitious plan to automate its network configuration deployment process and use internal teams to run all aspects of network operations. The move was made, in part, because of the fluidity of the bank's network, which is constantly undergoing configuration changes.
Many of us are fond of collecting things, but not everyone is excited about Collections #1-5. In 2019, these Collections, composed of ca. 932 GB of data containing billions of email addresses and their passwords, made their way around the Internet. These collections weren’t breaches but compilations of emails and passwords that had been gathered. Even after repeat entries were whittled down, the collection still contained billions of distinct address and password combinations.
