A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. This first article makes a really good point of pointing out how ludicrous the apathy to tighten exposed service is. The cloud providers have done a lot to make it obvious vulnerable services are exposed, but no, people still can’t or ignore such advice. Is it lack of capability? Ignorance? Cost cutting? Maybe all of them.

Back in March, a hacking group known as DarkSide began a campaign on Colonial Pipeline’s IT network and billing systems. On May 7th, Colonial publicly announces the attack, shuts down servers and some pipelines and pays DarkSide $4.4M in ransom. On May 12th, Colonial restores operations and announces fuel delivery timelines amidst panic buying at gas stations.

COVID-19 contact tracing and personal cloud apps, what could possibly go wrong? A recent federal lawsuit, filed against the state of Pennsylvania and a vendor contracted by the state’s Department of Health, provides an interesting answer. The vendor in question was contracted “to provide contact tracing and other similar services” following the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020.

Residual risk is the threat or vulnerability that remains after all risk treatment and remediation efforts have been implemented. Even with an astute vulnerability sanitation program, there will always be vestiges of risks that remain, these are residual risks. Because they will always be present, the process of managing residual risk involves setting an acceptable threshold and then implementing programs and solutions to mitigate all risks below that threshold.

Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, addressed President Biden’s executive order at the virtual RSA Conference this week. The executive order, announced on May 12, 2021, aims to safeguard U.S. cybersecurity and modernize cybersecurity defenses. As Neuberger explains, this executive order couldn’t come at a more critical time.

In today’s digital world, we practically live on our phones or computers. Chances are, you don’t go more than 15 minutes without checking your email or social media. And you probably get most of your news from the Internet. But how do you know what information is real? Two different news sites might be giving a different opinion of the same story. Take the presidential election, for example. There was a frenzy of fake news trying to sway voters in one direction or the other.