You’ll often find that ‘vulnerability scan’ and ‘penetration test’ are wrongly used interchangeably, creating confusion about which is the right security choice for businesses. Broadly speaking, a vulnerability scan could be thought of as a surface-level security assessment, whereas a penetration test delves that much deeper. In fact, penetration testers often make use of a vulnerability scan as part of their process.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Quite an interesting stream of news this week, however, my choices this week focus on threat management. The first one, and its quite alarming and not at all funny, shows an example of someone didn’t accept reasonable proof of account ownership for a password reset – something many of us face with public websites.

Recently, an AlienVault customer reached out to ask how AlienVault handles the detection of zero-day attacks, which are exploits against previously unknown vulnerabilities. In this blog, I shed light on how we approach this.

Flaws in code lines, file system and data input methods make up the core security vulnerability of any application. This is what we address through secure coding practices. Secure coding guidelines stand out as the last battling army before the enemy line of security risks and threats.

Despite the fact that PCI DSS has been in effect for over a decade, and most merchants are achieving compliance, some of the world’s largest retailers have been hit by to data breaches. The sad truth is that achieving compliance doesn’t guarantee data protection, even for large organizations. For example, more than five million credit card numbers were stolen in 2018 hacks of two major retailers.

Working with a wide variety of customers and technologies often brings interesting challenges and stories that usually end up buried in a support ticket never to see the light of day again. However, after a curious ticket regarding integration of our product into a BitBucket pipeline, we asked WeTek if they would like to contribute an article about this particular problem. Well, here it is, a great article highlighting the subtleties that can trip us up!