Digital attackers are sending around love-themed malicious emails in an attempt to infect recipients with the Nemty ransomware. If you’ve been kicking around in the world of IT security for more years than you’d like to admit, then you’ll surely remember the ILOVEYOU virus (also known as the “Love Bug” or “Loveletter”).

What is red teaming? How is it different from conventional penetration testing? Why do we need blue, red, and white teams? How are cyber-drills carried out, and what results should be expected? In this article, we will answer these and other questions related to red teaming.

The United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) has put together a short guidance document on mitigating vulnerabilities for cloud computing. At only eight pages, it is an accessible primer for cloud security and a great place to start before taking on something like the comprehensive NIST 800-53 security controls.

During the past year, we have witnessed significant data breaches that have impacted industries ranging from hospitality to legal to social media. We have seen a continuation of financially motivated threats, such as business email compromise (BEC), which continue to plague corporate bank accounts. Ransomware has brought multiple cities, schools and universities to their knees, earning threat actors significant funds.

The climb is getting steeper, but thanks to hard work, vision and insight are much keener. At ML:4, all assets are scanned by a combination of agent and remote scans on a normal cadence. This will generate a lot of data dictated by threat and patch priority. Thousands of new vulnerabilities are released each year, and no company or product can detect all of them. Organizations must prioritize their coverage of vulnerabilities that they determine will have the biggest impact.

If you want to become a digital forensic expert, be aware that when entering the field, you will be presented with an abundance of information that you will not know. It is a wonderfully challenging career path. Some believe that having the title of a cybersecurity professional (e.g. digital forensics expert, cybersecurity analyst, incident response commander, etc.) means that this is an area where the field of knowledge is intimidating because it’s so expansive.

One thing I have noticed is that each industry comes up with their own terms and acronyms. Unfortunately, these inventions often vary depending on the person you speak to due to a lack of a governing body that decides on an exact definition. At times, acronyms can even overlap, causing further confusion. Therefore, when it comes to definitions, I always look to ask a variety of persons from across industries on how they would define certain terms.

Over 10 million people who have stayed at MGM Resorts hotels – including Twitter boss Jack Dorsey and pop idol Justin Bieber – have had their personal details posted online by hackers. The security breach, publicised by ZDNet and security researcher Under the Breach, saw the records of 10,683,188 former guests – including names, postal addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and email addresses – made available in an online data dump.

In part one of this cyber resilience blog series, we discussed what it means to be a resilient organization. For part two, let’s discuss why organizations need to consider these challenges and who’s responsible for addressing them. Whilst asking why an organization may need to be resilient sounds a bit silly, I can say from experience that just because something seems obvious doesn’t mean it’s not quite a bit of work.

As hackers’ methods become more sophisticated, the scale of email security breaches and the frequency at which they occur grow greater with each passing year. In 2019 alone, an estimated 2 billion unique email addresses, accompanied by over 21 million unique passwords, were exposed within a single data breach.

For the majority of people in the information security world, the act of offensive hacking is something they are tasked with protecting against but have little ability to do themselves. That is like asking a professional boxer to enter the ring without knowing how to throw a punch. Sure, you may be able to get in and last a few rounds, but eventually, a formidable opponent will wear you down and knock you out.

Zero Trust is a security concept that is based on the notion that organizations should not take trust for granted, regardless of whether access attempts originate from inside or outside its perimeters. An enterprise needs to verify any attempt for connection to its systems before granting access. At the same time, the defensive layers that define the Zero Trust model should enable access for enterprise users no matter where they are and no matter what device they’re using.

Managing security incidents can be a stressful job. You are dealing with many questions all at once. What’s the scope? Who do I need to engage? How do I manage all of this? As an Incident Commander (IC), you have many responsibilities. You’re responsible for driving an incident to resolution as quickly as possible, creating the resources necessary to document, collaborate, and communicate while helping identify, engage, and orient the right people.

Historically, common detection methods have used file hashes (MD5, SHA1, and SHA256)—unique signatures based on the entire contents of the file—to identify malware. Modern threat actors have increased in sophistication to a point where every instance of a given malware will have a different hash, and that hash will vary from machine to machine.

Post-exploitation can be one of the most time-consuming but worthwhile tasks that an offensive security professional engages in. Fundamentally, it is where you are able to demonstrate what an adversary may do if they compromise a business. A big component of this is trying to get as far as you can without alerting the defenders to what you’re doing.

As if Puerto Rico wasn’t having a hard enough time as it attempts to recover from a recession, the damage caused by devastating hurricanes in recent years, and a damaging earthquake last month, it now finds itself being exploited by cybercriminals. According to media reports, the government of the US island territory has lost more than US $2.6 million after falling for the type of email scam that has plagued companies and organisations around the world.

Having worked with many individuals responding to incidents where their digital private images were shared without consent, social media or email accounts had unauthorised access, and even physical safety was a concern, it is all too familiar how terrifying the unknown can be. As someone who has been on both the victim’s and later the responder’s side, I am qualified to express both the terror and knowledge of things you can do to take back control.

You’ve seen the high-level stats on the cybersecurity skills gap, but I’ll remind you of some of the main ones from the (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study: As the gap persists, Tripwire continues to keep a pulse on how the skills gap issue is actually being felt by the security experts who are responsible for defending their organizations from cyber attacks every day.

What is cyber resilience? If you search the definition within the Oxford Dictionary, resilience alone is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” If you narrow the definition down to cyber resilience, it shifts to maintaining vs recovery. As noted on Wikipedia, it becomes “the ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation.”

Companies are facing increased and complex cybersecurity challenges in today’s interconnected digital economy. The cyber threats have become more sophisticated and may harm a company via innovative new forms of malware, through the compromise of global supply chains or by criminal and hostile state actors. The hard truth is that it is difficult to counter the ever-expanding cyber-criminal economy.

A few years ago, I myself was vished, or ‘phished,’ over the phone. The caller was someone, likely offshore in a call center, who had done a little bit of research online to find my name, my phone number, my wireless phone carrier and a few other details that they used to build rapport with me on the phone. Spoofing the customer service phone number of my wireless service provider, they called me and claimed that a credit was being added to my bill.

Malware closed out 2019 on a strong note. According to AV-TEST, malware authors’ efforts throughout the year helped push the total number of known malware above one billion samples. This development wouldn’t have been possible without the vigor exhibited by malware authors in the fall of 2019. Indeed, after detecting 8.5 million new samples in June and 9.56 million specimens the following month, AV-TEST saw the monthly totals jump up above 13 million in August.

It may not be the most efficient way to steal data from an organisation, let alone the most practical, but researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have once again detailed an imaginative way to exfiltrate information from an air-gapped computer. And this time they haven’t done it by listening to a PC’s fan, or watching the blinking LED lights on a hard drive or even picking up FM radio waves.

Is an electricity provider’s supply chain its weakest link in the event of a cyberattack? The evidence is compelling that third parties often play unwitting roles. For example, the NotPetya ransomware attacks in mid-2017 originally gained a foothold via a backdoor in third-party accounting software. To safeguard North America’s electricity supply, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has issued several critical infrastructure protection (CIP) standards.

I think we all know what log management is. As discussed in a 2017 article for The State of Security, log management is about systematically orchestrating the system and network logs collected by the organization. That being said, there’s still some confusion surrounding why an enterprise would want to collect log data in the first place. There are two primary drivers for an enterprise to collect log data. These are security and compliance.

According to the NIS Directive, Member States should adopt a common set of baseline security requirements to ensure a minimum level of harmonized security measures across EU and enhance the overall level of security of operators providing essential services (OES) and digital service providers (DSP).

Threats against industrial environments are on the rise. Near the beginning of 2019, for example, Kaspersky Lab revealed that 47% of industrial control system (ICS) computers on which its software was installed suffered a malware infection in the past year. That was three percent higher than the previous year.