Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

I look back on L0pht’s testimony before Congress in 1998 with a mix of pride and reflection. It’s been twenty-five years since our group of hackers (or vulnerability researchers, if you will) stepped up to raise awareness about the importance of internet security in front of some of the world’s most powerful lawmakers. This event marked the beginning of a long journey towards increased cybersecurity awareness and implementation of measures to protect our digital world.

SchoolDude is a cloud-based work management tool for school districts and other organizations throughout the United States. This software service is used by school employees and students to submit repair requests and manage those same requests. The software is used to handle serious repairs in schools all over, and it also manages some confidential data about employees. This information was just released in a serious data breach that included more than 3 million user accounts.

The Security Operations Center (SOC) is the central unit that manages the overall security posture of any organization. Knowing how your SOC is performing is crucial, so security teams can measure the strength of their operations. This article describes SOC metrics, including their importance, common SOC metrics, and the steps SOC teams can take to improve them.

A user impersonation feature typically allows a privileged user, such as an administrator, but typically these days, support teams, to sign into an application as a specific user without needing to know the user’s password. This feature allows support teams to see the application as the user would see it, often in relation to following a user journey in the context of that user, in order to see the same error message a user is receiving with a view to resolving the issue.

‘A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for,’ said Dr. Grace Hopper, Rear Admiral of the US Navy and a computer pioneer. As soon as the ship leaves the harbor, or even the dock, there are risks. Depending on conditions and purposes, the ship's crew might decide they are negligible, that they can be recovered from, or that the potential rewards are worth the risk. The same ideas can be applied to computers.

In today’s business landscape, security and compliance mean everything. ‍ Because of this, many modern businesses look towards solutions that will provide customers and prospects with the most confidence and trust. One of these is SOC 2 compliance and attestation. SOC 2 is a marker of solid and consumer-minded companies that want to protect customer data.

A new report covering 13 global markets highlights phishing prevalence and its role in cyber attacks when compared to other types of attacks. It’s difficult for me not to stand on my “phishing is a problem” soapbox when there exists stories and reports demonstrating that phishing continues to dominate as a security problem that isn’t being properly addressed.

This new phishing toolkit is rising in popularity for its effective realism in impersonating not just Microsoft 365, but the victim organization as well. Security researchers at Cisco Talos have identified a new Microsoft 365 toolkit that actually creates a realistic login experience for the victim user, making it more dangerous to organizations.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2023, Google introduced eight new top-level domains (TLD) available for purchase and that could be used with websites and/or email addresses. From these eight new TLD’s, one that stands out as a potential security risk is.zip. The.zip TLD is concerning since it is also used as an extension of files commonly shared over the internet. With the inclusion of.zip as a domain, email clients and web platforms will now accept URLs disguised as filenames with.zip extensions.

On Wednesday, May 17, 2023, Cisco disclosed four critical remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting the web-based user interface of Cisco Small Business Series Switches. Cisco’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of PoC exploit code being available for these vulnerabilities, however, they have not identified a publicly available PoC exploit.