Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Data leaks happen once every few months at least. Millions of users can have their phone number, address, and Social Security Number smeared across the internet in a matter of seconds. Your online browsing behavior is also sold legally by tech companies to the highest bidder. Ever seen an ad that is a little too specific? Most major tech companies rely on some form of data harvesting for revenue. As consumers, should we do anything? Can we do anything?

I was recently asked to host a round table discussion on ‘Governance, Risk and Compliance‘ (GRC), and I have to admit I was more than a little excited. Why? Because the other people around the table were leading lights in the world of Cybersecurity, Risk and Resilience, and I was looking forward to exploring how a GRC framework can work across industries and learning some valuable lessons from those around our virtual table.

Google recently released the new Cloud Security Foundations Guide. We’re going to take apart Google’s guide and show you what’s worth looking into. First, an introduction. “This comprehensive guide helps you build security into your Google Cloud deployments.” – Google What’s going on: Google Cloud Services are out there, being deployed in the wild, untamed. This guide is Google’s self-proclaimed “opinionated” view on keeping them safe.

You just started reading this blog post. But are you reading it alone? Or is there a “man in the middle” watching and recording everything you do online? While it may sound like a plot from a Hollywood blockbuster, the reality is far from amusing. A man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack can quickly occur when an unsuspecting victim joins the same public Wi-Fi network as a malicious attacker, for example, at a cafe.

The recent slate of breaches and regulatory actions has prompted many companies who had been doing the minimum in terms of proactive cyber risk management to rethink their approach. In the U.S., new regulations are emerging (for states like Virginia, Colorado, Massachusetts and many others), and existing regulators are increasing their enforcement, as we’ve seen by the NY Dept of Financial Services (NYDFS) and the SEC.

SpecterOps recently released an offensive security research paper that details techniques enabling an adversary to abuse insecure functionality in Active Directory Certificate Service. SpecterOps reports that abusing the legitimate functionality of Active Directory Certificate Service will allow an adversary to forge the elements of a certificate to authenticate as any user or administrator in Active Directory.

Throughout July and August, Kaseya released a slew of patches for this vulnerability. Bitdefender released a universal decryption key that they developed by working with law enforcement. That key, with instructions, is available to organizations that have been impacted by the attack. Although REvil popped back online after nearly two months of silence, this vulnerability is no longer a threat due to vendor patches and a widely available decryption key.

When it comes to establishing a robust mobile application security posture, vulnerability scanning is certainly the go-to option. But given the complex cybersecurity challenges of modern times, it might be complicated and challenging to implement vulnerability scanning properly. According to the 2020 Edgescan Vulnerability Statistics Report, around 35% of the vulnerabilities discovered in external-facing apps were of critical or high risk.

Whilst originally thought to be a local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler, identified as CVE-2021-1675 and patched during Microsoft's June Patch Tuesday, Microsoft increased the severity of this issue on June 21 as well as reclassifying it as a 'remote code execution' (RCE) threat.

Hashing is a one-way function that outputs a fixed-length string, where it’s impossible to decipher back into the original input. Encryption is a reversible process used to scramble data so that it can’t be read. So, if you’re looking for a way to keep your passwords safe and secure, look no further than hashing! But there is a slight catch here that relates to the term salting.