Several digital attacks against pharmaceutical companies have made news in the past few years. Back in 2017, for instance, Merck fell victim to NotPetya. The wiper malware spread to the pharmaceutical giant’s headquarters, rendered years of research inaccessible, affected various production facilities and caused $1.3 billion in damages, according to Bloomberg News.
Here at Tripwire, we, like many others, recently surpassed the one-year anniversary of working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since March of 2020, we have converted kitchens, spare bedrooms and garages into office spaces. Our pets and children have become our coworkers, and companies are reporting a sudden increase in shirt sales as opposed to pant sales.
As we know, Tripwire Enterprise (TE) is the de-facto go-to solution for File Integrity Monitoring (FIM). In normal operations, we deploy a TE agent to a system we want to monitor. TE then uses that agent to baseline the system against the appropriate rules, creating a known good state for that system. Moving forward, that system is monitored for change per the rules that were used to create the baseline.
The White House is reportedly moving swiftly forward with a plan to harden the security of the US power grid against hacking attacks. According to Bloomberg, the Biden administration has a plan to dramatically improve how power utilities defend themselves against attacks from countries considered to be adversaries in cyberspace – such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China.
As expected, the start of 2021 has seen unprecedented movement in the U.S. with 22 states introducing comprehensive privacy legislation and even more introducing specific-use legislation. To date, hundreds of privacy bills were introduced across the states; to give some perspective, more than 50 privacy bills were introduced in New York alone. Undoubtedly a hot topic, it seemed anyone with an idea for a privacy bill put it in writing and introduced it to their legislature.
Where were you when you first heard about the SolarWinds breach? It’s not unusual for information security professionals to learn about a breach. Keeping track of the news is part of the job. The SolarWinds attack, however, was different for two primary reasons. First, it reached the level of mainstream news. The majority of breaches stay mostly in the industry press.
After a year of lockdown, or nearly full lockdown, due to the ongoing health crisis, we learned a lot from how our organizations responded when we all had to change our work habits to a home-office setup.
Digital attackers are increasingly launching sophisticated campaigns in an effort to target U.S. federal agencies and other organizations. Two recent examples demonstrate this reality. These are the SolarWinds supply chain attack and the HAFNIUM Exchange exploit campaign.
Hidden deep in Google’s release notes for the new version of Chrome that shipped on March 1 is a fix for an “object lifecycle issue.” Or, for the less technically inclined, a major bug. Bugs like these have been common in Chrome, leading some to wonder whether the world’s most popular web browser is as safe as it could be? Google created Chrome as a secure browser and has loaded it with a growing set of security features along the way.
Cybercriminal extortionists have adopted a new tactic to apply even more pressure on their corporate victims: contacting the victims’ customers, and asking them to demand a ransom is paid to protect their own privacy. At the end of March, Bleeping Computer reported that the Clop ransomware gang had not stopped at threatening hacked companies and contacting journalists, but had taken the additional step of direct emailing victims’ customers whose details had been found in stolen data.
