During a penetration test, it's not an uncommon practice for a penetration tester to launch a password attack against Active Directory. Many times this password attack uses a list of domain user accounts that were enumerated or even just a list of potential domain user accounts that were generated randomly. Many penetration testers will either perform just a single password attack or at least 2-3 attempts, depending on domain's password lockout policy is set to.

How Chooseus Life Insurance lost its customers’ cardholder details and their trust In August 2019, reporters began flocking to Chooseus Life Insurance’s head office in Detroit after news leaked that thousands of the company’s customers had lost money due to a security breach. The CEO of this life insurance company released the following statement: “We have had your trust for two years.

A whaling attack is a type of phishing attack that targets high-level executives, such as the CEO or CFO, to steal sensitive information from a company. This could include financial information or employees' personal information. The reason whaling attacks target high-ranking employees is because they hold power in companies and often have complete access to sensitive data.

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.

Privileged passwords should be used wisely. These credentials, also called secrets, provide a user with access to protected accounts, systems, networking hardware, cloud instances, and applications. Since privileged accounts also have elevated permissions, passwords to these accounts are often targeted by cybercriminals. In fact, weak, reused, and compromised passwords are the cause of 81% of all data breaches according to the Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report.

Simply put, DevOps is a software methodology that includes security automation. Software engineering teams often equate DevOps and automation as synonymous. Most security experts believe that automation is the most quantifiable benefits for organizations. In this article, we will explore how DevOps security automation helps in achieving better software security.

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.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Blockchain is trendy, has been for a while, and to be honest its not something I’ve had time to look at myself. All I tend to hear about are companies trying to find uses for that and/or machine learning, and the often shouted response of others saying its a solution looking for a problem outside it’s original sphere.