Almost exactly a year ago, cybersecurity professionals were locked in a heated debate about insurance. While some were keen to point out that the future of the industry would need to include some form of insurance market, others argued that cyber insurance would never be worth the premiums, especially given the inherently volatile nature of cybersecurity. The pandemic has changed all of that.
The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a warning to companies to better protect their cloud-based accounts after several recent successful attacks. According to an advisory published by CISA, an increasing number of attacks have succeeded as more employees have begun to work remotely with a variety of corporate laptops and personal devices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On February 11, 2020, Offensive Security introduced a major overhaul and update to their already fantastic course: Penetration Testing with Kali Linux. Those changes included updates to their lab environment. The study materials were substantially updated, with additional material including entire new sections on Bash Scripting, Active Directory Attacks, and PowerShell Empire.
In their attempt to extort as much money as quickly as possible out of companies, ransomware gangs know some effective techniques to get the full attention of a firm’s management team. And one of them is to specifically target the sensitive information stored on the computers used by a company’s top executives, in the hope of finding valuable data that can best pressure bosses into approving the payment of a sizeable ransom.
Complying with Standards drawn by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council can be complicated and time-consuming. But, with a PCI DSS Gap Analysis, the process becomes a lot easier, streamlined, and less exhaustive. PCI Gap Analysis is the first step towards the Compliance process. The assessment provides details on your current security posture against what is expected and needs to be achieved by the organization.
A popular joke among technologists says that it’s always DNS, even when it initially didn’t seem that way. DNS issues come in many shapes and forms, including some often-overlooked security issues. DNS (short for the Domain Name System) continues to be described as “the phonebook of the Internet,” but many people, including most readers of this blog, will be more familiar with the basic workings of DNS than with the outdated phenomenon of paper phonebooks.
Over the last few years, the idea of patching systems to correct flaws has graduated from an annoying business disruption to a top priority. With all of the notorious vulnerabilities that can wreak total havoc, the time it takes to patch becomes a minor inconvenience when weighed against both the technical challenges and possible regulatory penalties of not patching.
As a cybersecurity professional, how numb have you become to vendors who try to scare you with frightening statistics in an effort to sell you a new product? It is understandable that a vendor has to present as much information in a limited amount of attention-grabbing time, so their doomsday technique makes some sense. Perhaps the vendors’ approach is faulty, as the numbers are quite frightening indeed. There is definitely a larger point to be made.
As if dealing with COVID-19 were not enough, 2020 turned out to be a banner year for another troublesome strain of virus— ransomware. Malicious actors grew more sophisticated, daring and brutal. They also hit a number of high-profile targets. For those of you who didn’t keep up with all of the developments in the ransomware space, we’ve broken down some of the most important events and trends of the year here.
