Companies are facing increased and complex cybersecurity challenges in today’s interconnected digital economy. The cyber threats have become more sophisticated and may harm a company via innovative new forms of malware, through the compromise of global supply chains or by criminal and hostile state actors. The hard truth is that it is difficult to counter the ever-expanding cyber-criminal economy.
A few years ago, I myself was vished, or ‘phished,’ over the phone. The caller was someone, likely offshore in a call center, who had done a little bit of research online to find my name, my phone number, my wireless phone carrier and a few other details that they used to build rapport with me on the phone. Spoofing the customer service phone number of my wireless service provider, they called me and claimed that a credit was being added to my bill.
Malware closed out 2019 on a strong note. According to AV-TEST, malware authors’ efforts throughout the year helped push the total number of known malware above one billion samples. This development wouldn’t have been possible without the vigor exhibited by malware authors in the fall of 2019. Indeed, after detecting 8.5 million new samples in June and 9.56 million specimens the following month, AV-TEST saw the monthly totals jump up above 13 million in August.
It may not be the most efficient way to steal data from an organisation, let alone the most practical, but researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have once again detailed an imaginative way to exfiltrate information from an air-gapped computer. And this time they haven’t done it by listening to a PC’s fan, or watching the blinking LED lights on a hard drive or even picking up FM radio waves.
Is an electricity provider’s supply chain its weakest link in the event of a cyberattack? The evidence is compelling that third parties often play unwitting roles. For example, the NotPetya ransomware attacks in mid-2017 originally gained a foothold via a backdoor in third-party accounting software. To safeguard North America’s electricity supply, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has issued several critical infrastructure protection (CIP) standards.
I think we all know what log management is. As discussed in a 2017 article for The State of Security, log management is about systematically orchestrating the system and network logs collected by the organization. That being said, there’s still some confusion surrounding why an enterprise would want to collect log data in the first place. There are two primary drivers for an enterprise to collect log data. These are security and compliance.
According to the NIS Directive, Member States should adopt a common set of baseline security requirements to ensure a minimum level of harmonized security measures across EU and enhance the overall level of security of operators providing essential services (OES) and digital service providers (DSP).
Threats against industrial environments are on the rise. Near the beginning of 2019, for example, Kaspersky Lab revealed that 47% of industrial control system (ICS) computers on which its software was installed suffered a malware infection in the past year. That was three percent higher than the previous year.
One of the only things that is constant in life is change. It’s the same with cybersecurity. There are different types of changes to consider. A lot of changes in our everyday life are out of our control. It can be hard to discover, monitor and even react to change. However, when it comes to change in the world of cybersecurity, it’s possible we can manage that change in a way that can have a positive impact on our business.
An investigation claims that the UK’s National Health Service, which was hit hard by the notorious WannaCry worm in 2017, has seen a marked fall in ransomware attacks since. A report published by Comparitech, based upon Freedom of Information requests, reveals the somewhat surprising news that since WannaCry there have only been six recorded ransomware attacks against the NHS.
