In a dark room lit only by the light from four computer monitors sits a hacker named Hector (not his real name). You can hear the faint pulse of an EDM track coming from his headphones as Hector taps away on his computer’s keyboard. The above description could serve as the setting for a hacker movie set in the early 2000s. But it doesn’t work in today’s context. Nowadays, Hector sits in a brightly lit room with multiple screens at his disposal.
It’s been a few weeks since Verizon released the 12th edition of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). For this publication, Verizon’s researchers studied 41,686 security incidents in which a response was necessary. These analysts found that 2,013 of those incidents were data breaches in that some sort of information was actually compromised.
YouTube, the world’s top provider of streaming multimedia content, keeps reaching new heights in terms of its popularity. Nearly two billion monthly users and five billion videos watched every single day – these impressive statistics speak for themselves, and the numbers are steadily growing year over year. Everybody loves YouTube and so do cybercriminals, only in their very own nefarious way.
When I was younger, I played a variety of team sports and enjoyed competing against opponents with my teammates. Winning was always a matter of applying sound tactics and strategy, attacking and defending well and using a blend of skill, talent and luck. Now that I’m older, I watch more than I play, and I’m able to appreciate the many lessons team sports teach, especially at the professional level. With sports, we can tackle technical topics in a relatable way.
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Distributed Control Systems (DCS) and other control system configurations such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). They are typically used in industries such as electric, water, oil and natural gas, transportation, chemical, pharmaceutical and manufacturing (e.g., automotive, aerospace). These control systems are vital to the operation of U.S.
DevOps is revolutionizing the way enterprises deliver apps to the market by blending software development and information technology operations. This convergence creates an assembly line for the cloud, as Tim Erlin wrote for The State of Security, by increasing the rate at which companies can develop apps and deliver them to users.
So, you have 2000 network devices in your environment and everyone is telling you that you have to rotate all 2000 device passwords every 30, 60 or 90 days (at a minimum) — who has time for that?! How are you going to manage this? The task seems monumental and time-consuming! If nothing is done, then your security/compliance posture will worsen due to reusing passwords that are easy to remember across assets. In addition, passwords could become stale and give adversaries more time to crack them.
The move to the cloud — in many ways — is a return to the early days of computing. When I took my first computer class in 1978, we used an IBM 360 system time share. We rented out time on a remote system — sent our jobs over a modem to a computer at a university — and got back the results of the program run. Today, we’re using the cloud, which is just a fancy version of the old time-share systems.
In May 2019, Verizon Enterprise released the 12th edition of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Researchers analyzed a total of 41,686 security incidents, of which there were 2,013 data breaches, for the publication. More than half (52 percent) of those reported breaches involved some form of hacking. The report listed the most prominent hacking variety and vector combinations, with “vulnerability exploitation” making the top three.
Although DNS rebinding attacks have been known for over a decade now, they are only recently receiving attention as a practical attack surface. In the last year, quite a few popular products have been shown to lack DNS rebinding protections, and as a result, someone could operate them remotely using a malicious web site. Manufacturers have made a habit of giving consumers connected devices that are controlled by unauthenticated HTTP requests via the local network.
