Two years after the WannaCry ransomware outbreak shone a light on the computer security of the UK’s National Health Service, and five years after Microsoft said it would no longer release patches for Windows XP, the NHS still has 2300 PCs running the outdated operating system. The worrying statistic came to light in the response to a parliamentary question asked by shadow minister Jo Platt MP. The fact that 2,300 NHS computers are still running Windows XP is, obviously, not great news.

Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is not easy to achieve. Quite the opposite, in fact: A 2017 Verizon report stated that 80 percent of companies fail their PCI DSS assessments, and only 29 percent of those that pass are still compliant after one year. PCI DSS compliance, like information security as a whole, is not a one-and-done process but ongoing. To succeed, your enterprise must be vigilant.

Alien Labs has identified an unreported and ongoing malware campaign, which we attribute with high confidence to the adversary publicly reported as “StrongPity”. Based on compilation times, infrastructure, and public distribution of samples - we assess the campaign operated from the second half of 2018 into today (July 2019). This post details new malware and new infrastructure which is used to control compromised machines.

In ancient history, to be able to establish identity implied you had to recognize the person simply by their appearance. So typically, one actively transacted only with those in the same neighborhood or village. “One of the earliest known references to paperwork that served in a role similar to that of a passport is found in the Hebrew Bible.

Enterprises are increasingly adopting a cloud-first approach and migrating their workloads, data and applications to the Cloud. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the Public Cloud industry with more than 30% of the market. As digital transformation progresses and the digital space expands, so does the attack surface that exposes the ongoing proliferation of security risks. In today’s cloud-first world, security remains the primary concern.

Security professionals have many tools in their toolbox. Some are physical in nature. (WireShark, Mimikatz, endpoint detection and response systems and SIEMs come to mind.) Others not so much. (These assets include critical thinking faculties, the ability to analyze complex processes, a willingness—some call it a need—to dig in and find the root cause of an issue and a passion to learn and keep learning.) One such tool that’s often overlooked is, communication.

On 10 July 2019, Atlassian released a security advisory for a critical severity vulnerability in most versions of Jira Server and Jira Data Center. The vulnerability was introduced in version 4.4.0, released in 2011, and affects versions as recent as 8.2.2, released on 13 June 2019. The good news is that users of Jira Cloud are not affected. But how many organizations are running Jira Server or Jira Data Center, and are vulnerable to this attack?

Too many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are under the belief that purchasing “This One Product” or “This One Managed Service” will provide all the security their network requires. If this were true, large corporations with huge IT budgets would never have data breaches! Before you start buying expensive new technology to protect your office network, take some time to examine your internal infosec processes. Make sure you are covering the basics.

Those who have worked in the life sciences industry have undoubtedly observed a sea of change in the discipline over the past twenty years. From new modalities (like CAR-T to microbiome) to external collaborations, the way drugs are developed in the 21st century is more complex, more distributed, and faster. Alongside fundamentally new discoveries is a pan-industry shift from on-premise computing to the cloud.