During the holiday season people logged on to make purchases through online retailers, like no other time of the year. While there was significant growth in many segments of society on a global scale in 2018, we also saw a significant increase in online retail breaches where personally identifiable information was compromised at an alarming rate.

We in the infosec community have made enormous progress towards getting multi-factor authentication the recognition it deserves. All the respected folks in the community have been promoting multi-factor as the best protection against account hijacks.

Over the last few years, technology has transformed our lives and made it easy for businesses to collect and process personal data. These technological advancements have also created the need for new regulations to provide better protection of personal data.

Typically, people think of security threats as outside attacks on an organization. Data security plans tend to focus on securing the perimeter, endpoints, email and data. Though these are certainly critical measures, all organizations should realize the real threat that insiders, or internal employees, pose to operations.

Many organizations have DevOps on their mind going into 2019. This is a global movement. In fact, Puppet and Splunk received responses for their 2018 State of DevOps Report from organizations on every continent except Antarctica. Those organizations varied in their industry, size and level of DevOps maturity, but they were all interested in learning how they could advance their DevOps evolution going forward.

Meet the hacker europa, a white hat hacker on the Detectify Crowdsource platform. He is based in Italy with a great passion for infosec and relatively new to the bug bounty scene, but seasoned in infosec. We asked him about the kind of bugs he likes to find, why he joined Crowdsource and how persistence helped him turn a duplicate finding into a bug with 8 different bypasses.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Looks like 2019 starts as busy as the previous year ended, breaches and failures all around. Let’s start with a pretty dumb but not uncommon issue – someone entering the wrong email address. How bad can that go?