Enterprises and small businesses alike are facing challenges that impact their ability to maintain adequate cybersecurity. Budget constraints and limited staff are just a couple of reasons why businesses have become more susceptible to cyberattacks. Hackers are becoming smarter, and the tools that teams deploy are growing in number, leading to fragmentation and increased vulnerabilities.
Binary diffing, a technique for comparing binaries, can be a powerful tool to facilitate malware analysis and perform malware family attribution. This blog post describes how AT&T Alien Labs is leveraging binary diffing and code analysis to reduce reverse-engineering time and generate threat intelligence.
While October is famous for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we provide resources and recommendations for our customers, really every month should focus on this business-critical topic. Given the frequency of Ransomware attacks, all industries need to be increasingly vigilant. This includes many aspects of cybersecurity, such as user training, endpoint security, network security, vulnerability management, and detection and response to incidents.
It’s becoming more popular in 2021 to have a smart home with connected devices capable of communicating with each other. It’s expected that smart home spending will reach more than $141 billion by 2023, and the number of smart homes will surpass 300 million by 2023. Some connected home trends are dominating the headlines in 2021, including more tech for the fitness-conscious, multifamily smart homes, and a higher level of security and privacy in connected homes.
In today’s dynamic threat landscape, having different tools to meet unique security requirements helps keep data protected. However, businesses today have 10 to 50+ security tools and consequently spend too much time managing them instead of protecting against cybercrime. This security tool overload creates internal challenges and potentially distracts from the primary business mission.
Dealing with the massive architecture of client-server networks requires effective security measures. Everyone has become painfully aware of all dangerous fishes roaming around the pool of the network, trying to get access to the system. Having a weak password policy is a key vector for attackers to gain system access. However, admins can help protect password security of the wide-reaching network using Group Management Policy (GPO).
The FBI recently published a warning stating that ransomware gang OnePercent Group has been attacking companies in the US since November 2020. This gang of cybercriminals targets individuals within an organization with social engineering tactics designed to fool them into opening a document from a ZIP file attached to an email. Ransomware is then downloaded and the breach is underway.
Access management is a key element of any enterprise security program. Using policies defined by IT administrators, access management enforces access rights across the network. It does this by designating which groups of users are allowed access to which applications and identifying which user attributes are required to access each application. Problems arise for businesses when they base their access management programs entirely around passwords, however.
The impact of Data Exfiltration, which is the act of copying or transferring data from a computer or server without authorization, has increased over the years and it can be difficult to detect because data is transferred regularly for normal business purposes. If not monitored accurately, company data can be stolen without anyone being aware. Companies in every industry, no matter the size, have sensitive data that must remain private (e.g. PHI, PII, PCI).
The proliferation of cloud computing, mobile device use, and the Internet of Things has dissolved traditional network boundaries. Today, the network perimeter has evolved as workloads have moved to the cloud while non-managed, mobile devices have become the norm rather than the exception. The location of applications, users, and their devices are no longer static. Data is no longer confined to the corporate data center.
Here at AT&T Cybersecurity, we believe cyber protection should include multiple layers and cover as much ground as possible. Having full visibility into threats on the network and being able to automate actions against them not only reduces an organization’s risk but also frees up time for security teams to focus on other high-value security tasks.
In March 2021, cybersecurity researcher Le Xuan Tuyen discovered a security bug in Microsoft Exchange Server. The vulnerability, dubbed ProxyToken, lets attackers bypass the authentication process to access victims’ emails and configure their mailboxes.
As the threat landscape evolves faster than we can keep up with, organizations must be aware of the type of threats they may face. Certain threat types, like ransomware and malware, are more prominent and therefore must be fought with the appropriate resources. On the other hand, some threat types are not prevalent and pose significantly less risk. However, just because a specific threat isn’t as widespread does not mean we shouldn’t take it seriously.
