One of the greatest misconceptions about online safety is that home networks are somehow private. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been true since around the turn of the century when we started filling our home networks with Internet-connected boxes serving local web pages. The problem is that web browsers typically make little distinction between web sites on the public internet versus those on a home or office network.

The traditional career path for a chief information security officer (CISO) is fairly straightforward. An individual begins their career in IT but ultimately moves to security after demonstrating a security mindset. Once established within the ranks of information security, the professional receives promotion after promotion until they attain the title of CISO.

Trend analysis is an important topic within threat intelligence. It lets us forecast where things are headed; whether they’re getting better, worse or different; and where we should be focusing our precious budgets. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently released the Incident trends report (October 2018 – April 2019). This highlights some of the trends seen across various UK government entities, organizations and sectors.

Cyberattacks in the healthcare industry show no signs of abating. In 2018, 15 million healthcare records were breached. Alarmingly, in the first half of 2019 alone, 32 million healthcare records were compromised as a result of multiple incidents including the American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA) breach. At AMCA, 24 million patient records were affected when an unauthorized user accessed systems that contained sensitive information like SSN, provider names and medical information.

Sometimes your best intentions are thwarted by technology. That was the case when Thom Langford and I attempted to do a Q&A session after our webinar “Modern Skills for Modern CISOs.” Unfortunately, the session ended before we got the chance to answer the questions that the audience had submitted. The silver lining is that we had the chance to write our answers thoughtfully instead of answering them on the spot.

Reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Siemens highlight both the increasing cyber threats faced by the electric utility companies and the lack of adequate readiness to respond to these threats. According to these reports, a cyber-attack on the electric grid could cause “severe” damage.

Ah, the wonders of technology. In the innovation-rich Information Age, we are the beneficiaries of a nonstop wave of new advancements, each offering the ability to execute vital tasks faster and more efficiently than ever before. However, along with each breakthrough comes potential security vulnerabilities.

Unsurprisingly, cyber attacks are growing in the business sector and not just in the United States but world-wide. Cyber-attacks represent the greatest risk in six out of ten of the top economies in the world. The report presented by the World Economic Forum discusses formjacking, cryptojacking, ransomware like LockerGoga and other cyber-attacks of which CEOs around the globe are starting to become more aware.

To protect the integrity and safety of their business-critical assets, cybersecurity must be a top priority for the oil and gas industry. Although they operate some of the nation’s most critical systems, securing these complex infrastructures can be a huge challenge.

Over the course of the past 10 years, traditional application development methodology (waterfall) has given way in favor of the more agile DevOps-centric methodologies focused on continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This trend was turbocharged in 2013 when Docker containers came onto the scene and ushered in the proverbial crossing of the chasm in container adoption. A recent Tripwire study revealed that 87% of surveyed organizations had containers deployed in production.

Industrial organizations face a growing list of digital threats these days. Back in April 2019, for instance, FireEye revealed that it had observed an additional intrusion by the threat group behind the destructive TRITON malware at another critical infrastructure.

The calculus for disaster recovery and risk management is changing. Most small businesses within the past decade would often keep many of their critical technology assets locally, perhaps in a server closet, or a centralized data center for multiple offices. They built their own “vault” of applications, databases, email, files, etc., often on a few physical servers they would be wholly responsible for maintaining and eventually upgrading or replacing.

You can’t go a week without seeing a story about a data breach or ransomware hitting organizations. These breaches can be very costly, but they still continue to show up. Are the good guys not winning the cybersecurity war? Organizations invest millions of dollars in security products and services, but they keep getting breached.

October is national cybersecurity awareness month, and with the recent hacks at Door Dash, the discovery of a large-scale iOS hacking campaign, and a database containing 419 million phone numbers associated with Facebook accounts, we’re all likely feeling a little dirty. So, I decided to share my perspectives on cyber hygiene.

As a system administrator during the early days of the “cloud revolution” I found the “cloud” metaphor an interesting choice to frame the technology stack. Clouds, in my mind, were “woolly” and hard to pin down as opposed to the omnipresent, always-available things that IT marketers were suggesting cloud services would be.

Diligent taxpayers are being increasingly targeted by con artists who are well-versed in manipulating the revenue system. The crooks usually impersonate IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service) officials, sending fake emails or messages on social media in an attempt to defraud the targeted individuals of their money. Unfortunately, lots of people fall for these scams, and the malefactors are raking in significant profits. Below is a list of the prevalent tax swindles doing the rounds nowadays.

The time at ML:0 can be eye-opening form many organizations. There are generally a lot of assets discovered that are new or had been forgotten about. Almost every organization discovers their own Methuselah; this is the system that has been around forever and performs some important tasks but has not been updated in years. The system admins are scared to touch it for fear of breaking something.

In the digital age, more often than not, you can be sure that some enterprise has hold of your personal information. This information could be your name, email, phone number, IP address, country and other details. This can come from submitting a form, subscribing to a newsletter, accepting cookies, accepting the privacy policy or terms and conditions when creating an account or downloading software.

Normally it works like this. Someone gets infected by ransomware, and then they pay the ransom. The victim then licks their wounds and hopefully learns something from the experience. And that’s what happened to Tobias Frömel, a German developer and web designer who found himself paying a Bitcoin ransom of 670 Euros (US $735) after his QNAP NAS drive was hit by the Muhstik ransomware.

Digital attackers are increasingly targeting industrial environments these days. Take manufacturing organizations, for instance. Back in late-August, FortiGuard Labs discovered a malspam campaign that had targeted a large U.S. manufacturing company with a variant of the LokiBot infostealer family. It wasn’t long thereafter when Bloomberg reported on the efforts of bad actors to target Airbus by infiltrating its suppliers’ networks.

Phishing attacks don’t show any sign of slowing down. Per its 2019 Phishing Trends and Intelligence Report, PhishLabs found that total phishing volume rose 40.9 percent over the course of 2018. These attacks targeted a range of organizations, especially financial service companies, email and online service providers and cloud/file hosting firms.

If I asked you what security products you had in place to manage your risk within your IT organisation 10 years ago, you’d probably have been able to list a half dozen different tools and confidently note that most of your infrastructure was covered by a common set of key products such as antivirus, DLP, firewalls, etc. But in a world with IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, maintaining a comprehensive approach becomes far more difficult.

For many organizations moving to the cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines or Google Compute Engine often forms the backbone of their cloud architecture. These services allow you to create instances of pretty much any operating system almost instantly. Unfortunately, moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud doesn’t relieve you of your compliance or security obligations.

As ransomware attacks continue to cripple networks, most recently forcing medical centres to shut down their systems and turn away patients, the FBI has issued some unambiguous advice for organisations on how they should handle ransom demands: Don’t pay.

In my previous article, we discussed how organizations are shifting how IT resources are deployed and managed. We covered three methods in particular: automated image creation and deployment, immutable image deployment and containers. We’ll now explore how organizations can make the best of these methods in a dynamic environment.

The CMMC enforcement model will require a significant adjustment to the way contractors conduct government business – from procurement to execution. In Part 2 of this series, I discussed the possible impacts of having your company’s security rating made public. In Part 3, I would like to discuss the impact of having one unified standard for cybersecurity on a company’s compliance practices.

As a regular reader of Tripwire, you are aware that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Way back in 2015, when the world was an entirely different place, I contributed an article that offered some tips for protecting yourself. Since that article, other scams have taken a front seat towards compromising our security. They are not new, but they seem to be the new “flavor of the day.”