Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

March 2020

The Future is Hybrid:Key Considerations for Cloud and DevOps

Do you want to modernize your cloud infrastructure while staying one step ahead of the associated security risks? Common cloud infrastructure challenges arise around the elasticity and short lifespan of servers as well as the up-and-coming wave of containerization. These challenges are the new status quo for organizations that expand their systems across on-prem and virtual infrastructures, resulting in a “hybrid” environment.

The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Execution

Of all the tactics that an adversary will take on in their campaign, none will be more widely abused than, Execution (https://attack.mitre.org/wiki/Execution). When taking into consideration off-the-shelf malware, traditional ransomware, or state of the art advanced persistent threat actors, all of them have execution in common. There’s a great quote from Alissa Torres which says, “Malware can hide, but it must run.”

Mr and Mrs CISO: Security in the Age of the Lockdown

With so many of us frantically learning to juggle our roles as parents, workers and most recently teachers; is it just my wife and I who feel it necessary to monitor the online activity of our teenagers during this lockdown? Sure, there’s rich educational content out there, but it sits amongst social networks, streaming services, gaming consoles and a world of other distractions. I almost miss the days when staring out of the window was a reasonable ‘get out’!

COVID-19 Scam Roundup - March 30, 2020

Many in the digital security community are coming together to combat malicious actors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak. One of the most visible of these new efforts is the COVID-19 CTI League. Made up of approximately 400 volunteers living in approximately 40 countries, the COVID-19 CTI League is working to block attackers from health care organizations and other medical facilities at this juncture.

Now Is the Time to Get up to Speed with CMMC and SP 800-171 Rev 2

At the beginning of March 2020, Fifth Domain reported that Colorado-based aerospace, automotive and industrial parts manufacturer Visser Precision LLC had suffered a DoppelPaymer ransomware infection. Those behind this attack ultimately published information stolen from some of Visser’s customers. Those organizations included defense contractors Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and SpaceX.

The Future is Hybrid: Practicing Security in the Hybrid Cloud

By now, many organizations have adopted the cloud in some way. We saw organizations moving whole servers over to the cloud at the beginning, but now we see small parts of a system being moved to the cloud and new cloud native offerings. We’ll use the analogies of Lincoln Logs and Legos to describe these deployment models.

Third-party data breach exposes GE employees' personal information

Past and present employees of General Electric (GE) are learning that their sensitive information has been exposed by a data breach at a third-party service provider. Fortune 500 company GE says it was recently informed of a security breach at one of its partners, Canon Business Process Services.

Who's Responsible for Industrial Cybersecurity and Securing OT Environments?

Who are the key stakeholders involved when it comes to securing OT environments? Kristen Polous, General Manager of Industrial Cybersecurity at Tripwire, discusses who should be responsible for ICS security and how these stakeholders can work together to address cyber risks.

The Biggest Challenge Affecting Industrial Cybersecurity Organizations

Implementing a robust cybersecurity program is no small feat, especially for critical infrastructure organizations. Kristen Polous, General Manager of Industrial Cybersecurity at Tripwire, shares the number one challenge affecting industrial cybersecurity customers today and how to overcome it.

Free Cyber Safety Resources during COVID-19

Whether you are reading this from somewhere in the United States or overseas, chances are you are doing it from the comfort of your home. Not because you chose to but because you were asked to do so in order to prevent Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from spreading any further. If you are a parent, working remotely with your kids at home, you are probably facing additional challenges.

COVID-19 Scam Roundup - Week of 3/16/20

Malicious actors are increasingly leveraging COVID-19 as a theme for new digital fraud attacks. In February 2020, for instance, Action Fraud received 21 reports of fraud relating to the coronavirus. This number of reports more than doubled to 46 between March 1 and March 13, 2020. Between March 14 and March 18, 2020, the United Kingdom’s national fraud reporting center collected 38 reports alone. Those 105 reports represented a collective total of £970,000 in losses.

How Organizations Can Fight to Retain Talent Amidst the Infosec Skills Gap

In a previous post, I shared some expert insight into how organizations can address the challenges of hiring skilled talent despite the ongoing infosec skills gap. Organizations can’t rest easy once they’ve brought on new talent, however. They need to make sure they hold onto their existing workforce. That’s easier said than done. Cybersecurity Ventures forecasted that a total of 3.5 million infosec-positions will be unfilled in 2021.

Whatever happened to cryptojacking?

A couple of years ago it felt like you couldn’t turn your head in any direction without seeing another headline about cryptomining and – its more evil sibling – cryptojacking. Countless websites were hijacked, and injected with cryptocurrency-mining code designed to exploit the resources of visiting computers. Victims included the likes of the LA Times, and political fact-checking website Politifact.

ICS Environments and Patch Management: What to Do If You Can't Patch

The evolution of the cyber threat landscape highlights the emerging need for organizations to strengthen their ability to identify, analyze, and evaluate cyber risks before they evolve into security incidents. Although the terms “patch management” and “vulnerability management” are used as if they are interchangeable, this is not the case. Most are confused because applying patches is one of the many tools that’s available in our arsenal for mitigating cyber risks.

How Organizations Can Achieve Security Availability

We have seen great strides in improving security tooling and processes over the past ten years. Via constantly maturing security models, security teams have become increasingly dependent upon an ever-more complex toolchain of products and services. But what happens when these systems fail. How much effort are we putting into planning and maintaining our security solutions to ensure they’re available when issues occur?

The State of the Cybersecurity Market: Where We've Come, Where We're Going

There’s an interesting trend that I have personally noticed over the past few years: organizations are starting to take cybersecurity more seriously. With the multitude of high-profile data breaches, organizations are starting to realize that cybersecurity is a significant risk to the business. This allows CISOs and other similar titles with leadership responsibilities to have a larger budget for people, process improvements, and supporting technologies.

What Is Multi-Factor Authentication, and What Does It Have to Do with You?

Security isn’t a simple matter of caring or spending time reading manuals or being told what you can or can’t do. Security is understanding how to view the world from a different perspective. It’s a skill that people build over time, and it’s completely appropriate to start out small. If you can do nothing else, consider the access to your accounts, professional, banking, and social media. Consider how hard a malicious actor needs to work to gain access to these.

Working from Home during COVID-19? What You and Your Organization Need to Consider

First and foremost, our hearts go out to those around the world impacted by the COVID-19 virus. The director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), who advises the country on public health, has indicated that the risk to the general public remains low and encourages Americans to go about their lives. Businesses and local communities are taking a much more personal approach.

Phishing attacks exploit YouTube redirects to catch the unwary

Attackers are increasingly exploiting the fact that email gateways turn a blind eye to links to popular sites such as YouTube, in order to phish passwords from unsuspecting computer users. Researcher Ashley Trans of Cofense highlighted the threat in a blog post describing a recent phishing campaign. In the attack, an unsuspecting user receives an email which purports to come from SharePoint, claiming that a new file has been uploaded to his company’s SharePoint site.

The Expert's Guide on Tackling the Cybersecurity Skills Gap

The skills gap is weighing heavily on the minds of digital security team members. In a survey of 342 security professionals, Tripwire found that 83% of infosec personnel felt more overworked in 2020 than they did a year earlier. An even greater percentage (85%) stated that it had become more difficult for their organizations to hire skilled security professionals since then.

MITRE Releases an Update to The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

MITRE has been doing exceptional work in advancing cybersecurity as a public good, and it is an excellent resource for security professionals. Possibly best known for their ATT&CK Framework, a rich source of adversarial tactics and techniques and their mitigations, MITRE is also known for another resource: the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). The CWE is a community initiative sponsored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

We Want You! Win the War on Ransomware Today

Arguably, the first malware extortion attack occurred in 1988 – the AIDS Trojan had the potential to be the first example of ransomware, but due to a design flaw, the victims didn’t end up actually having to pay up the 189 bucks. It’s safe to say that over the past 31 years, attackers have perfected the ransomware craft, with organizations shelling out more than $25 billion per year. We don’t expect it to end any time soon.

How to Leverage NIST Cybersecurity Framework for Data Integrity

Together with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a series of practice guides that focuses on data integrity: the property that data has not been altered in an unauthorized manner. Tripwire is very proud to have contributed and collaborated with other technology vendors in the development of these practice guides.

To Be or Not to Be: BCSI in the Cloud?

With regard to BCSI (BES (Bulk Electric System) Cyber System Information) in the cloud, responsible entity sentiments at the moment may be akin to Prince Hamlet as he contemplated death and suicide, “bemoaning the pain and unfairness of life but acknowledging that the alternative might be worse.” As currently written and subject to enforcement, components of CIP-011-2 quite frankly make it near impossible to be compliant in designating a cloud-hosted BCSI repository much less actually choos

Why It's Important to Have a Customer Community in the World of Cybersecurity

In an ever-evolving security world, we to need to secure more with even fewer resources. While the cybersecurity skills gap increases, leaving “350,000 U.S. cybersecurity jobs unfilled yearly,” it is vital to work together to protect our environments and educate others. Creating a customer community can do just that.

The War of Passwords: Compliance vs NIST

The most recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines have been updated for passwords in section 800-63B. The document no longer recommends combinations of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. Yet most companies and systems still mandate these complexity requirements for passwords. What gives?

What is ISO 27701?

If you have a familiarity with any information security frameworks and certifications, it’s more than likely you have heard of International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and possibly the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). From my experience, the most commonly referred to business-level security related certifications are ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27002.

How to Communicate Risk: Profiles, Dashboards and Responsibilities

The risk of a data breach with significant financial consequences and damage to brand equity is the fear of most large publicly traded companies. But many smaller businesses wrongly assume they are too small to be on the radar of the threat actors. The truth is that it is all about the data, and small businesses often have less well-guarded and well-defined structures for their data stores.

What Is PIPEDA? And How Does It Protect You and Your Privacy?

You have likely heard of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and you probably refer to this standard whenever the topic of privacy and data processing arises. But what about outside of the EU? The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (Commissariat à la protection de la vie privée du Canada) has a twitter account that shares information regarding privacy and an individual’s rights in Canada.

Navigating Cyber Landscape of Connected and Autonomous Cars

In recent years, various attacks have been performed to highlight security concerns about evolving smart cars. In particular, remote hacks took a lot of attention in 2015 when two security researchers hijacked the car’s infotainment system and demonstrated how to manipulate smart car functions. Such attacks elevate the risks associated with the smart car systems and indicate that there have to be diligent measures taken before rolling out these vehicles on the road.