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.”

Given the situation that many companies, organizations and government agencies have been forced into working remotely due to COVID-19, it is imperative to give some thought about corporate security.

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’!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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).

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.