We all know that cyberattacks in the public sector are mounting. Over 100 state and municipal governments and dozens of school districts were compromised by ransomware last year. And geopolitical tensions will only embolden both state-linked and financially motivated threat actors going forward. These are uneasy times for cybersecurity leaders at these government and education sector entities. But help is at hand.
As is tradition with my blog posts, let’s start off a definition of what HTTP pipelining is all about. “HTTP pipelining is a feature of HTTP/1.1 which allows multiple HTTP requests to be sent over a single TCP connection without waiting for the corresponding responses. HTTP/1.1 requires servers to respond to pipelined requests correctly, with non-pipelined but valid responses even if server does not support HTTP pipelining.
Most cybersecurity professionals will often try to cybersplain the importance of protection to their friends. In most social circles, many of the businesses that people work in are small businesses. Perhaps you are the owner of a small delicatessen, a dry cleaner, or you run a yoga studio, or some similar individually owned operation.
The other week, Bitsight released a piece of high-profile research alerting the public to a high-severity vulnerability potentially allowing attackers to launch one of the most powerful Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks in history. Here’s a summary of what happened and why it matters: Security leaders are asking “now what?” and Bitsight has answers.
Doxxing, also spelled doxing, is when a threat actor publishes Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about their target online. This can include publishing the target’s place of employment, home address, credit or debit card numbers and any other sensitive information. The purpose of the threat actor publishing another person’s PII varies, but most commonly has to do with harassment.
Since 2013, World Password Day has been celebrated on the first Thursday of May and aims to foster better password habits. This event reminds us that passwords are the main guardians of our digital identities and that we must implement complex passwords such as passphrases capable of protecting us. In 2022 alone, 721.5 million exposed credentials were leaked online. As a result of these leaks, account takeover attacks (ATOs) are on the rise.
Information disclosed in the leaked NTC Vulkan papers allows us to investigate the high probability of cooperation between the Russian private software development company and the Russian Ministry of Defense, namely, the GRU (Sandworm), and possibly others.
On May 24th, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ), United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK) and the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) along with their private sector partners recently discovered a cluster of activity of interest associated with a People’s Republic of China
Following a breach by the Lapsus$ cyber gang, Jason Haddix, then CISO of UbiSoft called over 40 other CISOs to discuss strategies on how to be more resilient to attacks. Those conversations led him to create a 4 step guide to building a comprehensive secrets management program.
As you all know, KnowBe4 frequently promotes security awareness training and we also mention that unpatched software is a distant number two issue after social engineering. We generally say that unpatched software is involved in 20%-40% of successful exploits. It's been hard though to get good figures on that for years and even CISA has not published hard numbers, even though they appear to focus on it.
RID hijacking is a persistence technique used by adversaries who have compromised a Windows machine. In a nutshell, attackers use the RID (relative identifier) of the local Administrator account to grant admin privileges to the Guest account (or another local account). That way, they can take actions using the Guest account, which is normally not under the same level of surveillance as the Administrator account, to expand their attack while remaining undetected.
In a previous memo, I mentioned the discovery, made by researchers at Kaspersky, of an active campaign carried out by an advanced threat actor since 2021, targeting multiple organizations in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea. One of the noteworthy aspects of this campaign was undoubtedly the usage of a new backdoor, called PowerMagic, characterized by the exploitation of the popular cloud storage services, Dropbox and OneDrive, as the command and control infrastructure.
Kroll’s findings for Q1 2023 highlight fragmented threat actor groups and a continued evolution in attack methods and approaches, which, alongside other key shifts in behavior, have concerning implications for organizations in many sectors. In Q1 2023, Kroll observed a 57% increase in the overall targeting of the professional services sector from the end of 2022.
Something as common and widely known as a software update can prevent major cyberattacks from happening, as they incorporate patches that fix system vulnerabilities. Prioritizing updates may seem a burdensome and inconvenient task for users, because computers and servers have to restart to perform installation, which interrupts users when they are working.
Since 2020, CrowdStrike has increasingly observed big game hunting (BGH) threat actors deploying Linux versions of ransomware tools specifically designed to affect VMWare’s ESXi vSphere hypervisor (read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).
Attackers use a variety of tactics to spread laterally across on-premises Windows machines, including Pass-the-Ticket, Pass-the-Hash, Overpass-the-Hash and Golden Tickets attacks. But similar techniques are also effective in moving laterally from a compromised workstation to connected cloud resources, bypassing strong authentication measures like MFA. This article explains how attackers can perform lateral movement to the cloud with an attack called Pass-the-PRT.
Web applications are vulnerable to several kinds of attacks, but they’re particularly susceptible to code injection attacks. One such attack, the XPath Injection, takes advantage of websites that require user-supplied information to access data stored in XML format. All sites that use a database in XML format might be vulnerable to this attack. XPath is a query syntax that websites can use to search their XML data stores.
A lot of us are fascinated with technology. Any form or mention of the subject piques an interest or at least a glance of curiosity. Unfortunately, we must endure the dark side of technology as well. From the beginning of the computer age, there have always been hackers who could match their criminal expertise to current technologies. Some hackers are concerned with small scams and easy entry points.
Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we are exploring mobile malware attacks, how they have exploited users, and the ways to prevent them in the digital era. Design Credits: Dhanwant When was the last time you took a handwritten list to the grocery store instead of saving a list as a note or voice message on WhatsApp? Mobile phones have gone through a crazy evolution.
CommScope is a massive tech company with more than 30,000 employees. The organization works with companies around the world and helps to establish network infrastructure systems for hospitals, schools, federal agencies, and more. CommScope is based out of Hickory, North Carolina, and has been in business since 1976. The massive company has an annual revenue of 9.23 billion USD and manages substantial networks for businesses throughout the United States.
It’s not easy being a cybersecurity leader these days. Security vulnerabilities in software, hardware, and devices are rising in number and severity, bringing with them risk of ransomware, breach, and other dangerous cybersecurity incidents. The risks presented by vulnerabilities are rising fast: Here’s the important question: With cyber vulnerabilities rising and presenting increasingly serious risks, are organizations doing enough to fight back? The answer might surprise you.
Be the first to receive the Cloud Threats Memo directly in your inbox by subscribing here. While the most common cloud apps are also the most exploited for delivering malicious content, opportunistic and state-sponsored threat actors are constantly looking for additional cloud services to leverage throughout multiple stages of the attack chain.
I get the WSJ Cybersecurity newsletter, which by the way is warmly recommended. Kim Nash today reported a shocker which will make everyone's insurance premiums go even further up: "Six years after the worldwide NotPetya cyberattack, a court ruled insurers for Merck & Co. must help cover $1.4 billion in losses. New Jersey appellate division judges rejected the insurers' argument that the 2017 attack, which U.S.
One set of valid employee credentials can provide an adversary with all they need to log into a business, move laterally, escalate privileges and achieve their goals — whether that’s removing access to accounts, terminating services, destroying data or deleting resources. Identity-based attacks are subtle, but destructive, and organizations must be on high alert for them. CrowdStrike reported 80% of cyberattacks now leverage stolen or compromised credentials.
