Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

February 2020

IT security: Keep calm and monitor PowerShell

In our last release of the PowerShell security series, we talked about how PowerShell could be leveraged by malicious actors to gain unprecedented access to your organization’s critical assets. From enumerating sensitive domain information and carrying out credential-based attacks to running malicious executables in memory (file-less malware), we shined a light on the potential of PowerShell and why it’s an ideal weapon for cyber attackers today.

What is really an API?

API has become one of those catch-all terms that developers throw around without really considering the context. On any given week, you will come across discussions like "How to use the Twitter API", "New framework X is great because it has a low API surface", and "Best practices for building an API." Is an API a data source? Is it a service? Is it a way to call native functionality? The truth is, in modern software development it can mean any of these things.

How to fix Error 429: Too Many Requests

Your application is running smoothly. Tests have passed. Suddenly you start to see 429 error responses from an API. As the name implies, you have made too many requests and your application has been rate limited. The 429 (Too Many Requests) error is an HTTP status code that often occurs when you've hit a request limitation of an API.

Climbing the Vulnerability Management Mountain: Reaching Maturity Level 4

The climb is getting steeper, but thanks to hard work, vision and insight are much keener. At ML:4, all assets are scanned by a combination of agent and remote scans on a normal cadence. This will generate a lot of data dictated by threat and patch priority. Thousands of new vulnerabilities are released each year, and no company or product can detect all of them. Organizations must prioritize their coverage of vulnerabilities that they determine will have the biggest impact.

How to Get Started in Digital Forensics

If you want to become a digital forensic expert, be aware that when entering the field, you will be presented with an abundance of information that you will not know. It is a wonderfully challenging career path. Some believe that having the title of a cybersecurity professional (e.g. digital forensics expert, cybersecurity analyst, incident response commander, etc.) means that this is an area where the field of knowledge is intimidating because it’s so expansive.

Elastic on Elastic: Securing our endpoints with Elastic Security

This blog post is one in an occasional series about how we at Elastic embrace our own technology. The Elastic InfoSec team is responsible for securing Elastic and responding to threats. We use our products everywhere we can — and for more than just logs. By harnessing the power and breadth of capabilities of the Elastic Stack, we are working on tracking risk and performance metrics, threat intelligence, our control framework, and control conformance information within Elastic.

The Top Node.js HTTP Libraries in 2020

Out of the box, Node.js offers the http library for making requests, but it isn't particularly user friendly and requires some customization before it can be easily used. As a result, a large ecosystem of third-party libraries have emerged to make AJAX and HTTP requests easier. Some offer cross-platform (browser and Node.js) support, while others focus on bundle size or developer experience. With some many options, how do you choose?

Signature and Socket Based Malware Detection with osquery and YARA

Historically, common detection methods have used file hashes (MD5, SHA1, and SHA256)—unique signatures based on the entire contents of the file—to identify malware. Modern threat actors have increased in sophistication to a point where every instance of a given malware will have a different hash, and that hash will vary from machine to machine.

INETCO Insight Technical Overview - Real-time Data Acquisition, Transaction-level Monitoring and Adaptive Machine Learning Capabilities

This whitepaper discusses the INETCO Insight transaction data platform. It reveals how the software's unique data streaming, decoding, semantic correlation and statistical analysis engines can be rapidly configured to monitor any application type - custom, packaged, or industry-specific. INETCO Insight produces a single rich transaction record for every transaction, containing business, application, infrastructure, and network performance information that can be sliced and diced instantly to serve the diverse needs of different members of the IT and business teams.

INETCO Insight - Machine Learning and Risk Scoring for Real-time Payment Fraud Detection and Prevention

With The Nilson Report projecting $34.66 billion in global fraud losses by 2022, it is clear that crime syndicates are investing heavily in finding new and more advanced ways of countering the controls organizations are constantly implementing. Financial institutions, retailers, card service providers and acquiring processors are struggling to detect suspicious payment transaction behavior and prevent payment fraud attacks before experiencing major financial loss and customer dissatisfaction.

Key security functions of unified endpoint management

As part of digital transformation, the adoption of a wide range of devices for work is on the rise. A unified endpoint management (UEM) solution is capable of enforcing management policies and configurations, as well as securing endpoints. In a previous blog, we reviewed the capabilities of a good UEM solution. In this instalment, we look at UEM security features.

MOSE: Using Configuration Management for Offensive and Defensive Security

Post-exploitation can be one of the most time-consuming but worthwhile tasks that an offensive security professional engages in. Fundamentally, it is where you are able to demonstrate what an adversary may do if they compromise a business. A big component of this is trying to get as far as you can without alerting the defenders to what you’re doing.

Sizing up the CCPA: How the USA's new privacy regulation measures up against the GDPR

The California Consumer Protection (CCPA) act took effect on January 1, 2020, and companies across the globe are scrambling to get their act together to avoid non-compliance penalties. Although enforcement of the CCPA doesn’t officially begin until July 2020, the California Attorney General’s office will still be able to penalize violations that occurred between implementation on January 1 and official enforcement in July.

The HTTP Status Codes You Need to Know

Working on the web means coming into contact with HTTP responses. Whether you spend your time primarily on the client or on the server, you're likely familiar with the popular ones like 200, 404, and 500. While memorizing all the codes using cat memes as a mnemonic can be helpful, let's dive deeper into what some of the most common codes mean.

Cyber Resilience - Everything You (Really) Need to Know

What is cyber resilience? If you search the definition within the Oxford Dictionary, resilience alone is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” If you narrow the definition down to cyber resilience, it shifts to maintaining vs recovery. As noted on Wikipedia, it becomes “the ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation.”

Protecting Organizations from Customized Phishing Attacks

A few years ago, I myself was vished, or ‘phished,’ over the phone. The caller was someone, likely offshore in a call center, who had done a little bit of research online to find my name, my phone number, my wireless phone carrier and a few other details that they used to build rapport with me on the phone. Spoofing the customer service phone number of my wireless service provider, they called me and claimed that a credit was being added to my bill.

What's Trending in 2020: Barclaycard Payment Solutions and INETCO share with Cards International

In an early January post by Mohamed Dabo of Cards International, the CEO of INETCO and the Director of Barclaycard Payment Solutions shared their views on key payment fraud and security issues that will dominate the payments landscape in 2020. Both alluded to the delicate balance between delivering an amazing customer experience, meeting compliance such as the Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) legislation, and trying to keep one step ahead of the fraudsters.

Building a Circuit Breaker in Node.js (Part 2)

Welcome to Part 2 in our series on building your own circuit breaker in Node.js. In Part 1, Building a Circuit Breaker in Node.js, we built a starter version that handles the core states of a circuit breaker. In this article, we will add configurability, manual overrides, and fallback request support. You can find the complete code for each example here.

What Is Log Management, and Why Is It Important?

I think we all know what log management is. As discussed in a 2017 article for The State of Security, log management is about systematically orchestrating the system and network logs collected by the organization. That being said, there’s still some confusion surrounding why an enterprise would want to collect log data in the first place. There are two primary drivers for an enterprise to collect log data. These are security and compliance.

IT security: Disrupting the cybersecurity kill chain by detecting domain reconnaissance

Cyberattacks are a growing threat, and organizations are investing time and money in security strategies to make certain that their infrastructures are secure. Active Directory (AD) is a constant target for compromise, as it’s at the core of any organization’s security — it handles authentication and authorization for all users in an organization.

Why Asset Visibility Is Essential to the Security of Your Industrial Environment

Threats against industrial environments are on the rise. Near the beginning of 2019, for example, Kaspersky Lab revealed that 47% of industrial control system (ICS) computers on which its software was installed suffered a malware infection in the past year. That was three percent higher than the previous year.

Banking on ATM Big Data: How to use real-time transaction data to make your operations lean and customers keen

While the ATM channel remains a strategic part of a healthy omni-channel banking ecosystem, it is continuously under critical analysis within many financial institutions. The big challenge lies in maintaining ATM fleets as a profitable delivery channel.

Why a Multi-Layered Technology Approach is the Best Choice for Preventing ATM Cash-outs and Cybersecurity Attacks

Despite several recent high-profile attacks, ATM cash-out schemes that involve multiple attack vectors over a very large attack surface continue to happen. While traditional fraud system management tools will provide one layer of defense against cash-out attacks, common single point monitoring solutions still run a risk of being compromised.