Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Researchers at VIPRE Security observed a 276% increase in malware delivered by phishing between Q1 and Q4 of 2023. “Last year, our YARA rules caught between one and two million generic malware instances each quarter, with a nearly 20% jump in Q4,” VIPRE’s report says.

I recently read an article about a bright, sophisticated woman who fell victim to an unbelievable scam. By unbelievable, I mean most people reading or hearing about it could not believe it was successful. A group posing as an Amazon employee and various U.S. law enforcement agencies were able to convince a woman to take $50,000 out of her bank account in cash and hand it off to a complete stranger in the streets. It is a wild story and most of us would not be tricked into doing what happened to her.

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates in February 2024 include critical fixes for two zero-day vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-21413 impacting Microsoft Outlook (called MonikerLink) and CVE-2024-21410 impacting Microsoft Exchange Server. The former allows remote code execution to access and leak privileged information, while the latter permits privilege escalation (potentially using credentials leaked by the former). These security risks expose a victim's machine to potentially malicious arbitrary code execution.

The CrowdStrike Global Threat Report, now in its tenth iteration, examines how adversaries’ behavior poses an ever-expanding risk to the security of organizations’ data and infrastructure. Armed with this critical information, organizations are better equipped to face evolving threats. Stealth was the pervading theme of the 2023 threat landscape.

Containers have revolutionized development in the cloud, allowing dev teams to work with unprecedented speed, efficiency, and scale. But securing containers at that speed and scale can be a thorny problem. The infrastructure of containers is complex and contains multiple attack vectors, and most enterprises don’t have the time or resources to secure all attack vectors for all containers.

Cyberattacks are evolving and growing more sophisticated, organizations are reacting to this by scaling the cybersecurity solutions they deploy to include services that go beyond threat protection. They are increasingly realizing that other factors such as monitoring and responsiveness are key to protecting their business.

I’ve seen this question bouncing about in different forums for quite some time now. I haven’t seen any definitive answers because it always depends on the organization’s use of AD. Recently, I noticed something called AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory. I must admit, six months ago I was not aware of AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory, but when I started looking into this cloud-based AD solution, some connections started coming together.

The news that US, UK, and other international law enforcement agencies disrupted LockBit is welcome, as stopping any threat group activity is always a positive. The unfortunate aspect is this blow won’t impact ransomware overall. As in the past, another group will pick up the slack, or LockBit itself will reform and get back into business.

Most security tools waste developers’ time. We’re on a mission to fix this. Application Developers aren't paid to care about security. Their performance is measured by the speed at which they can add value to the business through new features or enhancements. This makes traditional security tools a hindrance as they're not built for developers — plus, they're not designed to be helpful.