Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

To put the impact of cybercrime into perspective, let’s examine some important, and startling, numbers: Data breach costs increased from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in 2021. Every 39 seconds, there is an attack. About 90% of healthcare organizations have fallen victim to at least one breach within the past three years. The bottom line? Cyberattacks are frequent and costly, and COVID-19 has only fueled the fire with more employers adopting a remote work structure.

Last week, I attended the NotSoSecure Advanced Web Hacking training. While there were plenty of interesting topics taught, one that caught my attention was Out-of-Band (OOB) Data Exfiltration using DNS. Back in 2018, NotSoSecure published an Out of Band Exploitation (OOB) CheatSheet. In that document, they cover methods by which you can exfiltrate data. One of these uses files written to disk and multiple DNS queries to send large chunks of data.

A few months ago, a popular cybersecurity news organization posted an urgent notice on social media seeking help to recover their data after their blog was deleted. They announced that they had no backups and they were desperately trying to contact the site administrator to restore their blog collection. This was as maddening as it was embarrassing for the same reasons.

Originally envisaged as a convenient way to store web data, cookies emerged as a powerful marketing tool in the 2000s. For many years, digital marketers relied on cookies for data collection. However, in recent history, new privacy laws, browser features, and plug-ins have changed the landscape of data collection. Marketers have had to develop tools and strategies to ensure they meet compliance as the internet becomes more and more cookieless.

Many UK business and technology executives aren’t hopeful about their digital security going into 2022. In a survey of 3,600 business and technology executives, of which 257 were from the UK, PwC learned that a majority (61%) of respondents expected to see an increase in reportable ransomware attacks next year.

Cloud computing has emerged as the go-to organizational workload choice because of its innate scalability and flexibility. However, cloud computing still comes with some security risks. Examining cloud security is an important part of adopting this new technology. Presently, cloud-native security is experiencing changes and innovations that help address security threat vectors.

AvosLocker is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang that first appeared in mid-2021. It has since become notorious for its attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, including the sectors of financial services, critical manufacturing, and government facilities. In March 2022, the FBI and US Treasury Department issued a warning about the attacks.

Requirements for reporting cybersecurity incidents to some regulatory or government authority are not new, but there has always been a large amount of inconsistency, globally, in exactly what the requirements are. More recently, there’s been a growing trend across government and regulatory bodies in the United States towards shorter timeframes for reporting of cybersecurity incidents. Here’s a brief rundown of the recent activity.

Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) is a cybersecurity threat targeting cloud environments. EDoS attacks exploit the elasticity of clouds, particularly auto-scaling capabilities, to inflate the billing of a cloud user until the account reaches bankruptcy or large-scale service withdrawal. EDoS attacks exploit the cloud’s economies of scale to disrupt or discontinue the availability of cloud services and infrastructure that support applications, systems, and corporate networks.

One of the main challenges of OT security is the problem of compatibility. OT components often differ significantly from each other in terms of age and sophistication as well as software and communication protocols. This complicates asset discovery and makes it difficult to establish a consistent cybersecurity governance approach. Combating asset blindness in OT security begins with taking account of these differences.