Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In their attempt to extort as much money as quickly as possible out of companies, ransomware gangs know some effective techniques to get the full attention of a firm’s management team. And one of them is to specifically target the sensitive information stored on the computers used by a company’s top executives, in the hope of finding valuable data that can best pressure bosses into approving the payment of a sizeable ransom.

A popular joke among technologists says that it’s always DNS, even when it initially didn’t seem that way. DNS issues come in many shapes and forms, including some often-overlooked security issues. DNS (short for the Domain Name System) continues to be described as “the phonebook of the Internet,” but many people, including most readers of this blog, will be more familiar with the basic workings of DNS than with the outdated phenomenon of paper phonebooks.

Over the last few years, the idea of patching systems to correct flaws has graduated from an annoying business disruption to a top priority. With all of the notorious vulnerabilities that can wreak total havoc, the time it takes to patch becomes a minor inconvenience when weighed against both the technical challenges and possible regulatory penalties of not patching.

As a cybersecurity professional, how numb have you become to vendors who try to scare you with frightening statistics in an effort to sell you a new product? It is understandable that a vendor has to present as much information in a limited amount of attention-grabbing time, so their doomsday technique makes some sense. Perhaps the vendors’ approach is faulty, as the numbers are quite frightening indeed. There is definitely a larger point to be made.

As if dealing with COVID-19 were not enough, 2020 turned out to be a banner year for another troublesome strain of virus— ransomware. Malicious actors grew more sophisticated, daring and brutal. They also hit a number of high-profile targets. For those of you who didn’t keep up with all of the developments in the ransomware space, we’ve broken down some of the most important events and trends of the year here.

If high-tech gadgets are on your holiday shopping list, it is worth taking a moment to think about the particular risks they may bring. Under the wrong circumstances, even an innocuous gift may introduce unexpected vulnerabilities. In this blog series, VERT will be looking at some of the Internet’s best-selling holiday gifts with an eye toward their possible security implications.

As a security analyst, engineer, or CISO, there are so many aspects of the field that require immediate attention that one cannot possibly know everything. Some of the common areas of security knowledge include topics such as where to place a firewall, configuration and patch management, physical and logical security, and legal and regulatory concerns.

2020 was dominated by news of the pandemic and anchored by reality that we all found ourselves in – entire families logging in remotely, trying to keep school and work feeling “normal.” While we tested the limits of what a home office could sustain, the privacy and security of a fully remote world was put front and center. In this piece, we take a look at a few privacy highlights that will likely impact your business and look ahead to see what’s in store for 2021.

If high-tech gadgets are on your holiday shopping list, it is worth taking a moment to think about the particular risks they may bring. Under the wrong circumstances, even an innocuous gift may introduce unexpected vulnerabilities. In this blog series, VERT will be looking at some of the Internet’s best-selling holiday gifts with an eye toward their possible security implications.

As the retail world’s center of gravity shifts to the cloud, payment card fraud has followed suit. According to Verizon’s retail vulnerabilities study, attacks against e-commerce applications are by far the leading cause of retail data breaches. This trend mirrors similar outcomes in other industries, like food service. A complimentary Verizon study finds remote attacks against food service operators on the rise, as well.