Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The DoD or Department of Defense of the United States of America implements the CMMC or Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification to standardize or normalize the overall preparedness for cybersecurity across the DIB (Defense Industrial Base) of the federal government against evolving threats.

Illustration by Dorathe Victor Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. In this week’s edition, let’s explore how artificial intelligence and machine learning are weaponized by hackers to fuel cyberattacks. AI and ML are conquering the world at a rapid pace. AI has made life much easier. In many instances, it speeds up manual processes, reduces costs, and eliminates manual errors.

The Trustwave SpiderLabs email security team has been monitoring the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis to ensure that our clients are protected and aware of any imminent threats. This research blog captures some of the phishing email threats we have discovered. Whenever there is a global event, threat actors are sure to take advantage of the situation. As the war between Russia and Ukraine continues, cybercriminals are pumping out spam emails that use the crisis as a lure.

April 2020, Zoom was booming. The start of the COVID pandemic forced employees to work from home, meetings in person migrated to a videoconferencing model, and Zoom was the preferred tool. The massive and fast growth led into an opportunity for attackers. A vulnerability in Zoom could allow an attacker to steal a user’s Windows credentials, as long as the target user would click on a link provided through a Zoom session. The question was then how to get into those private sessions.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. I had almost forgotten (was I the only one?) that the aged IE web browser approaches it’s doom… Long may it rot.

CIS Control 14 concerns implementing and operating a program that improves the cybersecurity awareness and skills of employees. (Prior to CIS Critical Security Controls Version 8, this area was covered by CIS Control 17.) This control is important because a lack of security awareness among people inside your network can quickly lead to devastating data breaches, downtime, identity theft and other security issues.

The newly revised and renumbered Center for Internet Security (CIS) Control 11 highlights the need for backups, ensuring smooth and timely recovery of data in case of security breach or misconfiguration. In the current CIS Critical Security Controls (CSC) version 8 of CIS benchmarks, the data recovery control has been pushed ahead to 11. It was previously CIS Control 10 in version 7. CIS Control 11 is a vital player among the 18 cis controls CIS has formulated.

By now, pretty much anyone who uses email is familiar with the term “phishing,” and is aware of the prevalence of phishing scams. However, the term “spear phishing”—and what it means exactly—might be a bit more elusive. Essentially, spear phishing is a more targeted and socially engineered version of a spray-and-pray, bait-and-hook, phishing email.