A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Leaky bucket time once again. With so much effort by the providers to make it as hard as possible to accidentally expose data, then for the devs to try really hard to undo all of that because they are too lazy (or lack understanding) to do a proper job, is utterly mystifying. Please, please try and make the effort...

An incident response plan is a set of written instructions that outline your organization's response to data breaches, data leaks, cyber attacks and security incidents. Incident response planning contains specific directions for specific attack scenarios, avoiding further damages, reducing recovery time and mitigating cybersecurity risk. Incident response procedures focus on planning for security breaches and how organization's will recover from them.

Alerts are one of the most important information sources when it comes to cyber security. They notify and inform your IT team about ongoing cyber threats, security events and any other incident that might threaten your organization. In this article, we will focus on alert grouping and why it is important for the security of your organization.

With the growing complexity and velocity of security threats in dynamic, cloud-native environments, it’s more important than ever for security teams to have the same visibility into their infrastructure, network, and applications that developers and operations do. Conversely, as developers and operations become responsible for securing their services, they need their monitoring platform to help surface possible threats.

Malicious actors are increasingly launching digital attacks against industrial organizations. Many of these campaigns have been successful, particularly those that have targeted energy utilities and manufacturing plants. In late spring 2019, for instance, aircraft parts manufacturer ASCO temporarily suspended operations worldwide after falling victim to a ransomware attack.

Although we just wrapped up National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October, security professionals never take a break — because cybercriminals don’t either. That’s especially true for folks who work in law enforcement. Every day they are on the front lines helping to protect the public and solve crimes using Criminal Justice Information (CJI) such as crime reports and fingerprints.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email authentication protocol designed to protect your organization's email domain from being used in email spoofing. Email spoofing is often used for social engineering attacks like business email compromise attacks, phishing or spear phishing emails, emails scams and other cyber attacks.

Patient health information is governed by robust rules that determine how this data is handled, stored, and accessed. Federal laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and various state laws strengthen patient rights. HIPAA set a baseline for regulatory compliance with patient health information. Under the “preemption” language in the rule, no state may create less effective or weaker medical privacy protection for individuals.

I recently took – and passed – the CompTIA Security+ exam (Sec+). Sec+ is a general introduction to multiple functional areas of security, ranging from network security to access control and identity management, for anyone looking to break into the space. For context, I have no previous training as a network or security professional, and my educational background was finance and Russian, nothing related to security.

An exploit is a piece of software, data or sequence of commands that takes advantage of a vulnerability to cause unintended behavior or to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. Once vulnerabilities are identified, they are posted on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). CVE is a free vulnerability dictionary designed to improve global cyber security and cyber resilience by creating a standardized identifier for a given vulnerability or exposure.