Currently, we’re in a period of growth for supply chain management. With the digital revolution bringing industry players around the globe closer together, business operations have expanded for companies big and small. As both business owners and consumers, we’re experiencing the changes every step of the way as well. Each change brings with it a new set of challenges and benefits.
Alien Labs has identified an unreported and ongoing malware campaign, which we attribute with high confidence to the adversary publicly reported as “StrongPity”. Based on compilation times, infrastructure, and public distribution of samples - we assess the campaign operated from the second half of 2018 into today (July 2019). This post details new malware and new infrastructure which is used to control compromised machines.
The cloud certainly offers its advantages, yet as with any large-scale deployment, the cloud can offer some unforeseen challenges. The concept of the cloud just being “someone else’s data center” has always been a cringe moment for me because this assumes release of security responsibility since ‘someone else will take care of it’.
Being proactive is the key to staying safe online, especially for businesses and organizations that operate websites and mobile applications. If you wait for threats to appear, then in most cases it is too late to defend against them. Many data breaches come about this way, with hackers uncovering security gaps that had gone previously undetected. The average web developer wants to assume that their code and projects will always function in the intended manner.
With the commercialization of cybercrime, malware variations continue to increase at an alarming rate, and this is putting many a defender on their back foot. Malware analysis — the basis for understanding the inner workings and intentions of malicious programs — has grown into a complex mix of technologies in data science and human interpretation. This has made the cost of maintaining a malware analysis program generally out of reach for the average organization.
Ransomware attacks increased by 105% in the first quarter of 2019, according to Beazley’s tally of insurance claims and data analytics. Other alarming reports show that new variants of Ransomware keep appearing almost every month. In addition, two years after the WannaCry Ransomware attacks, 1.7 million computers still remain at risk in 2019 according to TechCrunch. Fortunately, there are cybersecurity solutions that can protect your data during file transfer and file storage.
The results are in, and once again AT&T’s Cybersecurity is recognized as an industry leader by securing its third consecutive ranking of “very strong” in Global Data’s annual product report. AT&T is the only company to achieve this hat-trick rating in all of Global Data’s seven categories of assessment. AT&T’s bold acquisition of AlienVault has reaffirmed its position as the cybersecurity leader with both competitive and qualitative edges.
Remember when you were younger, and you wanted to do something that all your friends were doing, yet you knew your parents would never approve? Perhaps it was skating in that home-made “Half-Pipe”, or that time you wanted to try some equally dangerous stunt? Of course, your parents disapproved, to which you probably responded with the time-honored refrain: “But everyone is doing it!” That was never a convincing argument.
As I talk to organizations in the AT&T Executive Briefing Center and learn more about the different types of business and enterprise security goals, one of the resonating themes across different industry verticals today is Digital Trust. The goal is to build trust in the system between the consumers of your services and the enterprise. To achieve this goal, it is about going to the foundational aspects of information protection.
A common discussion in the security industry is how to improve the effectiveness of detection and prevention systems. You can find tons of documentation and books about: The Defender's Dilemma, Blue Team vs Red Team, A Comprehensive Security Approach, among others. However, in any organization, it is very important to move beyond theory and implement specific solutions to detect security attacks and security threats.
