Data Breaches

In theory, enterprises should not only have security measures in place to prevent a data breach but should also have detailed plans for a response in the event of a breach. And they should periodically conduct drills to test those plans. Industry-wide best practices for incident response are well established. “In general, you want breach responses to be fairly timely, transparent, communicate with victims in a timely manner, prevent further harm to victims as best as…

Read More

A Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) bootkit called BlackLotus is found to be capable of bypassing an essential platform security feature, UEFI Secure Boot, according to researchers from Slovakia-based cybersecurity firm ESET. BlackLotus uses an old vulnerability and can run even on fully up-to-date Windows 11 systems with UEFI Secure Boot enabled, the researchers found. UEFI Secure Boot is a feature of the UEFI firmware, which is a successor to the traditional BIOS (Basic Input/Output System)…

Read More

Known vulnerabilities, compromise of legitimate package, and name confusion attacks are expected to be among the top ten open source software risks in 2023, according to a report by Endor Labs. The other major open source software risks, according to the report, include unmaintained software, outdated software, untracked dependencies, license risk, immature software, unapproved changes, and under/oversized dependency. Almost 80% of code in modern applications is code that relies on open source packages. While open…

Read More

In 2022, I started a podcast aimed at converting more Gen Z to seek careers in cybersecurity. In doing so, I had to educate myself on what they value and realized the many differences between Gen Z and previous generations. Gen Z refers to those born between mid-to-late 1990s and 2010, making them between the ages of 11 and 28. This means they grew up experiencing a much faster rate in which technology evolves. The…

Read More

Password management company LastPass, which was hit by two data breaches last year, has revealed that data exfiltrated during the first intrusion, discovered in August, was used to target the personal home computer of one of its devops engineers and launch a second successful cyberatttack, detected in November. The threat actor involved in the breaches infected the engineer’s home computer with a keylogger, which recorded information that enabled a cyberattack that exfiltrated sensitive information from…

Read More

While phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and ransomware still rank among the most popular cyberattack techniques, a mix of new-breed attacks is gaining steam, according to a new report from cybersecurity and compliance company Proofpoint. “While conventional phishing remains successful, many threat actors have shifted to newer techniques, such as telephone-oriented attack delivery (TOAD) and adversary in the middle (AitM) phishing proxies that bypass multi-factor authentication,” said Ryan Kalember, executive vice president of cybersecurity strategy…

Read More

Over the weekend an attacker has been uploading thousands of malicious Python packages on the public PyPI (Python Package Index) software repository. If executed on a Windows system, these packages will download and install a Trojan program hosted on Dropbox. Flooding public package repositories with malicious packages is not entirely new. Last year researchers detected a group of 186 packages from the same account on the JavaScript npm repository that were designed to install cryptomining…

Read More

Multilayered, well-funded cybersecurity systems are unable to protect enterprises in the US and Europe from cyberattacks, according to a report by automated security validation firm Pentera. The report, which was based on a survey of 300 CIOs, CISOs and security executives to get insights on their current IT and security budgets and cybersecurity validation practices, noted that the financial slowdown has had a minimal impact on cybersecurity budgets. “We’re seeing more organizations increase the cadence…

Read More