News

Software giant Microsoft on Wednesday sounded an alarm after catching a known Russian government-linked hacking group using its Microsoft Teams chat app to phish for credentials at targeted organizations. According to a research report from Redmond’s Threat Intelligence team, the hacking team is linked to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (also known as the SVR) and has been caught targeting government, non-government organizations (NGOs), IT services, technology, discrete manufacturing, and media sectors.…

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Venture capital outfit Forgepoint Capital has placed another bet in the cyber-insurance sector, leading a $15 million funding round for New York tech startup Converge Insurance. The $15 million Series A investment is Forgepoint’s second push into the cyber-insurance sector following last year’s incubation of Surefire Cyber, a startup selling incident response services specifically to cyber insurers, brokers and legal firms. Converge Insurance describes itself as a modern managing general agent (MGA) that fuses cyber…

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The Biden administration on Monday rolled out its first-ever National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy (NCWES), announcing a series of “generational investments” to  address immediate and long-term cyber workforce needs.  The new strategy seeks to transform cyber education in K-12 schools, community colleges and technical schools, invest in teachers and cyber education systems and make training more accessible and affordable.  “Filling the hundreds of thousands of cyber job vacancies across our nation is a national…

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New guidance from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and National Security Agency (NSA) warns developers, vendors, and organizations of access control vulnerabilities in web applications. Described as insecure direct object reference (IDOR) issues, they allow threat actors to read or tamper with sensitive data via application programming interface (API) requests that include the identifier of a valid user. These requests are successful because the authentication or…

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Threat intelligence company Greynoise says it has observed the first attempts to exploit a recent critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Citrix ShareFile. A popular cloud-based file-sharing and collaboration solution, ShareFile allows users to store files in their own data centers, via a storage zones controller (or storage center), a .NET web application running under Internet Information Services (IIS). The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-24489 (CVSS score of 9.1), was the result of errors leading…

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Oregon senator Ron Wyden wants the U.S. government to hold Microsoft responsible for what he describes as “negligent cybersecurity practices” that enabled “a successful Chinese espionage campaign against the United States government.” In a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and the heads of CISA and the FTC, Wyden said the software giant “bears significant responsibility” for the M365 cloud hack that started with the theft of a Microsoft encryption key. “Since the…

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Former Navy commander and senior official in the NSA and CIA Harry Coker has been formally tapped to replace the retired Chris Inglis as the U.S. government’s National Cyber Director. Coker’s nomination, announced by the Biden administration on Wednesday, puts him in line to lead the implementation of the government’s newly formed national cybersecurity strategy and manage the tricky relationship between the federal government and big-tech vendors struggling to cope with nonstop malicious hacker attacks.…

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While silos pose significant dangers to an enterprise’s cybersecurity posture, consolidation serves as a powerful solution to overcome these risks, offering improved visibility, efficiency, incident response capabilities, and risk management. (Matt Wilson)

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Data privacy and governance provider OneTrust today announced that it has raised $150 million in new funding, bringing the total raised by the company to over $1 billion. Founded in 2016, the Atlanta-based firm offers a trust intelligence platform to help organizations visualize the data entering their environment, manage it, meet compliance requirements, and ensure transparency. According to OneTrust, its privacy and security compliance tools are suited for small to large organizations, delivering a holistic…

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