Social Engineering

An XKCD comic strip shows two tech workers frustrated that there are 14 competing standards for a variety of use cases. “We need to develop one unified standard that covers everyone’s use cases,” they say. The next frame shows that there are now 15 standards instead of one. Brad Arkin, the chief security and trust officer at Cisco, will tell you that this illustration of how standards proliferate hits uncomfortably close to the truth. “Everybody…

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For many years, attackers have used and abused various ways to get on our systems. From phishing to tricking us to click on websites, if an attacker can get their code on our systems they are no longer our systems. Attackers will even invest the time, energy, and expense to get their malicious drivers approved and co-designed through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program in order to gain access to our machines. Ensuring that these malicious…

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A pair of newly discovered vulnerabilities have highlighted the ongoing risks posed by Internet Explorer’s (IE) deep integration into the Windows ecosystem, despite Microsoft ending support for IE in June 2022. Discovered by the Varonis Threat Labs team, the exploits affect an IE-specific Event Log that is present on all current Windows operating systems up to, but not including, Windows 11. The vulnerabilities, dubbed LogCrusher and OverLog by the researchers, have been reported to Microsoft,…

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Content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai said Tuesday that its Prolexic DDoS protection service will become able to handle DDoS attacks of up to 20Tbps, thanks to a new wave of construction of so-called scrubbing centers. The company’s announcement said that this will effectively double its current capacity to handle network-level DDoS attacks, with rollouts planned for “all major regions,” which includes US East and West, Canada, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, India, Japan, Hong Kong and…

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According to data from the Rekt leaderboard, cybercriminals have stolen as much as $3 billion of investor funds through 141 various cryptocurrency exploits since January, putting 2022 on track to top 2021 levels of digital currency malfeasance. Comparitech’s cryptocurrency heists tracker indicates that since 2011, hackers have stolen $7.9 billion in cryptocurrency worth about $45.5 billion in today’s value. Along with the increased dollar amounts of cryptocurrency thefts, the scams, hacks, and exploits of cryptocurrency,…

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CISOs have long been tasked with building response and recovery capabilities, the objective being to have teams that can react to a security incident as quickly as possible and can restore business functions with as little damage as possible. The need for those activities is certainly not going to go away, but many security chiefs are seeking to take more proactive steps to balance out reactive ones. “On the proactive side, you’re trying to predict…

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A secure by design approach is vital to protecting the internet of things (IoT) and smart cities, according to Lindy Cameron, CEO of the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Cameron spoke during Singapore International Cyber Week, calling for swift ongoing action to ensure connected devices are designed, built, deployed, and managed securely to prevent malicious actors, improve national resilience, and reap the benefits of emerging technologies. Growth of IoT giving rise to increased security…

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The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran on Sunday confirmed that an email server at its  Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant was hacked. The organization blamed a foreign country, but an Iranian hacking group that goes by the name Black Reward has claimed responsibility for the breach. The Atomic Energy Organization said that the IT group serving the Bushehr plant has examined and issued a report on the breach, and denied any sensitive information being exposed. The…

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There’s a joke cryptographer Jon Callas likes to tell: CISO stands for Chief Intrusion Scapegoat Officer, “because CISOs are often thrown into a position where they can’t succeed.” Callas, who is the director of public interest tech at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that security officers are often “simultaneously in charge and powerless.” They know what they should do to mitigate risks, but they can’t get enough support. This predicament threatens to overwhelm them. Almost…

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We’ve made a point of shoring up security for infrastructure-as-a-service clouds since they are so complex and have so many moving parts. Unfortunately, the many software-as-a-service systems in use for more than 20 years now have fallen down the cloud security priority list. Organizations are making a lot of assumptions about SaaS security. At their essence, SaaS systems are applications that run remotely, with data stored on back-end systems that the SaaS provider encrypts on…

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