Crypto-ransomware continues to be one of the most popular money making exploits for cyber criminals. The reason for this is simple; its works, and the return on investment is quite high. According to a recent article in Naked Security, the score will reach $1 billion in 2017.
A poll by the IBM company found that nearly 50% of the businesses polled had been hit by ransomware, and of those 70% paid ...
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If you own a Netgear wireless router, especially the R6200, R6250, R6400, R6700, R6900, R7000, R7100LG, R7300, R7900, R8000, D6220, and D6400 routers and possibly other models are vulnerable to arbitrary command injection. This is a security bug that could allow a remote attacker to access your router. This vulnerability was announced by US-CERT on December 9th, and reported in Naked Security on December 12th.
Vulnerabilities such as this ...
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There are a number of great frameworks for developing your cybersecurity plan. Two of our favorites are the NIST-CSF and the 20 CIS Controls. We have written about these excellent tools before here (CIS Controls) and here (NIST-CSF).
Back in December we received an email from Pete Herzog of ISECOM about a new, open-source methodology manual for cybersecurity ...
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The Federal Trade Commission recently released an warning about fraudulent mobile apps. These apps are designed to steal personal information such as user names, passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal information.
My advise is to always get your app from an authorized app store, such as the Apple Store or the Google Store. These apps have been tested for the most part.
Another idea ...
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The United States recently accused the Russian government of trying to influence US elections last November, and has expelled 35 Russian diplomatic officials and closed two Russian diplomatic facilities, one in New York City, and the other in Maryland, near Washington DC.
The Russians are denying any direct involvement, of course, and are laying the blame on Russian cyber-criminal groups. But we have ...
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The House Judiciary Committee’s Encryption Working Group has released a report that comes out in favor of strong encryption, and opposed to the daft notion of creating encryption “backdoors” for law enforcement and government to use. As we have expressed in this blog previously, the concept that the secret backdoor keys could somehow be kept securely, when nothing else seems to be able to be kept secret, is the main ...
This is the time of the year everyone writes either a year in review article, or a what’s coming in the new year post. Guess which one this is? I’ve been reading the pundits, and considering my own findings as a cybersecurity professional. I pulled together the following list for your review, and to help you plan where to spend your time, talent, and budget in 2017.
Cybersecurity professionals are in agreement. The Russians appear to have been actively engaged in influencing the outcome of our recent Presidential election. Specifics include compromising and taking over Hilary Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta’s personal Gmail account. This spear phishing exploit used a “near-miss” domain name of “accounts.googlemail.com” to trick John into clicking on a link and and entering his email credentials. The real domain name is accounts.google.com.
There was also ...
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The FBI recently reported on arrests of a number of lottery scammers in what they call “Operation Hard Copy.” We do like to report when cyber-criminals are arrested, prosecuted, and jailed, because it shows that stopping cyber-crime is not impossible. But it is almost always a multi-national, multi-jurisdictional undertaking that requires the cooperative efforts of law enforcement from several countries.
What I found most interesting was the way that this ...
Continue Reading →Yesterday I released a post before it was fully baked. I publish 3 times a week, and generally I have articles written several weeks ahead, but my schedule has caught up with me, and I have nothing in the hopper. I’ll have to get busy over the Christmas holiday weekend.
Please come back Friday for the complete article.
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