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 discussed ...
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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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It was recently reported in Naked Security that a Seattle television news crew interviewed an Office Depot employee who alerted them to the practice of selling in-store repair scams to customers who came in looking for computer help. This whistle-blower told a story where employees where encouraged and even pressured to run the chain’s “PC Health Check” on evey ...
I was tempted to post this article late in October, when Brian Krebs suffered with the DDoS attack on his website, or when the Mirai botnet attack on DynDNS was in full swing, but decided to wait it out until after the election, in case it turns out that the Dyn attack was a precursor to an attack to disrupt the elections. And as of today, it appears that it was ...
I don’t like to get political in this web log, but since the mainstream parties have given us what is possibly the worst two choices in Presidential candidates since the Revolution, may I suggest voting Libertarian? You can check out their platform from the link.Tuesday we get to vote for president again. Worried about the security of electronic voting machines? You are not alone, but you would not find any political or election officials in your group. They think everything is fine! The fact that your next president may be elected by the Russian Cyber Army is OK, I guess. So that means Trump.
Here’s a little humor to make the nightmare seems more acceptable.
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In the last several days, we have seen big distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against DynDNS, an Internet services company that provides domain name services (DNS) to many companies including Twitter and PayPal. DNS is how web sites are found on the web, you enter a web address in your browser, and DNS finds the website you are looking for. When attacked in ...
I attended the (ISC)2 Security Congress in September, and one of the featured speakers was well known television journalist Ted Koppel. He gave a presentation about his new book Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath. You are probably wondering, as I was, what would make Ted Koppel an authority on this particular subject? The answer is ...
I recently read Dave Eggers book The Circle at the recommendation of a friend in the cybersecurity profession. While I don’t do book reviews in this blog very often, I thought I would throw in my two cents about this book.
I was recommended this book during a cybersecurity training class. I do want to say that this book looks unblinkingly at ...
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