The Russians Are Coming!

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 a ...

Continue Reading →
0

Retailing Hall of Shame – Office Depot Tech Support Scam

office-depotIt 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 ...

Continue Reading →
0

Mirai and Bashlight Show the Power of IOT Botnets

mirai-botnetI 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 ...

Continue Reading →
0

Sunday Funnies – Vote Early, Vote Often

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.

voting_machines Continue Reading →

0

Cybersecurity and the Elections

election-hackedIn 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 ...

Continue Reading →
0

What Happens If The Lights Go Out?

lights-outI 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 ...

Continue Reading →
2

The Circle

the-circleI 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 ...

Continue Reading →
0

Cyber War Interview on Web Radio

business-game-changers-sarah-westallWe were interviewed again by Sarah Westall on her web radio show Business Game Changers.  Our discussion wove together different threads I have been following about cyber warfare and our lack of national preparedness.  Since reading Ted Koppel’s book Lights Out and watching the documentary Zero Days, this has become a bigger issue for me, and maybe it should be for ...

Continue Reading →
0

Zero Days – Documentary About Cyber War

zero-daysWe have written about Stuxnet a couple of times.  (Here and here)  My fascination with this incredible piece of malware writing is that it represents the first documented case of cyber war between nation-states.  As we now know, Iran, specifically the nuclear facility at Natanz, was attacked by the United States, and our ally Israel.  I recently watched a ...

Continue Reading →
1
Page 9 of 12 «...7891011...»