October, 2021

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‘Trojan Source’ Bug Threatens the Security of All Code

Krebs on Security

Virtually all compilers — programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine code — are vulnerable to an insidious attack in which an adversary can introduce targeted vulnerabilities into any software without being detected, new research released today warns. The vulnerability disclosure was coordinated with multiple organizations, some of whom are now releasing updates to address the security weakness.

Software 363
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Facebook Is Down

Schneier on Security

Facebook — along with Instagram and WhatsApp — went down globally today. Basically, someone deleted their BGP records, which made their DNS fall apart. …at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specifi

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Data Breach Numbers, Costs and Impacts All Rise in 2021

Lohrman on Security

By almost any measure, the breadth, depth and impact of data breaches have dramatically increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s a roundup of the numbers.

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Pwned - The Collected Blog Posts of Troy Hunt (Preview)

Troy Hunt

We choose this photo for the cover because this was when it all started. 18-year old Troy, having just discovered the web in early 1995 and chomping at the bit to do something with it. The full tale of what I first did (and how disastrous it ultimately became), is up front early in the book so I won't relay it here, but it's quite the story.

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Prevent Data Breaches With Zero-Trust Enterprise Password Management

Keeper Security is transforming cybersecurity for people and organizations around the world. Keeper’s affordable and easy-to-use solutions are built on a foundation of zero-trust and zero-knowledge security to protect every user on every device. Our next-generation privileged access management solution deploys in minutes and seamlessly integrates with any tech stack to prevent breaches, reduce help desk costs and ensure compliance.

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“Ransomware Killed My Baby”: Lawsuit Raises Issue Of CyberSecurity-Breach Disclosure Liability

Joseph Steinberg

A hospital suffering through a ransomware attack failed to provide proper care for an expectant mother and her newborn child, leading to the child’s death, according to a lawsuit filed in the US State of Alabama. Springhill Medical Center, a hospital in based in Mobile, Alabama, was hit with ransomware during the summer of 2019; the cyberattack crippled the medical facility’s information systems, causing multiple computer systems and networks to be unusable for over a week – the same period of t

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Do You Trust Your SIEM?

Anton on Security

My admittedly epic (but dated) post “Security Correlation Then and Now: A Sad Truth About SIEM” mentioned the issue of TRUST as it applies to SIEM. Specifically, as a bit of a throwaway comment, I said “people write stupid string-matching and regex-based content because they trust it. They do not?—?en masse?—?trust the event taxonomies if their lives and breach detections depend on it.

Passwords 257

More Trending

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Problems with Multifactor Authentication

Schneier on Security

Roger Grimes on why multifactor authentication isn’t a panacea : The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his most trusted VP who let the attackers in. It turns out that the VP had approved over 10 different push-based messages for logins that he was not involved in.

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Is Burnout Causing Staffing Shortages — Or Worse?

Lohrman on Security

Public- and private-sector organizations are facing staffing shortages, especially in technical positions. But don’t forget to take care of your current staff, who may be struggling with burnout.

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Weekly Update 264

Troy Hunt

A lot of cyber things this week: loads of data breach (or "scrape", In LinkedIn's case) incidents, Windows 11 upgrade experiences and then bricking my house courtesy of a Home Assistant update that fundamentally changed the Tuya integration. So pretty much "same, same but different" to every other week 🙂 References I've done another podcast with 1Password ("Crocodile Shower Privacy Settings with Troy Hunt" - yep!

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SHARED INTEL: Automating PKI certificate management alleviates outages caused by boom

The Last Watchdog

Our Public Key Infrastructure is booming but also under a strain that manual certificate management workflows are not keeping up with. Related: A primer on advanced digital signatures. PKI and digital certificates were pivotal in the formation of the commercial Internet, maturing in parallel with ecommerce. With digital transformation leading to a boom in the use of digital certificates, our bedrock authentication and encryption framework is at an inflection point, where the demand and adoption

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Optimizing The Modern Developer Experience with Coder

Many software teams have migrated their testing and production workloads to the cloud, yet development environments often remain tied to outdated local setups, limiting efficiency and growth. This is where Coder comes in. In our 101 Coder webinar, you’ll explore how cloud-based development environments can unlock new levels of productivity. Discover how to transition from local setups to a secure, cloud-powered ecosystem with ease.

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9 key security threats that organizations will face in 2022

Tech Republic Security

Supply chain attacks, misinformation campaigns, mobile malware and larger scale data breaches are just some of the threats to watch for next year, Check Point Software says.

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What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?

Krebs on Security

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

Internet 363
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Airline Passenger Mistakes Vintage Camera for a Bomb

Schneier on Security

I feel sorry for the accused : The “security incident” that forced a New-York bound flight to make an emergency landing at LaGuardia Airport on Saturday turned out to be a misunderstanding — after an airline passenger mistook another traveler’s camera for a bomb, sources said Sunday. American Airlines Flight 4817 from Indianapolis — operated by Republic Airways — made an emergency landing at LaGuardia just after 3 p.m., and authorities took a suspicious passen

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In-Person Conferences Are Back — What Can We Expect?

Lohrman on Security

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Annual Conference was held this past week as a live event in Seattle for the first time in two years. What happened, and what’s next?

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The Tumultuous IT Landscape Is Making Hiring More Difficult

After a year of sporadic hiring and uncertain investment areas, tech leaders are scrambling to figure out what’s next. This whitepaper reveals how tech leaders are hiring and investing for the future. Download today to learn more!

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Weekly Update 263

Troy Hunt

Lots of little bits and pieces this week in a later and shorter than usual update. See the references for all the details, but plenty of cyber, some IoT weather station discussion and a bit of chatter around career and me deciding I want to do a "Hack Your Career More" talk once we all get back to doing events in person. Stay tuned for that last one in particular!

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MY TAKE: Can Project Wildland’s egalitarian platform make Google, Facebook obsolete?

The Last Watchdog

Most of the people I know professionally and personally don’t spend a lot of time contemplating the true price we pay for the amazing digital services we’ve all become addicted to. Related: Blockchain’s role in the next industrial revolution. I’ll use myself as a prime example. My professional and social life revolve around free and inexpensive information feeds and digital tools supplied by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Internet 223
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Dark Web: Many cybercrime services sell for less than $500

Tech Republic Security

A ransomware kit costs as little as $66, though it needs to be modified, while a spearphishing attack can run as low as $100, says Altas VPN.

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How Coinbase Phishers Steal One-Time Passwords

Krebs on Security

A recent phishing campaign targeting Coinbase users shows thieves are getting cleverer about phishing one-time passwords (OTPs) needed to complete the login process. It also shows that phishers are attempting to sign up for new Coinbase accounts by the millions as part of an effort to identify email addresses that are already associated with active accounts.

Passwords 353
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The Importance of User Roles and Permissions in Cybersecurity Software

How many people would you trust with your house keys? Chances are, you have a handful of trusted friends and family members who have an emergency copy, but you definitely wouldn’t hand those out too freely. You have stuff that’s worth protecting—and the more people that have access to your belongings, the higher the odds that something will go missing.

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Nation-State Attacker of Telecommunications Networks

Schneier on Security

Someone has been hacking telecommunications networks around the world: LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is an activity cluster that has been consistently targeting the telecommunications sector at a global scale since at least 2016, leveraging custom tools and an in-depth knowledge of telecommunications network architectures. Recent findings highlight this cluster’s extensive knowledge of telecommunications protocols, including the emulation of these protocols to facilitate command and control (C2

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Senate Bill Would Mandate Reporting Infrastructure Data Breaches

Lohrman on Security

The Cyber Incident Notification Act of 2021 would require reporting cyber incidents impacting critical infrastructure to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within 24 hours.

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Weekly Update 266

Troy Hunt

Well this is a totally different office view! I'm properly getting into working more on the acoustics and aesthetics to make this the most productive environment possible which means this week things are in a bit of disarray due to ongoing works. Speaking of disarray, I've not been able to raise this week's sponsor in time so as I say in the video, their appearance on my blog this week is a bit. unusual.

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GUEST ESSAY: Here’s why castle-wall defenses utterly fail at stopping deceptive adversaries

The Last Watchdog

When it comes to cyber attacks, most businesses think: “It could never happen to us,” but some plots are just hitting a little too close to home. Related: T-Mobile breach reflects rising mobile device attacks. For instance, if you’ve ever played Grand Theft Auto, you know the goal is quite simply mass destruction: Use whatever resources you have at your disposal to cause as much damage as you possibly can and just keep going.

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IDC Analyst Report: The Open Source Blind Spot Putting Businesses at Risk

In a recent study, IDC found that 64% of organizations said they were already using open source in software development with a further 25% planning to in the next year. Most organizations are unaware of just how much open-source code is used and underestimate their dependency on it. As enterprises grow the use of open-source software, they face a new challenge: understanding the scope of open-source software that's being used throughout the organization and the corresponding exposure.

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Gartner analyst: 12 technologies to accelerate growth, engineer trust and sculpt change in 2022

Tech Republic Security

CIOs must prioritize the same business imperatives and find the IT force multipliers to enable growth and innovation, according to a Gartner analyst during Gartner's IT Symposium.

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Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting Security Vulnerability

Krebs on Security

On Wednesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story about how its staff discovered and reported a security vulnerability in a Missouri state education website that exposed the Social Security numbers of 100,000 elementary and secondary teachers. In a press conference this morning, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) said fixing the flaw could cost the state $50 million, and vowed his administration would seek to prosecute and investigate the “hackers” and anyone who aided the publication

Education 347
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The Missouri Governor Doesn’t Understand Responsible Disclosure

Schneier on Security

The Missouri governor wants to prosecute the reporter who discovered a security vulnerability in a state’s website, and then reported it to the state. The newspaper agreed to hold off publishing any story while the department fixed the problem and protected the private information of teachers around the state. […]. According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its reporters discovered the flaw in a web application allowing the public to search teacher certifications and credentials.

Education 334
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Setting a Guinness World Record

Javvad Malik

I’ve been thinking of the best way to write this post for several days. Many drafts have ended up being deleted. Which, to be honest, doesn’t have the same visual satisfaction as seeing pages crumpled up into balls and tossed across the room into the bin. But here we are. Last week, KnowBe4, OneLogin, and Eskenzi PR partnered up to attempt to set the Guinness World Record for the Most views of A Cybersecurity Lesson Video on YouTube in 24 hours.

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Beware of Pixels & Trackers on U.S. Healthcare Websites

The healthcare industry has massively adopted web tracking tools, including pixels and trackers. Tracking tools on user-authenticated and unauthenticated web pages can access personal health information (PHI) such as IP addresses, medical record numbers, home and email addresses, appointment dates, or other info provided by users on pages and thus can violate HIPAA Rules that govern the Use of Online Tracking Technologies by HIPAA Covered Entities and Business Associates.

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Weekly Update 265

Troy Hunt

I had a bunch of false starts with this one. I don't know if it was just OBS or something else, but we got there after several failed attempts and me resorting to reading Gov Parson's nutty tweets until it all started working. "Nutty" is a bit of a theme this week not just with the Gov, but particularly Thingiverse's extraordinarily poor handling of their data breach.

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GUEST ESSAY: Tapping Bitcoin’s security — to put a stop to ‘51% attacks’ of cryptocurrency exchanges

The Last Watchdog

Over the past five years, cryptocurrency exchanges have been the target of increasingly damaging “ 51% attacks ” resulting in the theft of over $30 million worth of cryptocurrency to date. Related: Wildland restores control of data to individuals. However, these attacks aren’t due to exchange security flaws; malicious actors are exploiting the underlying consensus protocols of blockchains themselves.

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Over 1.5 billion Facebook users' personal data found for sale on hacker forum

Tech Republic Security

Unrelated to other recent problems Facebook has had, this particular batch of data was scraped from profiles, meaning it's publicly available knowledge. That doesn't stop it from being dangerous.

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FCC Proposal Targets SIM Swapping, Port-Out Fraud

Krebs on Security

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is asking for feedback on new proposed rules to crack down on SIM swapping and number port-out fraud, increasingly prevalent scams in which identity thieves hijack a target’s mobile phone number and use that to wrest control over the victim’s online identity. In a long-overdue notice issued Sept. 30 , the FCC said it plans to move quickly on requiring the mobile companies to adopt more secure methods of authenticating customers before

Wireless 321
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Software Composition Analysis: The New Armor for Your Cybersecurity

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?