December, 2018

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10 Personal Finance Lessons for Technology Professionals

Troy Hunt

Patience. Frugality. Sacrifice. When you boil it down, what do those three things have in common? Those are choices. Money is not peace of mind. Money’s not happiness. Money is, at its essence, that measure of a man’s choices. This is part of the opening monologue of the Ozark series and when I first heard it, I immediately stopped the show and dropped it into this blog post.

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Your Personal Data is Already Stolen

Schneier on Security

In an excellent blog post , Brian Krebs makes clear something I have been saying for a while: Likewise for individuals, it pays to accept two unfortunate and harsh realities: Reality #1: Bad guys already have access to personal data points that you may believe should be secret but which nevertheless aren't, including your credit card information, Social Security number, mother's maiden name, date of birth, address, previous addresses, phone number, and yes ­ even your credit file.

Hacking 279
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What the Marriott Breach Says About Security

Krebs on Security

We don’t yet know the root cause(s) that forced Marriott this week to disclose a four-year-long breach involving the personal and financial information of 500 million guests of its Starwood hotel properties. But anytime we see such a colossal intrusion go undetected for so long, the ultimate cause is usually a failure to adopt the most important principle in cybersecurity defense that applies to both corporations and consumers: Assume you are compromised.

Passwords 279
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114 Million US Citizens and Companies Found Unprotected Online

Adam Levin

The data of 114 million businesses and individuals has been discovered in an unprotected database. The information exposed included the full name, employer, email, address, phone number and IP address of 56,934,021 individuals, and the revenues and employee counts for up to 25 million business entities. Hackenproof, the Estonian cybersecurity company that found the data trove online, announced their discovery on their blog.

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Why Giant Content Libraries Do Nothing for Your Employees’ Cyber Resilience

Many cybersecurity awareness platforms offer massive content libraries, yet they fail to enhance employees’ cyber resilience. Without structured, engaging, and personalized training, employees struggle to retain and apply key cybersecurity principles. Phished.io explains why organizations should focus on interactive, scenario-based learning rather than overwhelming employees with excessive content.

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Pivots and Payloads

Adam Shostack

SANS has announced a new boardgame, “ Pivots and Payloads ,” that “takes you through pen test methodology, tactics, and tools with many possible setbacks that defenders can utilize to hinder forward progress for a pen tester or attacker. The game helps you learn while you play. It’s also a great way to showcase to others what pen testers do and how they do it.” If you register for their webinar, which is on Wednesday the 19th, they’ll send you some posters ver

Education 178
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GUEST ESSAY: The case for engaging in ‘threat hunting’ — and how to do it effectively

The Last Watchdog

Modern cyber threats often are not obvious – in fact it is common for them to lurk inside a business’ systems for a long time without anyone noticing. This is referred to as ‘dwell time’, and a recent report from the Ponemon Institute indicates that the average dwell time is 191 days. Related podcast: The re-emergence of SIEMs. In an ideal world there would no dwell time at all, and threats would be identified before they can penetrate business’ defenses.

LifeWorks

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Bad Consumer Security Advice

Schneier on Security

There are lots of articles about there telling people how to better secure their computers and online accounts. While I agree with some of it, this article contains some particularly bad advice: 1. Never, ever, ever use public (unsecured) Wi-Fi such as the Wi-Fi in a café, hotel or airport. To remain anonymous and secure on the Internet, invest in a Virtual Private Network account, but remember, the bad guys are very smart, so by the time this column runs, they may have figured out a way to hack

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Happy 9th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!

Krebs on Security

Hard to believe we’ve gone another revolution around the Sun: Today marks the 9th anniversary of KrebsOnSecurity.com! This past year featured some 150 blog posts , but as usual the biggest contribution to this site came from the amazing community of readers here who have generously contributed their knowledge, wit and wisdom in more than 10,000 comments.

Mobile 266
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New York Times Reveals Scope of Mobile Apps’ Location Spying

Adam Levin

A New York Times report about the ways smartphone apps track users and sell their location data (on a far greater scale than most customers realize) has gotten much deserved attention this week. One data sample obtained by the Times showed records of a company updating users’ locations up to 14,000 times a day in 2017. While many users allow location tracking on their mobile apps to enable tailored content such as weather or nearby restaurants, they are often unaware that their travel history an

Mobile 192
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High ROI Security Advisory Boards

Adam Shostack

Lance Cottrell has a blog “ The Why and How of High ROI Security Advisory Boards ” over at the Ntrepid blog. I’m pleased to be a part of the board he’s discussing, and will quibble slightly — I don’t think it’s easy to maximize the value of the board. It’s taken effort on the part of both Ntrepid staff and executives and also the board, and the result is clearly high value.

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Zero Trust Mandate: The Realities, Requirements and Roadmap

The DHS compliance audit clock is ticking on Zero Trust. Government agencies can no longer ignore or delay their Zero Trust initiatives. During this virtual panel discussion—featuring Kelly Fuller Gordon, Founder and CEO of RisX, Chris Wild, Zero Trust subject matter expert at Zermount, Inc., and Principal of Cybersecurity Practice at Eliassen Group, Trey Gannon—you’ll gain a detailed understanding of the Federal Zero Trust mandate, its requirements, milestones, and deadlines.

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MY TAKE: Massive Marriott breach continues seemingly endless run of successful hacks

The Last Watchdog

I have a Yahoo email account, I’ve shopped at Home Depot and Target , my father was in the military and had a security clearance, which included a dossier on his family, archived at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management , I’ve had insurance coverage from Premera Blue Cross and I’ve stayed at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. Related: Uber hack shows DevOps risk.

Hacking 157
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Weekly Update 119

Troy Hunt

I'm home! And it's a nice hot Christmas! And I've got a new car! And that's where the discussion kinda started heading south this week. As I say in the video, the reaction to my tweet about it was actually overwhelmingly positive, but there was this unhealthy undercurrent of negativity which was really disappointing to see. Several other non-related events following that demonstrated similar online aggressiveness and I don't know if it was a case of too much eggnog or simply people having more d

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The DoJ's Secret Legal Arguments to Break Cryptography

Schneier on Security

Earlier this year, the US Department of Justice made a series of legal arguments as to why Facebook should be forced to help the government wiretap Facebook Messenger. Those arguments are still sealed. The ACLU is suing to make them public.

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Serial Swatter and Stalker Mir Islam Arrested for Allegedly Dumping Body in River

Krebs on Security

A 22-year-old man convicted of cyberstalking and carrying out numerous bomb threats and swatting attacks — including a 2013 swatting incident at my home — was arrested Sunday morning in the Philippines after allegedly helping his best friend dump the body of a housemate into a local river. Suspects Troy Woody Jr. (left) and Mir Islam, were arrested in Manila this week for allegedly dumping the body of Woody’s girlfriend in a local river.

Internet 265
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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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Mozilla Releases Annual Privacy Guide to Holiday Shopping

Adam Levin

The Mozilla Foundation has released the second installation of *Privacy Not included, the organization’s annual privacy guide to internet-connected gifts. The list was started to promote the idea that privacy and security by design can and should be a major selling point. Mozilla is the non profit organization behind the popular open source Firefox web browser.

Internet 187
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Structures, Engineering and Security

Adam Shostack

J.E. Gordon’s Structures, or Why Things Don’t Fall Down is a fascinating and accessible book. Why don’t things fall down? It turns out this is a simple question with some very deep answers. Buildings don’t fall down because they’re engineered from a set of materials to meet the goals of carrying appropriate loads. Those materials have very different properties than the ways you, me, and everything from grass to trees have evolved to keep standing.

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GUEST ESSAY: Atrium Health data breach highlights lingering third-party exposures

The Last Watchdog

The healthcare industry has poured vast resources into cybersecurity since 2015, when a surge of major breaches began. While the nature of these breaches has evolved over the last four years, the growth in total healthcare incidents has unfortunately continued unabated. Related: How to get of HIPAA hit list. The recent disclosure from Atrium Health that more than 2.65 million patients had significant amounts of PII exposed by the healthcare provider’s third-party billing vendor, AccuDoc Solutio

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Weekly Update 116

Troy Hunt

I'm on countdown to take-off for the next 2 and a bit weeks so I'm going to keep this intro really short because it's sitting between me and a relaxing cold one (as soon as the bags are ready). Heaps of services got pwned, Australia has a screwy set of circumstances (and reactions) around a cyber bill and HIBP had a 5th birthday celebration which resulted in stickers and a really fun live AMA video.

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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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Banks Attacked through Malicious Hardware Connected to the Local Network

Schneier on Security

Kaspersky is reporting on a series of bank hacks -- called DarkVishnya -- perpetrated through malicious hardware being surreptitiously installed into the target network: In 2017-2018, Kaspersky Lab specialists were invited to research a series of cybertheft incidents. Each attack had a common springboard: an unknown device directly connected to the company's local network.

Banking 257
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Microsoft Issues Emergency Fix for IE Zero Day

Krebs on Security

Microsoft today released an emergency software patch to plug a critical security hole in its Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that attackers are already using to break into Windows computers. The software giant said it learned about the weakness ( CVE-2018-8653 ) after receiving a report from Google about a new vulnerability being used in targeted attacks.

Internet 252
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NASA Announces Data Breach

Adam Levin

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration has announced that it experienced a data breach in October. In an internal memo sent to employees, the agency disclosed that its “cybersecurity personnel began investigating a possible compromise of NASA servers,” and that they had “determined that information from one of the servers containing Social Security numbers and other PII data of current and former NASA employees may have been compromised.”.

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Beyond Elf on a Shelf

Adam Shostack

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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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GUEST ESSAY: ‘Tis the season — to take proactive measures to improve data governance

The Last Watchdog

The holiday season is upon us and the bright lights and greenery aren’t the only indicators that we’ve reached December. Sadly, data breaches often occur at this time of year. Recently we’ve seen major news stories about breaches at Starwood Hotels and Quora. Related podcast: The need to lock down unstructured data. Last year, at this time, it was announced that there was a significant privacy leak at eBay affecting many customers.

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Hackers infect Linux servers with JungleSec Ransomware via IPMI Remote console

Security Affairs

Since November, a new ransomware called JungleSec has been infecting servers through unsecured IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) cards. Security experts at BleepingComputer wrote about a new ransomware called JungleSec that is infecting victims through unsecured IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) cards. The ransomware was first observed early November.

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Drone Denial-of-Service Attack against Gatwick Airport

Schneier on Security

Someone is flying a drone over Gatwick Airport in order to disrupt service: Chris Woodroofe, Gatwick's chief operating officer, said on Thursday afternoon there had been another drone sighting which meant it was impossible to say when the airport would reopen. He told BBC News: "There are 110,000 passengers due to fly today, and the vast majority of those will see cancellations and disruption.

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A Chief Security Concern for Executive Teams

Krebs on Security

Virtually all companies like to say they take their customers’ privacy and security seriously, make it a top priority, blah blah. But you’d be forgiven if you couldn’t tell this by studying the executive leadership page of each company’s Web site. That’s because very few of the world’s biggest companies list any security executives in their highest ranks.

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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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DarkVishnya Attacks Loot Millions from Banks

Adam Levin

Hackers stole tens of millions of dollars from Eastern European banks in a campaign called “DarkVishnya.” The method deployed by the hackers relied on devices connected at the physical location of the targets, rather than attempting to breach networks remotely. There were several steps to the hack. The first step involved planting in the target banks a device.

Banking 159
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Resources for Infosec Skillbuilding

Adam Shostack

Thanks to the kind folks Digital Guardian for including my threat modeling book in their list of “ The Best Resources for InfoSec Skillbuilding.” It’s particularly gratifying to see that the work is standing the test of time.

InfoSec 113
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GUEST ESSAY: 5 security steps all companies should adopt from the Intelligence Community

The Last Watchdog

The United States Intelligence Community , or IC, is a federation of 16 separate U.S. intelligence agencies, plus a 17th administrative office. The IC gathers, stores and processes large amounts of data, from a variety of sources, in order to provide actionable information for key stakeholders. And, in doing so, the IC has developed an effective set of data handling and cybersecurity best practices.

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Cisco ASA is affacted by a privilege escalation flaw. Patch it now!

Security Affairs

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software is affected by a vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to retrieve files or replace software images on a device. . A privilege escalation vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-15465 affects the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software. The flaw could be exploited by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to perform privileged operations using the web management interface.

Firmware 112
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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.