Security News

Ransom Cartel linked to Colonial Pipeline attacker REvil, says infosec crew
2022-10-18 11:44

Does that mean REvil - which was behind the high-profile attack on Colonial Pipeline last year and essentially went dark just months before Ransom Cartel came to the surface - morphed into the new group and is just continuing with its nefarious ways under a new name? "Based on the fact that the Ransom Cartel operators clearly have access to the original REvil ransomware source code, yet likely do not possess the obfuscation engine used to encrypt strings and hide API calls, we speculate that the operators of Ransom Cartel had a relationship with the REvil group at one point, before starting their own operation," Unit 42 researchers Amer Elsad and Daniel Bunce write in a recent report.

Infosec still (mostly) a boys club
2022-10-15 14:57

Before organizations can work on retaining female infosec professionals, the industry needs to bring more women into cybersecurity jobs in the first place, she opined. "A lack of representation can perpetuate and reinforce the gender gap by dissuading women from entering the industry," Vasu Jakkal, a Microsoft Security corporate vice-president, told The Register.

India set to extend deadline for absurd infosec reporting requirements
2022-10-14 02:33

India's minister of state for electronics and information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, has hinted strongly that he will again extend the deadline to comply with sweeping new information security reporting rules that were imposed as an essential national defence mechanism. After the deadline they were required to report many types of infosec incidents - even trivial ones like port scanning and phishing attempts - to India's Computer Emergency Response Team within six hours of detection.

China's infosec researchers obeyed Beijing and stopped reporting vulns ... or did they?
2022-09-27 06:58

The Council explored the state of Chinese infosec research in the context of the 2021 introduction of "Regulations on the Management of Security Vulnerabilities of Network Products" that require local researchers to report any vulns they find to local authorities. A ban on Chinese researchers participating in international infosec competitions is thought to have been imposed for similar reasons.

LabMD gets another shot at defamation claim against 'extortionate' infosec biz
2022-09-01 03:49

LabMD, the embattled and now defunct cancer-testing company, will get another chance at suing security firm Tiversa for defamation following an appeals court ruling. The testing laboratory has long alleged that: Tiversa illegally obtained a 1,178-page computer file containing confidential data on more than 9,000 LabMD patients back in 2008; lied about the file being publicly available on a peer-to-peer file-sharing network and that it was downloaded by miscreants; and tried to use this alleged privacy fiasco to bully the medical company into paying for Tiversa's incident response services to the tune of $475 an hour.

Infosec products of the month: August 2022
2022-09-01 03:00

Scrut Risk Management is an assessment tool that combines all required elements of risk management, including mapping standard specific controls to risks, tracking compliance progress against each mitigated risk, and computing inherent and residual risk - under one umbrella. Halo Security platform combines external asset risk and vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing services to provide organizations complete visibility into the risk posture of their internet-exposed assets on an on-going basis.

Infosec products of the month: July 2022
2022-08-01 02:45

Darktrace launched Darktrace PREVENT, an interconnected set of AI products that deliver a proactive cyber security capability to help organizations pre-empt future cyber-attacks. CertiK launched several web3 Skynet security features to bolster end-to-end security for the web3 world.

The infosec investment landscape: Which tech gets the most bucks?
2022-07-26 05:00

How many cybersecurity vendors are active at the moment? What are they offering? How is their business doing? These are just some of the questions that Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst at IT-Harvest, is trying to answer on a daily basis. The former Gartner Research VP and industry executive is one of the industry's most prominent analysts and creator of the Analyst Dashboard, a web app that reveals data on 2,850 cybersecurity vendors.

Infosec pros want more industry cooperation and support for open standards
2022-07-26 03:00

As a result of this drive toward security technology consolidation, 77% of infosec pros would like to see more industry cooperation and support for open standards promoting interoperability. As thousands of cybersecurity technology vendors compete against each other across numerous security product categories, organizations are aiming to optimize all security technologies in their stack at once, and vendors that support open standards for technology integration will be best positioned to meet this change in the industry, according to a new annual global study of cybersecurity professionals by ISSA and ESG. The new research report, Technology Perspectives from Cybersecurity Professionals, surveyed 280 cybersecurity professionals, focused on security processes and technologies, and revealed that 83% of security professionals believe that future technology interoperability depends upon established industry standards.

Infosec not your job but your responsibility? How to be smarter than the average bear
2022-07-25 11:27

What the hell are we supposed to do with this information? Is this an error in the suspicious activity detector? Is this the result of hacking attempts via compromised Microsoft systems? Is it Microsoft bungling some sort of management task? At the time of writing, nobody knows. That's quite a remarkable response to a threat that's difficult to enumerate.