Ransomware is increasingly becoming a problem for companies, and the CEO of a leading computer security company says he fears 2017 could see entire companies shut down until they pay up, or risk losing all their data.Ransomware works by infiltrating a computer with malware and then encrypting all the files on the disk. The user is presented with a limited time offer: Lose all your data or send money with the promise your data will be unlocked. The fee typically varies from a few tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars and often has to be transmitted in Bitcoin.The problem began on a fairly small scale, targeting individual users, but has been growing. Last year, a hospital in Los Angeles admitted to paying $17,000 to get its system unlocked, and a report in October said ransomware cases were on course to quadruple in 2016 over the previous year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The responsibilities of information security are rapidly changing as enterprises digitize. Technology now enables business strategy and is transforming product, channels, and operations. In this new context, information security is expected to take a strategic role by helping business leaders understand the security implications of their digital strategies; support a quicker pace of technology exploitation and experimentation; and govern a larger, more varied project portfolio.Digitization has spurred three company-wide shifts, creating the need for three associated new information security roles.Shift 1: Strategy over governance
Information security increasingly plays a larger role in advising business partners on strategy. A key driver is the growing difficulty of executing digital strategies securely. Technology enablement of product, channel, and operations introduces new potential vulnerabilities that can only be spotted by information security’s keen eye. More business leaders are recognizing security’s centrality; in fact, CEB data shows that 81 percent of boards of director review information security matters in most or every meeting (disclosure: I work for CEB).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAN FRANCISCO -- In some ways, Google is like every other large enterprise. It had the typical defensive security posture based on the concept that the enterprise is your castle and security involves building moats and walls to protect the perimeter.Over time, however, that perimeter developed holes as Google’s increasingly mobile workforce, scattered around the world, demanded access to the network. And employees complained about having to go through a sometimes slow, unreliable VPN. On top of that, Google, like everyone else, was moving to the cloud, which was also outside of the castle.In other ways, Google is unlike any other company. Without much of a detailed business plan or cost/benefit analysis, Google execs gave the green light to an ambitious project aimed at totally reinventing the company’s security infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Yahoo has begun warning individual users that their accounts with the service may have been compromised in a massive data breach it reported late last year.The warning, in email messages sent from Yahoo CISO Bob Lord, tell users that a forged cookie may have been used to access their accounts in previous years.The warning to Yahoo users come at the same time that news reports suggest that Verizon Communications, in negotiations to buy Yahoo, may be seeking a discount of US$250 million because of the data breaches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
India’s space agency said today it had launched 104 satellites from a single rocket, crushing the previous record of 37 satellites from a single rocket by the Russian space agency in 2014.The rocket – India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), also known as Cartosat-2 –is a four-stage rocket that India has used for a variety of missions since 1993. This was its 39th flight.+More on Network World: Small satellites bring “Moore’s Law” into space+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers have devised a new attack that can bypass one of the main exploit mitigations in browsers: address space layout randomization (ASLR). The attack takes advantage of how modern processors cache memory and, because it doesn't rely on a software bug, fixing the problem is not easy.Researchers from the Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUSec) unveiled the attack, dubbed AnC, Wednesday after having coordinated its disclosure with processor, browser and OS vendors since October.ASLR is a feature present in all major operating systems. Applications, including browsers, take advantage of it to make the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows more difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ call for a way to “overcome” cryptography met with scorn from a panel of elite cryptographers speaking at this week’s RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco.“Any one of my students will be capable of writing good crypto code,” says Adi Shamir, the ‘S’ in RSA and a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.Sessions’ use of the term “overcome” during his confirmation hearings actually means installing backdoors, says Ronald Rivest, the ‘R’ in RSA and a professor at MIT. He cited a joint Congressional study that concluded that weakening encryption works against the national interest, and that encryption is global anyway -- so the U.S. can’t call all the shots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As you may have guessed from my blogs, I was really excited about the year’s RSA Security Conference. At the end of January, I wrote a blog about my expectations for endpoint security at RSA. I followed up with another ditty about network security banter at this year’s show and concluded the series with a blog about security analytics and operations talk at RSA. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Advanced endpoint security products don’t do you much good if they can be evaded or eat your time by consistently throw false positives. Since enterprises are expected to defend against sophisticated threats and money in the security budget only goes so far, you might be interested in the results from NSS Labs’ testing of 13 security vendors AEP solutions. The results were released during the RSA conference.According to NSS Labs’ CEO Vikram Phatak, “The AEP test results provide vendor neutral insight and analysis to help enterprises accelerate their decision process and make informed decisions about when to deploy these products to manage their risk posture.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Businesses targeted in email scams don’t always have to play the victim. They can actually fight back.Researchers at Dell SecureWorks have documented how they identified a suspected email scammer from Nigeria, by essentially playing along with the scheme to fool the attacker into revealing his true whereabouts.Anyone can use these tips, said Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks. “We’re letting them (the scammers) give us all the information about themselves,” he said.The email scheme SecureWorks dealt with involved a fraudster impersonating a CEO in what’s called a business email spoofing attack. The goal is often to trick a victim into wiring funds to the scammer’s bank account.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As tens of thousands of the world’s top security pros gather at RSA Conference 2017 they are being called upon to watch out for a new threat: their own data.By corrupting data that is used for making decisions, attackers can cause all kinds of problems, says Chris Young, general manager of Intel Security. “Now data is manipulated and used against us to affect the decisions we make,” he says.He calls this corruption “data landmines,” which when factored into decision making, can result in bad choices, missed opportunities and economic losses.He says stolen and manipulated data combined to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, for example, and the consequences of similar manipulations could be high for businesses whose big-data analysis is undermined by altered small data that makes it up. With inaccurate input to draw on, the outcomes will be faulty, he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The home security camera market has taken a big hit in recent months, becoming the poster child for “bad security behavior” when people talk about the security (or lack thereof) of Internet of Things. Last year’s highly publicized DDoS attack on Dyn highlighted insecure cameras being used as part of a botnet; vulnerabilities were also found in Chinese-based security cameras and at least one Samsung SmartCam product. In the U.S., the FTC filed a complaint against D-Link over claims that their webcams were “secure”.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The home security camera market has taken a big hit in recent months, becoming the poster child for “bad security behavior” when people talk about the security (or lack thereof) of Internet of Things. Last year’s highly publicized DDoS attack on Dyn highlighted insecure cameras being used as part of a botnet; vulnerabilities were also found in Chinese-based security cameras and at least one Samsung SmartCam product. In the U.S., the FTC filed a complaint against D-Link over claims that their webcams were “secure”.To read this article in full, please click here
If you are a victim of ransomware, don’t pay!That has been the mantra of the FBI for several years now – one that was forcefully echoed by one of the nation’s highest-profile security bloggers – Brian Krebs – in a recent post.But based on the statistics, either a lot of people aren’t listening, or it’s a bit more complicated than that. The reality is that the success of ransomware isn’t just increasing. It’s exploding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Trend Micro this morning released a report about the exposed cyberassets in the top U.S. cities and most critical industry segments -- and in many cases, it was the smaller municipalities that had the largest number of problems."Larger cities had fewer systems being exposed," said Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro.Houston, for example, had 3,900,208 exposed devices, compared with 1,031,325 in New York City, even though New York has nearly four times as many people.But many of the cities with the highest numbers of exposed devices were even smaller. Sometimes, much, much smaller.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network World increasingly has been writing about companies transforming their businesses via the Internet of Things rather than just tracking the latest IoT vendor announcements. But after taking a spin through our ongoing and interactive startup funding timeline, we figured it was a good time to round up some of the latest startups to rein in venture capital for their IoT-related businesses. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ping Identity's Patrick Harding joins Infoworld's Fahmida Rashid to take a look into the future of passwords and authentication for our increasingly complex online lives.
CSO's Steve Ragan talks with Cybereason's Chief Product Officer Sam Curry about the rising threat of attacks from nation-state actors, and how to address the unique nature of their attacks.
How should the U.S. respond to cyber attacks? That’s been a major question at this year’s RSA security conference, following Russia’s suspected attempt to influence last year’s election.
Clearly, the government should be doing more on cybersecurity, said U.S. lawmakers and officials at the show, but they admit that politics and policy conflicts have hampered the government's approach.
“I wish the federal government could do this, but it’s very hard, unfortunately, due to partisan politics,” said Virginia State Governor Terry McAuliffe, during a speech at the show. “They haven’t been able to take the lead on this issue as they should have.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today took the unprecedented step of postponing an entire month's slate of security updates for Windows and its other products just hours before the patches were to begin rolling out to customers."We discovered a last-minute issue that could impact some customers and was not resolved in time for our planned updates today," Microsoft said in a post to the MSRC (Microsoft Security Research Center) blog. "After considering all options, we made the decision to delay this month's updates."Today was set as Patch Tuesday, the monthly release of security fixes from Microsoft. Normally, Microsoft issues the updates around 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET). Although Microsoft did not time stamp its blog post, the SAN Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) pointed out the delay at 8:22 a.m. PT (11:22 ET).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here