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An innovative American insurance company, Corvus, has reported a drop of 65% in ransomware claims after they started insisting on vulnerability scans of the client’s network before providing cyber-insurance. Lauren Winchester of Corvus states in a recent blog post: Our automated scan locates threats like unprotected RDP upon quoting for new business and we notifyRead more

The UK National Cyber-Security Centre has published a toolkit to help organisations setup a vulnerability disclosure programme. A vulnerability disclosure programme makes it easy for someone to provide your organisation with information if they notice a vulnerability that could impact your security.  Without such a programme in place, concerned clients or researchers have to resortRead more

The Common Weaknesses Enumeration project has released their 2020 list of the 25 most dangerous software vulnerabilities.  The list describes the types of vulnerabilities that have resulted in CVE being issued over the last two years. The project describes itself as: The 2020 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE™) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses (CWE TopRead more

Details emerged this week of a failed multi-million dollar ransomware attack against Tesla which attempted to bribe an employee to hand deliver the malware. According to the legal case files,  a Russian named Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov travelled to Nevada in order to contact and then recruit a Tesla employee and offered him $1million in orderRead more

Southern Water found itself in hot water last week when a security researcher discovered a server side request forgery exploit in their customer service system. The (quickly rectified) mistake on the Southern Water customer self-service portal allowed the URL to be manipulated in order to display the details of another arbitrary customer account.  The targetRead more

Microsoft Application Guard helps protect against malware in Office documents by opening each document in its own segregated virtual machine. Microsoft says in the release notes: Application Guard is a virtualization-based sandbox that’s used to isolate untrusted documents you may encounter. It brings the same technology that powers Azure to your desktop. Untrusted documents areRead more

The number of ransomware attacks using RDP as the attack vector has increased sharply during the COVID lockdown. As the number of staff working remotely exploded during the COVID lockdown, criminals were quick to respond by targeting Remote Desktop Protocol services with ransomware.  For example, Group-IB recently reported that the Dharma ransomware-as-a-service was being usedRead more

The UK National Cyber Security Centre and CISA in the USA have issued a joint alert detailing the risk posed by the Qsnatch/Derek malware which attacks QNAP NAS devices. The National Cyber Security Centre states in the alert: All QNAP NAS devices are potentially vulnerable to QSnatch malware if not updated with the latest securityRead more

Boothole is a pervasive vulnerability that affects the GRUB2 boot loader that is used by most versions of Linux.  By exploiting this vulnerability, attackers can run arbitrary code on almost any PC or Server and install RootKits or similar Malware that will persist reboots and be very difficult to detect. BootHole was first reported byRead more

A report published by Barracuda Networks and researchers at UC Berkley which examines email compromise attacks at 111 organisations sheds light on how email is abused in cyber-attacks – often as the opening shot in the attack. The research reveals that 30% of the attacks were part of the emerging economy of ‘accounts for sale’Read more