As professionals in the technical discipline of Information Technology, it can be easy to forget that the risks that we need to guard against are more than purely technical. While it is true that patches need to be applied, security baselines followed, and firewalls configured – the job does not end there. For many organisations,Read more
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Anti-virus company Avast has revealed they were breached over several months, after identifying the suspicious activity on their network on 23rd September according to a blog post by their CISO. Avast think their CCleaner software was the target of a supply chain attack – with the hackers attempting to repeat the 2017 insertion of maliciousRead more
Webmin, the web-based interface for system administration for Unix and Linux, had a remote code execution vulnerability deliberately introduced into its source code in April 2018. It was only publicised in August 2019 when a zero day exploit was published at DefCon 27. Webmin has been installed over a million times worldwide. The malicious codeRead more
Microsoft details IoT devices used in corporate breaches in new report. Microsoft’s Security Response Centre has recently published a report listing several instances they have analysed where IoT devices were used as a beach head in attacks against corporate networks. There are more IoT (Internet of Things) devices currently in use than the total number of mobileRead more
Over 106 million individuals have had their credit application details stolen from Amazon S3 data buckets which had been insecurely configured by Capital One. The 30Gb of data from the S3 bucket was downloaded and then posted onto a Github account by the attacker. The stolen data was soon spotted and then reported to Capital One’sRead more
The record fine of £183,000,000 for a UK data breach signals a new era for the economics of information security. The first fine issued by the UK’s Information Commissioners Office (ICO) under the GDPR regime is 367 times higher than the previous maximum fine levied against Facebook in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.Read more
A wave of DNS hijack attacks has been sweeping across Europe, the Middle-East and America according to recently published reports from FireEye and Cisco. While the attacks are creative and sophisticated, the root attack vector is often a simple credential compromise to the DNS control panel of an organisation’s domain name registrar. The scale ofRead more
Half a billion user accounts stolen over four years On 8th September 2018, Marriott hotels noticed a security alert concerning an attempt to access the Starwood Hotels reservation database which the hotel chain had purchased back in 2016. Recent investigations have revealed that the attackers had access to the Starwood systems and database since 2014,Read more
This week, we saw a new vulnerability surface which affects users of all currently supported Microsoft Office applications. Security researchers at Qihoo 360 Core Security first detected the vulnerability being exploited ‘in-the-wild’ on 28th September, 2017. In a blog post on 10th October, 2017, a representative for Qihoo wrote “The attack only targeted limited customers. TheRead more
In this week’s Patch Tuesday update (dated 10th October, 2017), Microsoft have released patch for a vulnerability which affects multiple versions of the Windows operating system and could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code through specially-crafted DNS responses. The CVE-2017-11779 vulnerability was discovered by Nick Freeman (a security researcher at BishopFox), who identified theRead more
