As concerns mount over China’s efforts to swipe intellectual property from U.S. companies – most recently COVID-19 vaccine research – the State Department has expanded its Clean Network program to protect U.S. critical telecommunications and technology infrastructure. Among the key objectives is to push vaccine research and other sensitive information to secured clouds. The programs…
The security industry needs to become more clandestine in its approach to incident response, making it harder for attackers to know that they are being tracked. At least that’s what researchers concluded in the fifth installment of VMware Carbon Black’s semi-annual Global Incident Response Threat Report, which also focused heavily on the impact of COVID-19…
In a coordinated attack against Reddit that underscored the importance of multifactor authentication hackers compromised moderator accounts and led to numerous subreddit accounts being vandalized and defaced with pro-Trump messaging. Reddit acknowledged the “ongoing incident” and said it is “working on locking down the bad actors and reverting the changes.” The platform administrators called for…
Bank regulators dropped the hammer on Capital One, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) levying an $80 million fine and the Federal Reserve filing a cease and desist order that specified what the steps the bank needed to take to redeem itself after a massive data breach in 2019 that compromised…
Garmin reportedly paid cyber extortionists millions of dollars for access to a decryptor so that the company could restore its services to customers following a July 23 WastedLocker ransomware attack. Meanwhile, a separate ransomware outfit this week reportedly leaked sensitive data lifted from LG and Xerox’s internal networks after attempted negotiations with the two tech…
While the motivation behind the “Meow” bot attacks is unknown, the menace is still out there wiping out open source databases left unsecured on the internet, prompting Elastic to offer clear steps that organizations can take to safeguard their data. The bot came on the scene about two weeks ago when it was reported that…
Under pressure, large companies’ cybersecurity forces leaned in, and got the results they intended. Amid the extreme challenges cybersecurity teams experienced in the second quarter of 2020, a newly released business-activity index shows that companies with 500 or more employees in North America and Europe emphasized proactive security measures to protect assets and detect breaches…
Strapped for cybersecurity resources, small and medium-size health care providers should outsource electronic medical record (EMR) maintenance, Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance and threat intelligence gathering to third-party service providers, but risk assessment must still be handled internally, according to Mitchell Parker, CISO at Indiana University Health. Lamenting the recent scourge of ransomware and data…
Applying a security update to a CVE released more than a year ago could have prevented a hacker from publishing plaintext usernames and passwords, as well as IP addresses, for more than 900 Pulse Secure VPN enterprise servers. “The lesson here? Patch, patch, patch,” said Laurence Pitt, global security strategy director at Juniper Networks. “The…
Prosecutors dropped felony criminal charges against a pair of ethical pen testers arrested while assessing the security of an Iowa courthouse. But the the two men are not ready move on just yet. Coalfire employees Gary DeMercurio, managing senior, and Justin Wynn, senior security consultant, lobbied Wednesday at the virtual Black Hat conference for a…
