BrandPost: A booming business: The rise of cybergangs

Cybergangs are modeling themselves on successful businesses, with often staggering results. Based on the world’s growing interconnectivity, experts estimate that the cost of cybercrime will exceed $6 trillion annually by 2021, due in part to the growth in cybergang activity. In a 2016 report, Europol attributed the continued growth of “crime-as-a-service” activities to the strengthened…

The year ransomware became one of the top threats to enterprises

On Feb. 5, employees at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, started having network access problems that prevented electronic communications. Over the next few days, they learned that the hospital was the victim of a ransomware attack that encrypted files on multiple computers. After several days during which staff had to resort to pen…

Google researchers help developers test cryptographic implementations

Security experts from Google have developed a test suite that allows developers to find weaknesses in their cryptographic libraries and implementations. The company’s Project Wycheproof, which was released on GitHub, contains more than 80 test cases for widely used cryptographic algorithms, including RSA, AES-GCM, AES-EAX, Diffie-Hellman, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), and the digital signature algorithm…

Nagios 4.2.4 closes serious root privilege escalation bug

If you’re using Nagios to monitor your systems, networks and infrastructure, and you have not updated to version 4.2.4, you better hop to it. This latest release fixes a high severity root privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2016-9566) discovered by researcher Dawid Golunski, who published a proof-of-concept exploit for it on Thursday.

DDoS attacks via WordPress now come with encryption

Kaspersky Lab experts have noted an emerging trend – a growth in the number of attacks using encryption. Such attacks are highly effective due to the difficulty in identifying them amongst the overall flow of clean requests. Recently, the company encountered yet more evidence of this trend – an attack exploiting vulnerabilities in WordPress via…

IDG Contributor Network: Grid security insights for 2017: Pressure mounts to prevent physical attacks

As we close out 2016 and look forward to 2017, it seems appropriate to pause a moment and provide some grid security predictions for the new year. Predictions based on trends, insight, and understanding can arm security programs with the knowledge needed to test policies, exercise physical protection systems, and allocate corporate funds for resources….

12 tips for implementing secure business practices

Optiv Security shared a list of a dozen tips for implementing secure business practices during the 2016 holiday season. Security experts developed these recommendations to help security and IT teams better prepare their companies and employees to address the increase in cyber threats that occur during this time of year.

Cisco dents Arista again with patent infringement ruling

A US trade judge ruled today that Arista Networks infringed on two Cisco switch patents – the second important victory the networking giant has won against Arista in their ongoing legal confrontation since it began in 2014. U.S. International Trade Commission Judge MaryJoan McNamara issued the so-called “initial determination” on the case which now must…