BEC Attacks Far More Lucrative than Ransomware over Past 3 Years

BEC fraud netted cyberthieves five times more profit than ransomware over a three-year period, according to Cisco’s midyear report released today. Despite all the recent attention paid to ransomware, cybercriminals walked away with $5.3 billion from business email compromise (BEC) attacks compared with $1 billion for ransomware over a three-year stretch, according to Cisco’s 2017…

Catastrophic Cloud Attack Costs Would Rival that of Hurricane Damages

Lloyd’s of London estimates multi-billion-dollar loss figures in worst-case scenarios of a major zero-day exploit or massive cloud outage. WannaCry spread like wildfire in a matter of days reaching 150 countries and creating an anticipated $4 billion in losses, but if attackers were to launch a global, system-wide attack that hit a multitude of cloud-based companies,…

How Active Intrusion Detection Can Seek and Block Attacks

Researchers at Black Hat USA will demonstrate how active intrusion detection strategies can help administrators detect hackers who are overly reliant on popular attack tools and techniques. Penetration testers as well as bad-guy hackers typically rely on several common attack tools to break into business networks. Enterprises defending their networks can flip the equation on…

Businesses overconfident about keeping attackers at bay

Despite the increasing number of data breaches and nearly 1.4 billion data records being lost or stolen in 2016, the vast majority of IT professionals still believe perimeter security is effective at keeping unauthorized users out of their networks. However, companies are under investing in technology that adequately protects their business, according to Gemalto.

Five crucial ways to help keep a system safe from harm

We’re living in an incredible age of technology, invention and innovation. It’s hard to imagine that just a short time ago we couldn’t order groceries for delivery from our phones, or ask into the air any question, to be answered immediately by a robot sitting on a countertop. “Okay, Google — what do I have…

Video Game Firms Targeted With “Paranoid” PlugX Malware

Companies in the video game industry and possibly other sectors have been targeted in attacks involving improved variants of the notorious PlugX remote access trojan (RAT). Palo Alto Networks has spotted several interesting PlugX samples believed to have been used by the same threat actor. While the company has not provided any details on the…

WannaCry? You’re Not Alone: The 5 Stages of Security Grief

When it comes to securing the enterprise, the attackers have the advantage. Defenders are required to protect against every conceivable threat while the attacker needs only a single attack vector to penetrate a network. The universe of potential intrusion vectors is vast: faulty authentication mechanisms, gaps in the perimeter network, legacy applications, and, of course,…

Understanding Looming Threats and the Need to Hunt With Anonymity

Situational awareness is critical in every kind of engagement. The internet is no exception. Effectively all modern conflicts take place, at least in part, online. To understand the threats you will inevitably face, you need to go hunting outside your perimeter. Only by surreptitiously monitoring and engaging with potential attackers and malware developers will you…

U.S. Warns of North Korea’s ‘Hidden Cobra’ Attacks

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) released a technical alert on Tuesday on behalf of the DHS and the FBI to warn organizations of North Korea’s “Hidden Cobra” activities, particularly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The threat actor dubbed by the U.S. government “Hidden Cobra” is better known in the infosec community as Lazarus…