Security Awareness Training Top Priority for CISOs

Thirty-five percent of CISOs in the financial sector consider staff training to be the top priority for cyber defense. Twenty-five percent prioritize infrastructure upgrades and network defense. The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) polled more than 100 of its 7,000 global members to produce the first of its planned annual CISO Cybersecurity…

What CISOs prioritize in order to improve cybersecurity practices

In a new study by the The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), CISOs weighed in on the most critical cyber-defense methods, frequency of cyber-preparedness reporting to their respective boards of directors as well as the current cyber chain of command within their respective financial organizations.

Macro-less malware: The cyclical attack

Last year, attackers linked to the Russian hacking group APT28 (sometimes called Fancy Bear) started hacking like its 1999 with Microsoft Word-based malware that doesn’t trigger security warnings along the way. These types of attacks are called “macro-less malware” because they bypass the security warnings added to Microsoft Office programs in response to traditional macro…

The future of smartphone security: Hardware isolation

Mobile spyware has become increasingly more ubiquitous in corporate networks and devices. In a 2017 study, Check Point has found that out of the 850 organizations that they queried, 100% had experienced a mobile malware attack at least once in the past. To date, most cybersecurity companies have focused either on software-only or built-in hardware…

Innovative organizations build security into their cloud strategy

Businesses are increasingly evolving their security strategy to advance their cloud strategy. Based on research and interviews with industry practitioners, Hurwitz & Associates sees clear evidence that balancing velocity and security in the cloud starts with adopting new approaches to security. “Customers are increasingly depending on cloud computing to support the need for business agility and speed of transformation….

Six Months in Jail for University Email Hacker

A man who accessed over 1,000 email accounts maintained by a New York City-area university to download in appropriate photos and videos was sentenced to 6 months in prison this week. The man, Jonathan Powell, 30, of Phoenix, Arizona, pled guilty to the charges on August 9, 2017, in Manhattan federal court before United States…

Cyber attacks surge, ransomware leading the way

The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) found that cyber incidents targeting businesses nearly doubled from 82,000 in 2016 to 159,700 in 2017. Since the majority of cyber incidents are never reported, OTA believes the actual number in 2017 could easily exceed 350,000. “Surprising no one, 2017 marked another ‘worst year ever’ in data breaches and cyber incidents around the world,”…

Data breaches at an all time high: How are businesses protecting themselves?

Digitally transformative technologies are shaping the way organisations do business and moving them to a data-driven world, with 94% of organisations using sensitive data in cloud, big data, IoT, container, blockchain and/or mobile environments, according to the 2018 Thales Data Threat Report. Digital transformation is driving efficiency and scale as well as making possible new business…

It’s 2018: Time to assess your cyberrisk

What springs to mind when you hear the phrase: “The future’s already here”? It evokes thoughts of new technologies that are poised to make life easier, better, and safer — not modern cyberthreats. But so-called next-generation threats are already here, too. On February 20, within the framework of the European Summit on Information Security (TEISS…

IoT Devices Fuel Complex DDoS Attacks: Report

The continuous use of compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has helped cybercriminals increase the complexity of their assaults, NETSCOUT’s Arbor Networks says. According to the company’s 13th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR), attackers focused on increasing complexity in 2017, and the exploitation of IoT devices…