Conti ransomware gang appears to be behind Ireland's Health Service Executive (HSE) ransomware attack, according to reports. HSE, a $25 billion public health system, shut down its IT systems to protect the service from further damage, switching to a paper-based system. Though life-saving equipment and COVID-19 vaccine programs were still operating, several healthcare practices across Ireland were forced to cancel low priority appointments.
Ransomware is nothing new. But the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) leveraged by threat actors have reached new levels of sophistication over the last few years. And with that growth has come an increased difficulty in protecting networks against costly attacks such as the recent DarkSide one on the Colonial Pipeline.
The social and economic impacts of political violence don’t often match. Terror attacks can accomplish their main objective of striking fear into a local population while not significantly interfering with commerce, and broad waves of unrest have the potential for supply chain disruption, local business closures lasting for days, and repair and remediation that can become quite costly. There’s a third category that doesn’t get enough attention in policy and academic circles: insurance industry losses.
A recent survey conducted by Rave showed that only 22% of respondents completely trust the information they receive from local officials. Many factors – such as the spread of disinformation, social unrest and the ongoing pandemic – likely contribute to this low level of trust. However, it still poses a big problem to local leaders who are trying to keep residents safe – especially during the ongoing pandemic. We connected with Todd Miller, SVP of Strategic Programs at Rave Mobile Safety, to talk about how local governments and organizations can go about re-building trust in their communities by communicating effectively with residents.
Establishing operational resilience in the face of cyberattacks has become a top priority for organizations. As a core component of the IT infrastructure, Active Directory (AD) must be at the center of that process. But who is responsible for ensuring Active Directory is both protected and can be recovered quickly when a cyberattack occurs? In many organizations the answer is not clear, which can lead to missteps in detecting, defending against, and responding to cyberattacks.
Even if you are not mandated to adhere to any particular regulations, it still makes sense for your business to be proactive in managing risk. All frameworks include guidance for good cybersecurity hygiene, such as effective inventory and asset management, contingency planning, personnel security, system access control, and staff awareness and training, to list a few. To prepare for the aftermath of a cyber incident, frameworks provide incident response guidelines you can follow to recover and try to limit the damage. Establishing a framework can not only help your organization follow best practices but also bring rigorous cyber discipline to your organization.
While many people around the country were under stay-at-home orders, many security professionals, classified by the federal government as essential personnel, have continued to report to work during the pandemic. The heart and soul of the physical security business are the nation’s contract security professionals who assume leadership roles – sometimes with lifesaving ramifications – at facilities across country. Security professionals act as the first line of defense against civil unrest, violence, terrorist attacks and the pandemic.
U.S. President Joe Biden has signed an executive order (EO) to improve the cybersecurity of the U.S. As the U.S. faces persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately people’s security and privacy, the EO seeks to improve efforts to identify, deter, protect against, detect, and respond to these actions and actors. Specifically, the EO will:
Noted security expert Mathy Vanhoef recently discovered a Wi-Fi security vulnerability, that if exploited, it would allow an attacker within radio range to steal user information or attack devices. The security vulnerability, known as FragAttacks - fragmentation and aggregation attacks - are design flaws in the Wi-Fi standard and therefore affects most devices. In addition, Vanhoef discovered several other vulnerabilities that are caused by widespread programming mistakes in Wi-Fi products.
For many years, the focus on securing OT environments has been on the imminent danger of a cyberattack upon critical infrastructure, in other words, SCADA/ICS attacks. Most of the concern has been on nation state actors like China, North Korean, Iran and Russia directly attacking and destroying our infrastructure.
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