The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Defense (DoD) have identified a malware variant—referred as TAIDOOR—used by the Chinese government.
The FBI says that an increasing number of victims are being directed to fraudulent websites via social media platforms and popular online search engines.
Twitter has released additional information on their investigation into the compromise that occurred on July 15, 2020. The attack, says the company, started with a spear phishing attack on a select group of employees that "relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to [Twitter's] internal systems."
Congratulations to John "JT" Mendoza, one of our 2019 Most Influential People in Security awardees, who is retiring from federal government service after 22 years. He will be joining CGI as Director of Global Security, primarily responsible for establishing a global insider risk management program.
The National Science Foundation has awarded Georgia State’s Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group (EBCS) nearly $300,000 for a pilot program to teach students advanced cybersecurity research skills and match them with CISOs, with whom they will test tools to improve organizations’ security.
When I speak with candidates who are either leaving government roles or actively looking for a new role, I am often asked what programs or courses related to cybersecurity they could take to improve their marketability.
Sun Tzu famously said, “all warfare is based on deception.” He could hardly have anticipated how his words would ultimately be substantiated—particularly in the tactics of today’s cybercriminals.
In recent years, Enterprise Risk Management has become increasingly focused on cybersecurity risks. While this focus on cyber is understandable, the current COVID crisis has demonstrated that the unpredictable nature of cascading risks requires viewing risk through a much wider risk aperture. One way forward to successfully navigate this new risk frontier is the establishment of a Risk Operations Center (ROC). The ROC enables enterprise and technology leaders to have the continuous monitoring they require to proactively mitigate all cyber issues. Additionally, it fully supports the CISO/cybersecurity leader's principal responsibilities identified by the HBR survey.
COVID-19 has completely changed our world from six months ago, as we continue to battle the grave health implications, face extended stay at home orders, and grapple with the insurmountable ramifications on our economy. The pandemic has also forever changed the cyber threat landscape, with our workforce becoming more dispersed, and potentially more vulnerable, than ever as organizations switch out of the confines of their offices and move entire data streams to their laptops and home offices. On top of this, Salesforce has announced it is ending its Data Recovery service on July 31st, which is putting all of the data protection responsibilities, and the dire consequences that comes along with it, on the backs of the customer.
To address this current losing war with cyberattackers, the future of cybersecurity requires augmenting the current focus of “indicators of compromise” with “indicators of exposure & warning” in real-time. Where the measure would be to gauge the shift of incident management that would tilt on managing more incidents at warning stages than on compromise stages. It is imperative to build an AI engine to perform this very task as that would be the only way to perform in real-time, scale with the growing nature of cloud as well as to cover the evolving nature to attack scenarios.
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