I was chatting with a chief information security officer (CISO) recently, and we started talking about motivation and the role of love and hate in driving ourselves towards our goals. In cybersecurity, we tend to think about external opponents, most notably white hats vs. black hats, but rarely discuss the internal factors that guide our day-to-day decisions. Humans are dynamic beings that aren’t driven solely by love or hate (despite what the chatter on social media may have you believe). We do, however, have predilections based on our personalities and environment. How we choose to deal with those influences shapes who we become. A good strategy is a combination of love and hate where organizations work towards a grand vision of their future while eliminating things they hate one after the other.
In 2019, Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks – a long-standing cybersecurity threat – accounted for $1.7 billion in losses, with cybercriminals using new tactics and techniques to carry out existing attacks. As cybercrime spikes in the wake of COVID-19, BEC’s toll is expected to rise this year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently issued a warning to businesses on the growing threat of BEC attacks using the pandemic as a backdrop for unusual requests like payments to a “new” vendor or a change of account information.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) make everything a bit easier - from data sharing to system connectivity to delivery of critical features and functionality - but they also make it much easier for the bad actors (and the bad bots they deploy). Here are the top 5 API vulnerabilities that get exploited by hackers, including some tips to help close those gaps.
Security magazine is pleased to announce our 2020 Most Influential People in Security – 22 top security executives and industry leaders who are positively impacting the security field, their organization, their colleagues and peers, and the national and global security landscape.
Beginning this fall, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) will partner with Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies in its efforts to examine and solve some of the cybersecurity issues facing critical infrastructure today.
Digital Shadows has identified 225 new, potentially malicious, typosquats related to the upcoming US presidential elections. Based on the major party tickets, Digital Shadows identified three classes of typosquats - misconfigured or illegitimate sites, non-malicious sites, and sites that redirect to another – associated with election-specific keywords like Trump, Pence, Biden, and Harris, among others.
Multiple intelligence agencies are releasing a joint cybersecurity advisory on technical approaches to incident response and best practices to remediating malicious cyber activity.
The Russian group that meddled in the 2016 election (Internet Research Agency) is now using sham accounts and a fake left-wing news site to sow disinformation, according to The New York Times.
September is National Insider Threat Awareness Month (NIATM), which is a collaborative effort between the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), National Insider Threat Task Force (NITTF), Office of the Under Secretary of Defense Intelligence and Security (USD(I&S)), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) to emphasize the importance of detecting, deterring, and reporting insider threats.