As the head of information security for a technology company with more than a thousand (now mostly-remote) employees, the COVID-19 pandemic has been — among other adjectives — an educational experience. And while it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, I believe one of the reasons we were able to transition so quickly to remote work with relatively few hiccups is that we established practices to withstand precisely this type of scenario long before the virus swept through our community.
Counterfeiters do not take time off. At its core, counterfeiting preys upon our vulnerabilities and takes advantage of the average customer at any cost. This is particularly true right now during the coronavirus pandemic, the most inconvenient and vulnerable moment in generations. In the midst of mass shortages and colossal demands for certain products, especially in the health field, the counterfeit community has seen a golden opportunity. Over the past few months, tens of millions of new counterfeit products have been seized or identified on the web. These include fraudulent face masks, ventilators, disinfectants and testing kits.
The National Cyber Security Centre – a part of GCHQ – has announced that Lindy Cameron will become its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Her role will include overseeing the organization’s response to hundreds of cyber incidents each year, improving the cyber resilience of the UK’s critical national infrastructure, identifying the risks and opportunities for the UK in emerging technologies and leading the NCSC’s ongoing response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad F. Wolf recently hosted the inaugural meeting of the Department’s China Working Group. The Group’s purpose is to holistically articulate, prioritize and coordinate the Department’s response to evolving threats to the Homeland posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The new COVID-19 Law Lab initiative will gather and share legal documents from over 190 countries across the world to help states establish and implement strong legal frameworks to manage the pandemic. The goal is to ensure that laws protect the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities and that they adhere to international human rights standards, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
As consumers increasingly turn to online shopping for essential and non-essential goods while at home, fraudsters have adapted their technique to use more sophisticated tactics against consumers, banks and merchants.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is releasing new science-based resources and tools for school administrators, teachers, parents, guardians and caregivers when schools open this fall.
Though organizations have changed their IT environments to accommodate remote workers, 39 percent of respondents have not changed their security programs as a result of COVID-19, potentially exposing their organizations to cyber risks from new and more sophisticated attacks, reveals a new Crowdstrike report.
A new Rapid7 research found that the security of the internet overall is improving. The number of insecure services such as SMB, Telnet, rsync, and the core email protocols, decreased from the levels seen in 2019. However, vulnerabilities and exposures still plague the modern internet even with the increasing adoption of more secure alternatives to insecure protocols, like Secure Shell (SSH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT).
With telecommuting here to stay, now is the perfect time to re-examine just how much network access you are giving your users and machines. You might be shocked to see how open your network really is. Most organizations allow more access than their users or machines will ever need or should ever have – this excessive trust is what allows attackers who get into the network to spread and cause a lot of damage.