Expert insights. Personalized for you.
Trail of Bits released a threat model for Kubernetes. There’s some context from Aaron Small, who made the project happen. Continuum has a blog and a spreadsheet on threat modeling lambdas (as a category, not specific to Amazon Lambda), and also a post on threat modeling with CAPEC. MORE
159 
2020 seems to be getting off to an inauspicious start with the compromise of the home addresses of prominent UK citizens–many of them in lines of work that could make them targets for crime. MORE
208 
The email addresses and personal information of 982 million people were compromised in a leak from an unsecured database. The database belonged to Verifications.io, an “email validation service” that aggregates and sells information about the validity and associated personal data associated with email lists. Security researcher Bob Diachenko found the information in an unsecured 150GB-sized MongoDB database. This is perhaps the biggest and most comprehensive email database I have ever reported. MORE
Israeli cybersecurity researchers have created malware capable of showing fake cancerous growths on CT and MRI scans. The malware, called CT-GAN, served as a proof of concept to show the potential for hacking medical devices with fake medical news that was convincing enough to fool medical technicians. In a video demonstrating the exploit, researchers at Ben Gurion University described how such an attack might be deployed. MORE
Facebook’s long string of privacy scandals may (finally) have some meaningful repercussions by way of a multi-billion dollar fine from the Federal Trade Commission. The social media giant has been under investigation by the FTC since March 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which affected 87 million users and may have been a pivotal influence in the 2016 election campaign. MORE
Trojan horse-based malware attacks and spyware rose sharply in 2018 as ransomware-based attacks declined, according to a new report published by Malwarebytes. One of the larger threats outlined in the report was the Emotet Trojan, a sophisticated malware program capable of data theft, network monitoring, and propagating itself onto other vulnerable systems, and the Trickbot Trojan that steals passwords and browser histories from infected machines. “[F]ormer MORE
A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they're not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn academics have discovered that developers tend to take the easy way out and write code that stores user passwords in an unsafe manner. MORE
The NSA has released a security advisory warning of the dangers of TLS inspection: Transport Layer Security Inspection (TLSI), also known as TLS break and inspect, is a security process that allows enterprises to decrypt traffic, inspect the decrypted content for threats, and then re-encrypt the traffic before it enters or leaves the network. MORE
A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. MORE
Pensacola, FL was hit by a cyberattack in the wake of what has been described as a terrorist shooting. MORE
Interesting research: " TrojDRL: Trojan Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents ": Abstract: : Recent work has identified that classification models implemented as neural networks are vulnerable to data-poisoning and Trojan attacks at training time. MORE
219 
Many people will land on this page after learning that their email address has appeared in a data breach I've called "Collection #1". Most of them won't have a tech background or be familiar with the concept of credential stuffing so I'm going to write this post for the masses and link out to more detailed material for those who want to go deeper. Let's start with the raw numbers because that's the headline, then I'll drill down into where it's from and what it's composed of. MORE
MyPayrollHR , a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo. MORE
Google announced a glitch that stored unencrypted passwords belonging to several business customers, a situation that had been exploitable since 2005. In a blog post released this week, the company admitted the passwords of “some” of its G Suite customers had been stored on internal servers without cryptographic protection, also known as a hash. This issue has been fixed and, again, we have seen no evidence of improper access to or misuse of the affected passwords. MORE
On Nov. 23, one of the cybercrime underground’s largest bazaars for buying and selling stolen payment card data announced the immediate availability of some four million freshly-hacked debit and credit cards. MORE
Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, and has claimed responsibility for dozens of bomb threats and “swatting” incidents, where police are tricked into visiting potentially deadly force on the target’s address. MORE
A couple of high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks will surely go down in history as watershed events – each for different reasons. Related: IoT botnets now available for economical DDoS blasts. In March 2013, several impossibly massive waves of nuisance requests – peaking as high as 300 gigabytes per second— swamped Spamhaus , knocking the anti-spam organization off line for extended periods. MORE
A ransomware outbreak has besieged a Wisconsin based IT company that provides cloud data hosting, security and access management to more than 100 nursing homes across the United States. MORE
Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is the go-to story for Data Privacy Day with its new “user-friendly” tool called Replica, which allows city planners see “how, when, and where people travel in urban areas.”. The Intercept’s explainer details a troubling use of consumer data. Thanks for all you do,” could be Replica initiative’s tagline, since it seems to aggregate a huge amount of presumably phone-generated data to model the way cities work. MORE
215 The CEO of a UK-based energy firm lost the equivalent of $243,000 after falling for a phone scam that implemented artificial intelligence, specifically a deepfake voice. The Wall Street Journal reported that the CEO of an unnamed UK energy company received a phone call from what sounded like his boss, the CEO of a German parent company, telling him to wire €220,000 (roughly $243,000) to a bank account in Hungary. MORE
Many readers probably believe they can trust links and emails coming from U.S. federal government domain names, or else assume there are at least more stringent verification requirements involved in obtaining a.gov domain versus a commercial one ending in.com or.org. MORE
New Orleans has declared a state of emergency following a ransomware attack. The city government has effectively been offline since December 13 when employees were instructed to turn off all computers and disconnect them from WiFi networks following reports of suspicious network activity. . MORE
The Seattle Times has a story today about how “ 50 years ago today, the first 747 took off and changed aviation.” ” It’s true. The 747 was a marvel of engineering and luxury. The book by Joe Sutter is a great story of engineering leadership. For an upcoming flight, I paid extra to reserve an upper deck seat before the last of the passenger-carrying Queens of the Skies retires. And in a way, the 747 represents a pinnacle of aviation engineering advancements. MORE
Citrix, a major network software company, had its internal network compromised by what appears to be an international hacking campaign. The company was alerted to the cyberattack by the FBI earlier this month. While not confirmed, the FBI has advised that the hackers likely used a tactic known as password spraying, a technique that exploits weak passwords. Once they gained a foothold with limited access, they worked to circumvent additional layers of security,” announced Citrix on their website. MORE
Some of the most convincing email phishing and malware attacks come disguised as nastygrams from a law firm. Such scams typically notify the recipient that he/she is being sued, and instruct them to review the attached file and respond within a few days — or else. Here’s a look at a recent spam campaign that peppered more than 100,000 business email addresses with fake legal threats harboring malware. MORE
citizens are more vulnerable to the effects of identity theft and scams as a result of the ongoing government shutdown. The two primary websites created by the government as resources for victims of identity theft, IdentityTheft.gov and FTC.gov/complaint , are currently offline as part of the partial shutdown of the Federal Trade Commission. MORE
The personal data of more than 752,000 applicants filed to obtain copies of birth and death certificates was found on an unprotected Amazon Web Services database. . MORE
The European Union’s parliament voted to create a biometric database of over 350 million people. The Common Identity Repository, or CIR, will consolidate the data from the EU’s border, migration, and law enforcement agencies into one system to be quickly accessible and searchable by any or all of them. Information will include names, birthdates, passport numbers as well as fingerprints and face scans. MORE
Sometimes the discussion around extended validation certificates (EV) feels a little like flogging a dead horse. In fact, it was only September that I proposed EV certificates are already dead for all sorts of good reasons that have only been reinforced since that time. MORE
Unless you decide to go Henry David Thoreau and shun civilization altogether, you can’t — and won’t — stop generating data , which sooner or later can be traced back to you. Related: The Facebook factor. A few weeks back I interviewed a white hat hacker. After the interview, I told him that his examples gave me paranoia. He laughed and responded, “There’s no such thing as anonymous data; it all depends on how determined the other party is.”. MORE
One terabyte of data belonging to a major hotel booking platform was found leaked online. A huge trove of customer data belonging to Gekko Group was found online in an unsecured format. MORE
Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I’d never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices. MORE
Shortly, I’m off to Blackhat. My Threat Modeling Intensive classes both sold out (thank you!). Nearly a decade ago, I put forth a set of best practices: Breath mints Ricola Purell Advil Gatorade This year, I’m adding a travel humidifier. I’ve been using this one, and it really needs to soak for 10 minutes, but then it adds a nice stream of moisture to the room. Also, at a conference, you’ll ask, and get the question “What’s new?” MORE
161 
Until this month, I'd never heard of People Data Labs (PDL). I'd certainly heard of the sector they operate in - "Data Enrichment" - but I'd never heard of the company itself. MORE
Locking down firmware. This is fast becoming a profound new security challenge for all companies – one that can’t be pushed to a side burner. Related: The rise of ‘memory attacks’ I’m making this assertion as federal authorities have just commenced steps to remove and replace switching gear supplied, on the cheap, to smaller U.S. telecoms by Chinese tech giant Huawei. These are the carriers that provide Internet access to rural areas all across America. MORE
Cyberattacks don't magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to something called the " cybersecurity kill chain ": a way of thinking about cyber defense in terms of disrupting the attacker's process. On a similar note, it's time to conceptualize the "information operations kill chain." MORE
Adam Levin
NOVEMBER 26, 2019
One terabyte of data belonging to a major hotel booking platform was found leaked online. A huge trove of customer data belonging to Gekko Group was found online in an unsecured format.
Troy Hunt
NOVEMBER 22, 2019
Until this month, I'd never heard of People Data Labs (PDL). I'd certainly heard of the sector they operate in - "Data Enrichment" - but I'd never heard of the company itself.
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Krebs on Security
NOVEMBER 22, 2019
A ransomware outbreak has besieged a Wisconsin based IT company that provides cloud data hosting, security and access management to more than 100 nursing homes across the United States.
Schneier on Security
NOVEMBER 22, 2019
The NSA has released a security advisory warning of the dangers of TLS inspection: Transport Layer Security Inspection (TLSI), also known as TLS break and inspect, is a security process that allows enterprises to decrypt traffic, inspect the decrypted content for threats, and then re-encrypt the traffic before it enters or leaves the network.
Speaker: Mike Cramer, Director of HIPAA & Data Security at The Word & Brown Companies
Now that companies are slowly allowing employees to return to work at the office, it's time to re-evaluate your company’s posture towards privacy and security. Join Mike Cramer, Director of HIPAA & Data Security at The Word & Brown Companies, for a discussion that will focus on compliance and the types of privacy and security measures your company should be aware of, as well as tips and methods for implementing these measures.
The Last Watchdog
MARCH 28, 2019
A couple of high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks will surely go down in history as watershed events – each for different reasons. Related: IoT botnets now available for economical DDoS blasts. In March 2013, several impossibly massive waves of nuisance requests – peaking as high as 300 gigabytes per second— swamped Spamhaus , knocking the anti-spam organization off line for extended periods.
Adam Shostack
FEBRUARY 9, 2019
The Seattle Times has a story today about how “ 50 years ago today, the first 747 took off and changed aviation.” ” It’s true. The 747 was a marvel of engineering and luxury. The book by Joe Sutter is a great story of engineering leadership. For an upcoming flight, I paid extra to reserve an upper deck seat before the last of the passenger-carrying Queens of the Skies retires. And in a way, the 747 represents a pinnacle of aviation engineering advancements.
Cyber Security Informer brings together the best content for cyber security professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Krebs on Security
NOVEMBER 26, 2019
On Nov. 23, one of the cybercrime underground’s largest bazaars for buying and selling stolen payment card data announced the immediate availability of some four million freshly-hacked debit and credit cards.
Krebs on Security
NOVEMBER 25, 2019
Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I’d never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices.
Schneier on Security
NOVEMBER 29, 2019
Interesting research: " TrojDRL: Trojan Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents ": Abstract: : Recent work has identified that classification models implemented as neural networks are vulnerable to data-poisoning and Trojan attacks at training time.
Krebs on Security
SEPTEMBER 11, 2019
MyPayrollHR , a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.
Adam Levin
MAY 24, 2019
Google announced a glitch that stored unencrypted passwords belonging to several business customers, a situation that had been exploitable since 2005. In a blog post released this week, the company admitted the passwords of “some” of its G Suite customers had been stored on internal servers without cryptographic protection, also known as a hash. This issue has been fixed and, again, we have seen no evidence of improper access to or misuse of the affected passwords.
Troy Hunt
JANUARY 16, 2019
Many people will land on this page after learning that their email address has appeared in a data breach I've called "Collection #1". Most of them won't have a tech background or be familiar with the concept of credential stuffing so I'm going to write this post for the masses and link out to more detailed material for those who want to go deeper. Let's start with the raw numbers because that's the headline, then I'll drill down into where it's from and what it's composed of.
Adam Levin
MARCH 29, 2019
The email addresses and personal information of 982 million people were compromised in a leak from an unsecured database. The database belonged to Verifications.io, an “email validation service” that aggregates and sells information about the validity and associated personal data associated with email lists. Security researcher Bob Diachenko found the information in an unsecured 150GB-sized MongoDB database. This is perhaps the biggest and most comprehensive email database I have ever reported.
Adam Levin
APRIL 22, 2019
The European Union’s parliament voted to create a biometric database of over 350 million people. The Common Identity Repository, or CIR, will consolidate the data from the EU’s border, migration, and law enforcement agencies into one system to be quickly accessible and searchable by any or all of them. Information will include names, birthdates, passport numbers as well as fingerprints and face scans.
The Last Watchdog
JUNE 10, 2019
Locking down firmware. This is fast becoming a profound new security challenge for all companies – one that can’t be pushed to a side burner. Related: The rise of ‘memory attacks’ I’m making this assertion as federal authorities have just commenced steps to remove and replace switching gear supplied, on the cheap, to smaller U.S. telecoms by Chinese tech giant Huawei. These are the carriers that provide Internet access to rural areas all across America.
Adam Shostack
AUGUST 2, 2019
Shortly, I’m off to Blackhat. My Threat Modeling Intensive classes both sold out (thank you!). Nearly a decade ago, I put forth a set of best practices: Breath mints Ricola Purell Advil Gatorade This year, I’m adding a travel humidifier. I’ve been using this one, and it really needs to soak for 10 minutes, but then it adds a nice stream of moisture to the room. Also, at a conference, you’ll ask, and get the question “What’s new?”
Krebs on Security
JULY 24, 2019
Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, and has claimed responsibility for dozens of bomb threats and “swatting” incidents, where police are tricked into visiting potentially deadly force on the target’s address.
Adam Levin
FEBRUARY 18, 2019
Facebook’s long string of privacy scandals may (finally) have some meaningful repercussions by way of a multi-billion dollar fine from the Federal Trade Commission. The social media giant has been under investigation by the FTC since March 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which affected 87 million users and may have been a pivotal influence in the 2016 election campaign.
Adam Levin
JANUARY 15, 2019
citizens are more vulnerable to the effects of identity theft and scams as a result of the ongoing government shutdown. The two primary websites created by the government as resources for victims of identity theft, IdentityTheft.gov and FTC.gov/complaint , are currently offline as part of the partial shutdown of the Federal Trade Commission.
Schneier on Security
MARCH 27, 2019
A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they're not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn academics have discovered that developers tend to take the easy way out and write code that stores user passwords in an unsafe manner.
Adam Levin
JANUARY 25, 2019
Trojan horse-based malware attacks and spyware rose sharply in 2018 as ransomware-based attacks declined, according to a new report published by Malwarebytes. One of the larger threats outlined in the report was the Emotet Trojan, a sophisticated malware program capable of data theft, network monitoring, and propagating itself onto other vulnerable systems, and the Trickbot Trojan that steals passwords and browser histories from infected machines. “[F]ormer
Adam Levin
APRIL 9, 2019
Israeli cybersecurity researchers have created malware capable of showing fake cancerous growths on CT and MRI scans. The malware, called CT-GAN, served as a proof of concept to show the potential for hacking medical devices with fake medical news that was convincing enough to fool medical technicians. In a video demonstrating the exploit, researchers at Ben Gurion University described how such an attack might be deployed.
Troy Hunt
MAY 21, 2019
Sometimes the discussion around extended validation certificates (EV) feels a little like flogging a dead horse. In fact, it was only September that I proposed EV certificates are already dead for all sorts of good reasons that have only been reinforced since that time.
Adam Levin
SEPTEMBER 4, 2019
The CEO of a UK-based energy firm lost the equivalent of $243,000 after falling for a phone scam that implemented artificial intelligence, specifically a deepfake voice. The Wall Street Journal reported that the CEO of an unnamed UK energy company received a phone call from what sounded like his boss, the CEO of a German parent company, telling him to wire €220,000 (roughly $243,000) to a bank account in Hungary.
Krebs on Security
MAY 22, 2019
Some of the most convincing email phishing and malware attacks come disguised as nastygrams from a law firm. Such scams typically notify the recipient that he/she is being sued, and instruct them to review the attached file and respond within a few days — or else. Here’s a look at a recent spam campaign that peppered more than 100,000 business email addresses with fake legal threats harboring malware.
The Last Watchdog
MARCH 21, 2019
Unless you decide to go Henry David Thoreau and shun civilization altogether, you can’t — and won’t — stop generating data , which sooner or later can be traced back to you. Related: The Facebook factor. A few weeks back I interviewed a white hat hacker. After the interview, I told him that his examples gave me paranoia. He laughed and responded, “There’s no such thing as anonymous data; it all depends on how determined the other party is.”.
Adam Shostack
OCTOBER 9, 2019
Trail of Bits released a threat model for Kubernetes. There’s some context from Aaron Small, who made the project happen. Continuum has a blog and a spreadsheet on threat modeling lambdas (as a category, not specific to Amazon Lambda), and also a post on threat modeling with CAPEC.
Adam Levin
JANUARY 28, 2019
Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is the go-to story for Data Privacy Day with its new “user-friendly” tool called Replica, which allows city planners see “how, when, and where people travel in urban areas.”. The Intercept’s explainer details a troubling use of consumer data. Thanks for all you do,” could be Replica initiative’s tagline, since it seems to aggregate a huge amount of presumably phone-generated data to model the way cities work.
Krebs on Security
JANUARY 3, 2019
A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company.
Adam Levin
DECEMBER 30, 2019
2020 seems to be getting off to an inauspicious start with the compromise of the home addresses of prominent UK citizens–many of them in lines of work that could make them targets for crime.
Schneier on Security
APRIL 26, 2019
Cyberattacks don't magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to something called the " cybersecurity kill chain ": a way of thinking about cyber defense in terms of disrupting the attacker's process. On a similar note, it's time to conceptualize the "information operations kill chain."
Adam Levin
DECEMBER 10, 2019
Pensacola, FL was hit by a cyberattack in the wake of what has been described as a terrorist shooting.
Adam Levin
DECEMBER 11, 2019
The personal data of more than 752,000 applicants filed to obtain copies of birth and death certificates was found on an unprotected Amazon Web Services database. .
Adam Levin
MARCH 12, 2019
Citrix, a major network software company, had its internal network compromised by what appears to be an international hacking campaign. The company was alerted to the cyberattack by the FBI earlier this month. While not confirmed, the FBI has advised that the hackers likely used a tactic known as password spraying, a technique that exploits weak passwords. Once they gained a foothold with limited access, they worked to circumvent additional layers of security,” announced Citrix on their website.
Adam Levin
DECEMBER 17, 2019
New Orleans has declared a state of emergency following a ransomware attack. The city government has effectively been offline since December 13 when employees were instructed to turn off all computers and disconnect them from WiFi networks following reports of suspicious network activity. .
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