Still Discussing Sony Attack … but why?

The reason is that it was a _Destructive_ attack. Credit card numbers were not stolen. Data was deleted and stolen. Highly unusual attack. Dark Reading  has a story on the “destructive” attack. http://www.darkreading.com/how-not-to-be-the-next-sony-defending-against-destructive-attacks-/d/d-id/1318516 ” “If your only goal is to do damage,” says Jonathan Sander, strategy and research officer for Stealthbits Technologies, “you don’t need a lot … Read more

Studying Data Breaches as a whole

IBM has an infographic and a report: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/security/infographic/cybersecurityindex.html http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/it-services/security-services/cost-of-data-breach/ (we make a point to show you the whole link, so you know exactly where you are going) The image above is a snippet from the infographic  IBM has gathered this information from the Ponemon Institute research report (you can download these reports if you register … Read more

Amazing to note Telnet vulnerability Patch Tuesday

Microsoft has a Telnet  vulnerability which has a critical remote code execution. (MS15-002) https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms15-jan This is true:  “Only customers who enable telnet on Windows 2003 are affected (it is installed but not enabled). and Telnet is not installed on Vista or later operating systems” But if you did enable (or install and enable) it has … Read more

Credit Card Thieves Caught in Saint Louis area

Fox2 a local TV media channel (in Saint Louis area) has the story: http://fox2now.com/2015/01/12/police-bust-credit-card-thieves-from-detroit/   Why do I bring this up in a cyber security blog? Due to this little info blurb: “Maryland Heights police searched the vehicle, and found fake Michigan drivers’ licenses, dozens of pre-paid MasterCard gift cards, and pricey electronics.” and “Fedak … Read more

Another Desktop Exploit – Silverlight Problem

Checkpoint has the scoop: http://www.checkpoint.com/downloads/partners/TCC-Silverlight-Jan2015.pdf Silverlight exploits may be less common, but unfortunately this particular exploit obfuscates itself and can infect the desktop that has loaded Silverlight. Background to Silverlight: “The Silverlight framework enables the development of web applications with features similar to those of Adobe flash and Java Applets. The Silverlight runtime environment is … Read more