The Ireland-based Data Protection Commission (DPC), the supervisory authority for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has released a guide to GDPR breach notifications to help controllers understand their obligations regarding notification and communication.
There have been plenty — too many — breaches involving federal agencies over the years. Way back in 2006, a breach at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs affected 26.5 million people. In 2009, it was the National Archives and Records Administration that was hit and that breach affected 76 million. In one of the worst and most damaging breaches of all time, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) affected 21.5 million federal employees and contractors, and breached the information included in security clearances, such as background investigation data and associated person data. Most recently, the U.S. Customs Agency fell victim to an attack and photos and other personal information collected by U.S. Customers and Border Patrol was leaked.
One might think financial institutions, such as banks, would have formidable levels of application security. Unfortunately, if one thought that, one would be wrong. According to an analysis by application security vendor ImmuniWeb, a startling 97 out of 100 of the world’s largest banks are vulnerable to web and mobile attacks.
This is the second of a two-part series of blog posts covering the challenges of securing Industrial IT infrastructures. This part covers:
Legacy security designed to protect physical endpoints is no match for software-defined environments, such as cloud infrastructures. In fact, not even a modern endpoint security solution can, on its own, cover the full spectrum of cloud-workload protection requirements, use cases and workload types. This has opened the flood-gates to a new breed of cybersecurity solutions called “Cloud Workload Protection Platforms” (CWPPs), and the market is ripe for the picking, according to Gartner.
Commercial law firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP says that the average fine levied by the Information Commissioner’s Office rose 14% in the year since the introduction of GDPR, increasing from £125,000 in 2017/18 to £143,000 in 2018/19.
It’s an issue that gnaws at many cyber security executives perhaps as much as the latest insidious threats: the ongoing security skills shortage. And recent research suggest that the prospects will not get better any time soon.
Security summer camp is upon us as the cybersecurity industry convenes on Las Vegas this week for Black Hat and Def Con. In addition to presenting a ton of important research on new vulnerabilities and exploit methods, many security researchers will be sharing with attendees a smorgasbord of new and updated open source tools. Between speaker tracks at both shows, Black Hat Arsenal, and DEF CON Demo Days, presenters will unveil and demo dozens of freebies designed to help their colleagues with a range of offensive and defensive security activities.
- Speculative execution-based attacks exploit CPU architecture flaws to allow attackers to leak sensitive information from privileged operating system kernel memory
- The SWAPGS Attack leverages a new speculative execution vulnerability discovered by Bitdefender security researchers
- The SWAGS Attack circumvents all existing side-channel attack mitigations and allows attackers to gain unprivileged access to kernel sensitive data
- Bitdefender Hypervisor Introspection technology mitigates the SWAPGS Attack on unpatched Windows systems running on Citrix Hypervisor or KVM hypervisor
Today, multiple industry software and hardware vendors have published security advisories for CVE-2019-1125 related to a newly discovered side-channel attack, dubbed SWAPGS Attack. The SWAPGS Attack was identified and reported by Bitdefender security researchers working on hypervisor introspection and anti-exploit technologies. This led to a coordinated disclosure process that has included several strategic industry partners.
This is the first of a two-part series of blog posts covering the challenges of securing Industrial IT infrastructures. This part covers:
There’s clearly a sense of combativeness building on the part of cyber security leaders, teams, and organizations worldwide. Weary of seeing cyber criminals and other bad actors break into networks and systems seemingly at will to steal sensitive data, they are taking steps to bolster the overall effectiveness of security programs.
*Update* 4PM PDT on 8/06/2018 - Bitdefender senior researchers Dan Horea Luțaș and Andrei Vlad Luțaș recently uncovered a new speculative-execution vulnerability and demonstrated how it can be exploited via a side-channel style attack, dubbed SWAPGS Attack. The vulnerability has been publicly reported today as CVE-2019-1125. Be sure to join us on August 7th at 10:20 AM in Ballroom K to learn more about the SWAPGS attack.
In August, all roads lead to Las Vegas – that is if you want to meet the best security professionals, penetration testers and malware investigators in the world. Over the past 22 years, Black Hat has become the leading information security event in the world.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), part of the US Department of the Treasury, has released an alert to financial institutions that fraudsters are attempting to steal much more money through Business Email Compromise than previously believed.
