INSIDER THREAT SECURITY BLOG

By now it’s common knowledge that FireEye has disclosed they were the victims of an attack by a nation-state seeking government information. If you aren’t aware of the particulars of this attack, I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes and read the blog posted by the FireEye team. It includes details about the attack and what was compromised, as well as how the company plans to address the situation. In the next few days, we will face a barrage of messages from vendors seeking to re…

Going remote is the new reality as we continue to grapple with a devastating global pandemic. The transition to remote learning in our nation’s schools, in particular, has created a new level of upheaval and burden that’s impacted most every home and community. Luckily, most of Stealthbits’ existing corporate customers switched to digital work rather seamlessly after testing and reinforcing the security of their networks and IT infrastructure. Educational institutions, on the other hand, were…

If recent years have taught us anything about the intent of threat actors, it’s that no victim or circumstance is off limit when there’s a profit to be made. Throughout the year attackers have used COVID-19 to take advantage of victims’ fears of the virus, exploited new attack surfaces resulting from the increase in remote work, and even attempted to steal vaccine research. Earlier this year, it was reported that the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has seen reports in cybercrim…

PostgreSQL or simply referred to as Postgres has had a very colorful history.  It began in 1986 as a POSTGRES project led by Professor Michael Stonebraker, which was sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and ESL, Inc.   Postgres95 was released in 1994 for general use on the web which included support for SQL language interpretation.  In 1996, Postgres95 was officially renamed t…

This year has been a year like no other, with what seems to be a never-ending and always evolving set of headlines. At a glance, we’ve seen the evolution of the Coronavirus pandemic, the ongoing wildfires across not only the country but the world, the death of a basketball legend, Brexit finally coming to fruition, a civil rights uprising, and so much more.   The state of cybersecurity this year has had just as many ups and downs. While research done by the&nb…

In this era of big data, it is in an organization’s best interest to seek to safeguard their critical data assets, especially sensitive data, to the best of their ability. However, data breaches continue to occur, and according to certain studies, are happening every minute. And now with more consumer data being collected than ever, these breaches pose a real problem not only to an organization’s operations but to their credibility. But imagine if data security, and possibly more importantly …

In my last blog, I stated that “data security can be achieved without data privacy, but you can’t effectively fulfill data privacy without data security. When it comes to complying with regulations, or protecting against breaches, if you don’t know your data, you won’t be able to justify it to a regulator, or safeguard it from malicious intent.” Complex, Heterogeneous Data Infrastructure Challenges Once you’ve discovered all the data in your organization, you can then write a report. Ho…

Two things can be inherently related, even though they are thought of differently. Examples abound, from tragedy and comedy, to fear and elation. Many pairs just go hand in hand; like privacy and security.   Flipping a coin to resolve a decision will cause one person to win, and the other to lose. The same can be said for data privacy. Without data security, data privacy will be limited at best. The controls over data privacy are juxtaposed with the discovery, classification, access, …

A recent cyber-attack on the Canadian government was successful because of a well-known attack technique, credential stuffing. If you’re not familiar, credential stuffing is just taking credentials from one breach and using it to compromise a new organization.  It is successful because 62% of people reuse personal passwords on work systems. News of this attack broke on Monday, August 17, 2020, and it highlights how real the cyberattack risk is for every organization. Th…

Webinar Preview: Back to “The Basics” – Pragmatic advice from Gavin Ashton, author of “Maersk, me, & notPetya” Part 1 – Ransomware The origins of modern ransomware trace back all the way to the AIDS trojan of 1989. Its use of simple symmetric cryptography and gentle extortion of $189 seems almost infantile compared to the techniques used and extortions of today. In the midst of a global pandemic, ransomware has been on the rise – economically motivated actors would never m…