Firewalls are the most widely deployed network security devices. Enterprises expect next generation firewalls (NGFWs) to prevent exploits and malware from infecting critical systems.
NSS Labs 2019 NGFW Group Test
NSS Labs announced the results of its 2019 NGFW Group Test. Twelve of the industry’s NGFW products were tested to compare NGFW product capabilities across multiple use cases. Products were assessed for security effectiveness, total cost of ownership (TCO), and performance.
This is the ninth year for testing NGFW products. NSS Labs raised the bar this year by performing a significantly harder test for security effectiveness, which exposed weaknesses not seen previously.
Nine years and more than 8,500 security bug reports later, Google decided to increase the value of the rewards for security vulnerabilities submitted through its Chrome Vulnerability Rewards Program.
The amount for the baseline maximum reward has tripled to $15,000 and the ceiling for delivering high-quality reports for valid security vulnerabilities is now $30,000, double of what it used to be.
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has launched Galahad, an open source revolutionary user computer environment (UCE) for the Amazon Cloud. The technology, which is named after the Arthurian knight that ultimately secured the Holy Grail, will fight to protect people using desktop applications running on digital platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Galahad will leverage nested virtualization, layered sensing and logging to mitigate cloud threats. These layers will allow individual users to host their applications seamlessly and securely within the cloud avoiding both known and unknown threats.
Galahad takes a holistic approach to creating a secure, interactive UCE. The software leverages role-based isolation, attack surface minimization practices, operating system (OS) and application hardening techniques, real-time sensing, and maneuver / deception approaches to reduce the risk associated with cloud deployments. Galahad makes no attempt to establish trust, nor does it require specialized, more costly services provided by AWS, e.g., dedicated servers. Instead, the software impedes the ability of adversaries to operate within the AWS by making it more difficult to co-locate (either through the use of insiders, compromised hypervisors, witting or unwitting peers, or remote access) with targets, while also requiring adversaries consume more resources. Such an increase in complexity and cost means Galahad also increases the accuracy, rate, and speed with which threats are detected
The project intends to establish a national programme of coordinated 5G testbeds and trials and is funded from the £740m pot for digital communications technologies announced in the 2016 Autumn Statement
Google has chosen to remove a method websites could use to detect visitors that used Chrome’s Incognito Mode when on a web site.
When Chrome 76 lands at the end of July, sites will no longer be able to check if the FileSystem API is available or not. If it was not available, sites could deduce the visitor was in an incognito tab.
“The behavior of the FileSystem API will be modified to remedy this method of Incognito Mode detection,” Google said in a blog post.
Security researchers observed a new campaign targeting financial institutions and governmental organizations with a customized version of a remote access tool called “Proyecto RAT”.
The payload found to be written in Visual Basic 6 and it uses Disposable E-mail Address service yopmail for its C&C communication. The yopmail is known for creating temporary inboxes.
Slack has started sending out emails informing users that their account passwords have been reset due to being compromised during the Slack 2015 security incident. Slack has stated that this is only affecting 1% of their users.
In 2015, Slack was hacked and an unauthorized user was able to gain access to their infrastructure, including a database containing hashed passwords. The attackers also injected a script that would capture passwords in plain text as they were entered by users logging into their workspaces.
