Category: News

From securityboulevard.com

Last year saw a tremendous shift in security priorities following enterprises’ response to the pandemic. The good news is, business leadership is now paying more attention to information security. The bad news is, enterprise security teams have a lot of work ahead.

According to a survey conducted by IDG on behalf of integration services provider Insight Enterprises, the shift to protect remote workers forced many organizations to back-burner their longer-term security initiatives.

The survey polled 213 users at organizations with 1,500 or more employees, representing a cross-section of vertical industries. In the effort to protect their suddenly-larger population of remote workers, the majority of companies shifted their focus to a handful of initiatives to better protect those workers, according to the survey. These initiatives included threat visibility/identification (73%), incident response (70%), network security (68%), endpoint security (67%), application security (67%), malware protection (64%) and identity and access management (55%).

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From thehackernews.com

Researchers have uncovered gaps in Amazon’s skill vetting process for the Alexa voice assistant ecosystem that could allow a malicious actor to publish a deceptive skill under any arbitrary developer name and even make backend code changes after approval to trick users into giving up sensitive information.

The findings were presented on Wednesday at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) conference by a group of academics from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the North Carolina State University, who analyzed 90,194 skills available in seven countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and France.

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From securityaffairs.co

On February 14, Dutch Research Council (NWO) was hit by a cyber attack that compromised its network and impacted its operations.

In response to the incident, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) was forced to take its servers offline.

The attackers stole documents from the NWO and demanded a ransom to avoid leaking them online, but the research council refused to pay.

“On 8 February, the DoppelPaymer hacker group gained access to the NWO network. As part of the Dutch national government, NWO does not address the demands of criminals on grounds of principle. That is why DoppelPaymer started on 24 February to leak internal NWO documents from the past years on the dark web.” reads an update published by the company.

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From pandasecurity.com

Have you been shopping online lately? If so, you may have already noticed a change, but if not, here’s the news: paying online is now more secure, and that means it involves an extra step to verify your identity. This is the visible result of the new SCA or Strong Customer Authentication, a requirement to confirm your identity that has just been added to the often mentioned PSD2.

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From ciso.economictimes.indiatimes.com

New Delhi: India was second only to Japan in Asia Pacific in number of cyberattacks faced in 2020, accounting for 7% of all attacks in the region, according to an IBM report released on Wednesday.

Finance and insurance emerged as the most vulnerable sectors, followed by manufacturing and professional services, according to the 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index released by IBM Security. Ransomware was the top attack type, making up roughly 40% of all cyberattacks. In addition, digital currency mining and server access attacks hit Indian companies last year.

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From zdnet.com

More hacking groups than ever before are targeting industrial environments as cyber attackers attempt to infiltrate the networks of companies providing vital services, including electric power, water, oil and gas, and manufacturing.

Threats include cyber-criminal groups looking to steal information or encrypt systems with ransomware, as well as nation-state-backed hacking operations attempting to determine the potential disruption they could cause with cyberattacks against operational technology (OT).

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From wired.com

FOR ALL THE nation-state hacker groups that have targeted the United States power grid—and even successfully breached American electric utilities—only the Russian military intelligence group known as Sandworm has been brazen enough to trigger actual blackouts, shutting the lights off in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016. Now one grid-focused security firm is warning that a group with ties to Sandworm’s uniquely dangerous hackers has also been actively targeting the US energy system for years.

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