RSS_Virtulization

A new Automated Clearing House (ACH) data security rule to protect electronically stored sensitive financial information has come into force in the United States. As of June 30, the ACH Security Framework now requires large, non-financial-institution (Non-Fi) originators, third-party service providers (TPSPs) and third-party senders (TPSs) to protect deposit account information by rendering it unreadable when it is stored electronically. First introduced in April 2020, the new rule specifically applies to entities sending payments (ACH originators)…

‘Smart homes’ could experience more than 12,000 cyber-attacks in a single week, according to a new investigation by Which? The consumer group partnered with NCC Group and the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) to conduct the experiment, in which a home was filled with numerous IoT devices, including TVs, thermostats and smart security systems. They then analyzed the number of attempted hacks that took place over several weeks. Which? revealed a “breathtaking” amount of hacks and unknown scanning attacks targeting these devices,…

Even our favorite superheroes can’t defend us against cyberattacks. Image: GettyImages/Yuichiro Chino In May, Specops Software, a password management and authentication company, released a roundup of “Star Wars”-themed breached passwords for the sci-fi holiday May 4 also known as Star Wars Day. On Monday, the company brought the DC and Marvel universes into the fold and released a roundup of commonly used superheroes found on compromised password lists. Turns out, superhero characters used as passwords…

Containers are complex virtual entities that provide proven benefits to the business but also require strong security guidelines. Learn how to get the most out of container security best practices. Image: Avigator Fortuner/Shutterstock Containers, best defined as an operating system virtualization instance that can run applications, microservices and processes, are a staple in the technology industry. Containers’ flexibility and ease of deployment can help achieve faster deliverables and more robust environments. SEE: Kubernetes: A cheat…

The US authorities reportedly opened a record number of cases relating to healthcare fraud in 2020, as unscrupulous individuals tried to profit during the pandemic. Michael Granston, deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, revealed the news during the American Health Law Association’s annual meeting this week, according to Bloomberg Law. The DoJ opened a total of 900 new cases last year, 580 of which were related to healthcare fraud, according to…

The zero-day vulnerability known as PrintNightmare now has an official CVE listing, but Microsoft is still investigating the severity of the bug. The public disclosure of the flaw came about in a comedy of errors this week. A Chinese research team at QiAnXin announced exploit code for a similar remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler service (CVE-2021-1675), which Microsoft had patched in June. Mistaking this code for a project that they had been working on,…

Scammers are increasingly resourceful when coming up with scam techniques. But they often rely on long-standing persuasion techniques for the scam to work. So, you may hear about a new scam that uses a novel narrative, but there is a good chance that the scam relies on proven scam techniques once the narrative is stripped away. These scam techniques often exploit our characteristics and heuristics, or things that make us human and fallible. In this…

The US and UK authorities have issued a new warning of state-sponsored Russian threat activity, focused on stealing information from global targets. The new NSA, CISA, NCSC and FBI alert attributes the campaign, which has been ongoing since mid-2019, to military intelligence outfit APT28 (aka Fancy Bear, Strontium). The threat actors use a Kubernetes cluster to conduct “distributed and large-scale targeting using password spray and password guessing”. These brute force attempts to crack credentials are routed through…