Google has seen a 33% year-on-year spike in nation state attempts to compromise its customers so far in 2021, the tech giant revealed yesterday. Security engineer Ajax Bash claimed that in the year-to-date, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) had sent over 50,000 warnings to customers that their account was the target of government-backed phishing or malware attempts. The main reason for the increase in attacks was an “unusually large” campaign attributed to the notorious Kremlin-backed actor…

The potential risks of communication APIs and CPaaS and secure vendor selection criteria. By James Ryan, Director of Information Security, BISO, IntelePeer The pandemic accelerated the demand for various things, from vaccines to virtual telecommunications platforms. Cloud services also rose in use to enrich customer communication channels, from Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) seeing considerable growth….

The US authorities have issued an alert warning of ongoing malicious cyber-activity targeting the country’s water and wastewater systems (WWS) sector. The alert highlighted multiple tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) being used by a range of actors in an attempt to compromise IT and OT systems. These include spear-phishing, exploitation of insecure RDP, targeting of unsupported or outdated operating systems and software, and exploitation of control system devices with vulnerable firmware. The alert was issued by…

Missouri governor Mike Parson has been widely criticized for seeking to prosecute news reporters who disclosed a vulnerability on a state education website. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a story on Wednesday about how its team discovered a web app flaw on the site that leaked teacher information, including 100,000 Social Security numbers (SSNs). The SSNs were apparently available in the site’s source code, available to anyone who wanted to right-click on the page. The journalists reported the…

Windows 11 was released on October 5, 2021. It has several new installation requirements including, most notably, Secure Boot and a Trusted Platform Module. These features can provide a more secure computing environment, but if you need to virtualize a Windows 11 environment, you will need virtualization software that supports this. Although I would normally install a new Windows OS in ESX, I installed Windows 11 using VMware Workstation which has support for Secure Boot…