BitCoin

February 4, 2019

INNOVATION

Blockchain is Much Bigger Than Bitcoin. Here’s How it Will Impact Vendor Financing.

When people ask what blockchain might impact or change within vendor financing and the wider financial industry, people wonder if I’m joking when I say everything. Essentially, blockchain has the potential to impact any industry that stores and transfers data. Today, because every industry, organiza…

January 8, 2019

INNOVATION

The Potential of Blockchain for Network Engineers

Everybody’s talking about blockchain these days, but as real-world use cases of the technology are still in early stages of implementation, it’s understandable if network engineers don’t see how blockchain affects them just yet. Let’s cut to the chase: Blockchain technology has the potential to radi…

December 14, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Bitcoin Bomb Scare Associated with Sextortion Scammers

Organizations across the country are on edge today after a flurry of phony bomb threats hit several public entities Thursday, such as universities, schools and news outlets, among others. The attackers distributed malicious emails claiming to have placed some type of explosive materials in the recip…

December 11, 2018

SECURITY

Cryptomining: A sheep or a wolf?

One of, if not the, most prominent motivators for threat actors is money. Whether it’s botnet owners renting out their services for DDoS attacks, tech support scammers cold-calling people to convince them there are problems with their computers, or point-of-sale Trojan horses siphoning off credit ca…

October 31, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Anatomy of a sextortion scam

Since this July, attackers are increasingly spreading sextortion-type attacks across the internet. Cisco Talos has been investigating these campaigns over the past few months. In many cases the spammers harvested email addresses and passwords from a publicly available data breach, and then used this…

December 15, 2017

SECURITY

Cryptojacking: Hijacking your computer resources

Your internet connection is slower than usual, your PC is also very slow, and you notice that your CPU fan is running faster when you are on a given website. All the above symptoms indicate that you could be a victim of cryptojacking. This is a new kind of menace in which malicious users or the host…

September 14, 2017

CLOUD

Cloud Unfiltered Podcast, Episode 18: Chris Riviere, Cisco

Cloud security is the kind of topic that can make you sigh, shake your head, and quickly look for some other, less daunting project to deal with—no doubt about it. I mean honestly—what do you even define as “cloud” in your particular environment, and what constitutes “secure”? Is your only job to wo…

May 16, 2017

GOVERNMENT

WannaCry Type Ransomware a Growing Threat: 5 Easy Steps to Protect Your Agency

It all started harmlessly enough. A pleasant sounding ping on her phone and a quick check of her email. But it then quickly descended into a weekend of worry. For people in both the public and private sector, cyber attack has become a potentially life-altering and seemingly unstoppable threat that i…

March 28, 2014

OPEN AT CISCO

In Search of The First Transaction

At the height of an eventful week – Cloud and IoT developments, Open Source Think Tank,  Linux Foundation Summit – I learned about the fate of my fellow alumnus, an upperclassman as it were, the brilliant open source developer and crypto genius known for the first transaction on Bitcoin. Hal Finney…