security

The Cisco 2014 Annual Security Report has been released, following months of collaboration between threat researchers and other cybersecurity experts at Cisco and Sourcefire. As promised, it provides a “warts-and-all analysis” of security news from 2013 and our perspective for the year ahead based o…

In October 2013, Cisco TRAC discussed Network Time Protocol (NTP) as a possible vector for amplified distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Litnet CERT has since revealed that their NTP servers were used in a denial of service (DoS) attack. Symantec also published information regarding an NTP…

Are you back from holiday break all refreshed and ready to embrace 2014 with confidence? Many organizations will see new devices on their networks given the recent massive holiday gift giving. In particular, educational organizations will be morst likely to be impacted. It seems there was no new hot…

Update 2014-01-10: This malicious campaign has expanded to include emails that masquerade as bills from NTTCable and from VolksbankU Update 2014-01-21: We’ve updated the chart to include the Vodafon emails and latest URL activity English language has emerged as the language of choice for inter…

One of the things I like best about Cisco’s focus on security is the internal SecCon conference we put on each year. It focuses on security threats, defenses, and innovation. Although I participate as a trainer, organizer, and reviewer, my favorite role this year was as an attendee. The confer…

The website of the OpenSSL project, which provides a widely-used SSL/TLS implementation, was breached on 29th December and defaced (OpenSSL.org announcement). This defacement only affected the website of the project, however. The OpenSSL project has since checked the cryptographic hashes of the Open…

It’s December and the 2013 cyber security news cycle has just about run its course. We’ve seen more and increasingly virulent attacks, continued “innovation” by adversaries, and a minor revival of distributed denial of services (DDOS) actions perpetrated by hacktivists and other socio-politically mo…

Language is a powerful tool. With acronyms like ACL, IPS/IDS, and APT*, the security world has created its own language, acronyms, and catchphrases. In our industry, sometimes the meaning of more commonly used words can cause misunderstandings. For example, is a hacker a bad actor or a well-intentio…

Most recently ESG/Vormetric came out with a threat report that highlighted the increase in insider threats & the significance to augment perimeter and host-based security. The rationale behind the increase was that more people are accessing the network, increase cloud and network traffic are mak…