The IT world is preparing for one of its highest profile deaths on April 8th, 2014. Microsoft will be discontinuing security updates and technical support for Windows XP and its variants. Microsoft will not mourn, as their call to action is to migrate off of one of its most popular consumer operating systems in history.
Incident Responders take a lot of pride in finding that ‘Needle in the Haystack’ when conducting data breach investigations. The thrill of forensics lies in finding the tiniest clue that unravels the story of how a breach occurred and what exactly was compromised as a result. But the reality is that during forensic investigations, there […]
Once again another company is on the heels of a massive data breach where intellectual property, customer records, private information, you-name-it, has been compromised, a security incident. The recent news of Adobe Systemsi where a malicious entity stole intellectual property and accessed millions of credit card numbers is another case where “if there is a […]
I’m one of those fortunate information security professionals who plays both sides of the technology defense game: I’m your incident response guy and your preventive technologies guy. When I’m working with a company after they’ve been breached I can see pretty quickly what defenses they were missing that allowed the breach in the first place, […]
Dear Antivirus Vendors, On more and more incident response investigations, my clients (victims) have been asking the question “Why didn’t our Antivirus software detect the malware when we always keep it up to date?” I respond by telling them that they had targeted malware on their system. Their follow up question usually is whether antivirus […]
‘Malware’ has come a long way – next-gen malware. From merely annoyance applications coded by bored engineering students for notoriety all the way to professionally developed stealth applications for financial gains and stealing state secrets. According to Verizon’s 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, 69% of the breaches were attributed to malware infections. The business impact of […]
The other day I met with an executive whose company had recently been hacked. He looks me in the eye and says, “It’s like I paid someone to punch me in the face…Repeatedly!” Getting breached is a huge pain that costs a lot of money, productivity, time and your reputation can suffer as well. The […]
I received an email last night from my online video rental provider that they were compromised and that my personal information may have been stolen. I immediately thought that this was a “phishing” scam and deleted the email. With all the compromised data in recent years though, Sony, and Barnes and Noble to name a […]
Recent article from Dark Reading, June 29: U.S. Critical Infrastructure Cyber Attack Reports Jump Dramatically.
We see time and time again in our incident response practice department scenarios where long-term systemic malware resides in a seemingly secure environment for months at a time.