News

At the end of 2014, ASERT presented research where we mapped some DDoS booter advertisements on Russian language forums to their behind-the-scenes DDoS botnet infrastructures. For this post, we will follow up on that research a bit by looking at another one of these mappings and trying to estimate the revenue generated by the DDoS service. It Starts With an Advertisement In this marketplace, it almost always starts with an advertisement for a DDoS booter...

Capgemini and RSA have teamed up on research into the abilities of organisations in secureing online identities and the results are, well....not good. Actually, pretty bad. After surveying over 800 C-level staff in the US, UK, Germany, France, Benelux and the Nordics, it turns out only one in five (21%) organisations are equipped to securely manage user identities. There were some differences across nations, with only 15% of organisations in the UK being equipped to support secure and...

The results are in from a survey carried out by GBG, a global identity data intelligence specialist, with some surprising results. Almost 1 in 4 uk consumers, when asked to value their personal identity, put it at £500 or less - that's £39 less than the cost of a new iPhone 6s. There were differences across age groups, with over a third of millenials valuing their identities at less that £1000, whereas only 17% of the 65+...

Troy Hunt has uncovered a flaw within the Nissan Leaf's companion app that allows hackers to see data about recent journeys and meddle with other aspects of the vehicle such as climate control and battery life. All they need is he vehicle identity number (VIN). Mr. Hunt gave Nissan one month to fix the flaw prior to his unmasking of them in public. His stance on the issue is that Nissan should disable the app, which...

PwC's global bi-annual economic crime report has shed new light on what the latest fears are over online crime. As it turns out, over 50% of UK organisations expect an economic crime to be committed against them in the next 24 months. These organisations are living in fear because it's so difficult to ascertain where cyber-threats originate , who's behind them and what their motives are. It's not all doom and gloom however, since Palo...

The risks to sensitive data are everywhere, and your organisation is ultimately responsible for the security of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). This means you must protect PII not only during transaction processing, but also through business processes such as charge-backs, loyalty or repeat payments, storage and analytics – including outsourced environments. Find out how you can protect PII throughout its life cycle from Andy Heather, VP EMEA at HPE Security - Data Security. This...

Dell has today announced the results of their annual threat report and the results are pretty staggering for businesses worldwide. The company has now called for new decryption and inspection strategies in light of recent comments from Dell VP Patrick Sweeney, who warns that we can expect cybercriminals to continue finding ways to circumvent the latest security updates issued by the likes of Android. Key findings from the report include: Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security...

A new guidance paper from the prpl Foundation, Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Embedded Computing, has been released that describes how to create secure embedded systems that power connected devices.  By forging what it calls a root of trust at the hardware layer and leveraging hardware virtualisation to create two distinct, secure domains- lateral movement attacks within the system will be dramatically reduced according to the foundation. President of the prpl Foundation, Art Swift...

More than 3,000 Organizations Rely on AlienVault to Detect Threats and Mitigate the Impact of a Breach  AlienVault™, the leading provider of Unified Security Management™ solutions and crowd-sourced threat intelligence, today announced that it ended 2015 with unprecedented momentum. The company closed out the year with more than 55 percent year-over-year sales growth and increased its install base to over 3,000 commercial customers. AlienVault’s new customer wins came from a broad range of industries around...

In response to the growing threat of cyber crime and a number of high profile data breaches, employers are planning significant increases in salaries for IT security specialists this year. Head of Cyber Security and Security Analyst roles will both see salaries increase by 18%, while salaries for more junior security support positions will increase by 7%. Steve Corbett, Associate Director, IT recruitment, Robert Walters, comments: “Over the last year we've seen a massive increase...