You may have seen it in the news, but another major company has been a victim of a nasty ransomware attack that disrupted services and customers for over ten days. This time, the victim was MGM Resorts in Las Vegas.
What separates this major incident from others is that the hackers pulled the malicious attack off using one of the oldest tricks in the book: social engineering. So, what happened, and what can we learn from this?
Topics: Cybersecurity, Network Security, Data Breach, Data Security, security incident handling, risk, Ransomware, social engineering
During a penetration test, login credentials are a highly sought-after item. While it is common to harvest that information via email scams (phishing attacks), it is not always the most practical or effective tactic to gain unauthorized access. That access, however, still requires a valid set of credentials. This poses a challenge. How does an attacker find valid accounts without social engineering? There are two main options: breached credentials and password spraying.
Topics: Cybersecurity, Network Security, Data Protection, Personal Data Protection, Security Awareness Training, Passwords, Monitoring
With so much of the world's business taking place online, cybersecurity threats have become increasingly prevalent. Cyberattacks cost companies millions of dollars a year, and not every business can recover from an incident like a data breach or ransomware hoax. A cybersecurity risk assessment evaluates how potential weaknesses could impact your organization.
Topics: Cybersecurity, Network Security, Risk Assessment
Security information and event management, or “SIEM,” is a tool that assimilates all of your log data to give you an all-encompassing overview of the activity on your network. SIEM tools watch over your network and help you stop trouble in its tracks. Whether your organization has 200 or 20,000 employees, SIEM software can be a vital part of any company’s cybersecurity posture.
Topics: Cybersecurity, Network Security, SIEM, Monitoring
As a cybersecurity engineer and an unapologetically enthusiastic “web guy,” I have both a personal and professional interest in finding new exploitation methods. Recently, I found an interesting and creative way to control a browser by exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. I learn by doing, so I executed the concept to see it work in practice. Without spoiling too much, I was very pleased with the results! This attack uses nothing more than Netcat and some clever XSS injection code. For those unfamiliar with Netcat, it’s a networking utility that reads and writes data across network connections.
Topics: Network Security, Data Protection, Penetration Testing, hacking