A Review of the Best News of the Week on Cyber Threats & Defense

Fighting ransomware with network segmentation as a path to resiliency (Help Net Security, May 22 2018)
Segmentation is the solution to this problem with a particular focus on the emerging world of micro-segmentation. In this model, security profiles are adopted closer to the endpoint, thus replacing the traditional concept of a hardened single perimeter, and providing a dynamic and scalable perimeter wrapped around every workload.

After Meltdown and Spectre, Another Scary Chip Flaw Emerges (Wired, May 21 2018)
A new processor vulnerability known as Speculative Store Bypass could expose user data on a huge swath of devices.

Email Leakage – An Overlooked Backdoor to GDPR Failure (SecurityWeek, May 25 2018)
The most common incidents were not technology-related: 121 incidents involved data posted or faxed to the wrong recipient, or the loss or theft of paperwork.


Sponsored by LogRhythm
SIEM Magic Quadrant
Gartner Positions LogRhythm in SIEM Leaders Quadrant for 5th Consecutive Year. Get the report


Is Threat Intelligence Garbage? (Dark Reading, May 23 2018)
Most security professionals in a recent survey said that threat intelligence doesn’t work. So why all the hype?

500,000 Devices Infected With Malware That Could Cut Users Off From The Internet (Fortune, May 24 2018)
It could be a warning of another massive cyber attack on Ukraine.

Pet Tracker Flaws Expose Pets and Their Owners to Cybercrime (Dark Reading, May 22 2018)
Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in popular pet trackers to intercept location coordinates and access owners’ personal data.

SOC Automation: Good or Evil? (Infosec Island, May 24 2018)
The need for SOC automation is increasing in urgency since adversaries are also harnessing software and hardware to develop and carry out attacks.

Cybercriminals Battle Against Banks’ Incident Response (Dark Reading, May 22 2018)
Filess’ attacks account for more than half of successful breaches of bank networks, new data shows.

Turla cyberespionage group switched to open-source malware (SC Magazine, May 22 2018)
The Turla cyberespionage group has implemented some new tactics over the last few months incorporating some open-source exploitation tools instead of relying solely on their own creations to run campaigns.

Cloudflare Improves DDoS Mitigation Tool (SecurityWeek, May 22 2018)
Cloudflare announced a series of improvements to its Rate Limiting distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection tool this week.

6 Steps for Applying Data Science to Security (Dark Reading, May 23 2018)
Two experts share their data science know-how in a tutorial focusing on internal DNS query analysis.

Security spring cleaning: Tidying up messy firewall rules to reduce complexity (Help Net Security, May 24 2018)
With so many things to do (managing next-gen architectures and combating sophisticated cyber criminals, for example) and so few resources available to help, it’s easy to understand how security teams have come to view firewall management as a trivial chore. But, it’s actually a critical one.

Office 365 will automatically block Flash and Silverlight (Naked Security – Sophos, May 24 2018)
If you are one of the small number of Office 365 users who enjoyed embedding Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight content inside files, time is about to run out on your unusual pastime.

New Monero miner hitting macOS devices (SC Magazine, May 23 2018)
Another chink has developed in the usually tough Apple OS ability to ward off cybersecurity issues with a new cryptocurrency miner being discovered that is hitting macOS devices.

Font Steganography (Schneier on Security, May 24 2018)
Interesting research in steganography at the font level….