As the phish, we all need to recognize the baited hook
Phishing scams aren’t going away, and the scammers are in fact getting more sophisticated. That means users have to be more cautious than ever.
Stories by By J.F. Rice
When Locky strikes
A friend’s company is hit with aggressive ransomware and calls our manager for advice.
Surprise! You have mystery PCs
Vulnerability scans uncover on the network unpatched, unprotected PCs that IT never even heard about.
The battle of the reboot
Patching has become routine, but patches don’t take without a reboot. That’s a problem when business units insist on zero downtime.
A ray of hope in the fight against malvertising
A new service offers to keep all your Web browsing on its servers. It could be the answer, despite the risks of contracting with a startup.
As pre-IE11 support ends, scrambling for workarounds
For our security manager, the two big issues are the browsers his users employ, and the versions supported by the corporate website.
Trying to stay ahead of the bad guys
Even a security manager who has steered away from emerging technology has a change of heart when it becomes ever more difficult to keep up with the ways criminals can sneak into our systems.
Malvertising is a troubling trend
Malware that can infect a computer with no user interaction needed is certainly bad news.
The sharks of the Internet
That’s what hackers are — they should be feared, but our fears are completely out of proportion.
Milling with the hackers at Black Hat and Def Con
Attending both for the first time was a chance to compare and contrast.
Assessing the value of cyber-insurance
I've ventured into new territory lately: cyber-insurance. Here's why.
Network analysis is like turning over rocks
I just found out my company's employees have been finding ways to get around my Web filtering. And that came as a surprise, because I use a best-in-class product that employs a database to categorize and block website URLs, which I thought I could rely on. But as I found out, that product is not perfect.
Data held hostage; backups to the rescue
Last year, <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2487348/security0/security-manager-s-journal--target-breach-unleashes-fresh-scams.html">I wrote about a ransomware infection</a> that encrypted the hard drive of one of my company's employees. In that situation, a live, in-person scammer called the employee, claiming to be from "technical support," and tricked the employee into visiting a website that infected his computer. As with <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2493263/security0/security-manager-s-journal--new-ransomware-attack-hurts-trustworthiness-of-web.html">a similar situation I wrote about in 2012</a>, the infection came from an advertisement on the front page of a major news service's website. The website runs rotating ads, one of which was compromised and hit the victim with a drive-by malware infection (without any intervention by or even the knowledge of the victim). I thought that because the infection was on the victim's personal computer, not on my company's network, we were pretty safe. I thought that if it had been on my network, the attempt probably would have failed, or would at least have been detected right away.
Discovering a blind eye to vulnerabilities
Last week, I was horrified to discover a problem with my <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2569669/security0/two-sides-of-vulnerability-scanning.html">vulnerability scanner</a>. The product I use relies on a user account to connect to our Microsoft Windows servers and workstations to check them for vulnerable versions of software, and that user account had never been configured properly. As a result, the scanner has been blind to a lot of vulnerabilities. And this has been going on for a long time.
Information overload, SIEM version
It's been over a year since <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2486501/security0/security-manager-s-journal--giving-thanks-for-siem.html">I last wrote about my security information and event management (SIEM) platform</a> -- and a lot has happened since then. Back then, I wrote, "Now that my SIEM has been in operation for several months, I've become completely dependent on it, not only for security monitoring, but also for overall awareness of my network."