Security Blah Blah

Information Security Summit 2018 in NE Ohio

2018-08-17T18:11:00.001-04:00

Don't forget to register for this great conference that supports local infosec professionals and organizations. This year's SUMMIT 2018 is scheduled for October 22-26, 2018 at the Cleveland I-X Center. https://www.informationsecuritysummit.org/summit-2018/

G's Reading List for August 4, 2017

2017-08-04T22:17:00.000-04:00

Security Concerns Lead to a Conference Boom by Beth Thomas Hertz @ CrainsCleveland.com Link to article: http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20170729/NEWS/170729795/security-concerns-lead-to-a-conference-boom Great conference - I highly recommend it! It's a week long event that's coming to Cleveland area the week of October 30, 2017. Details can be found here (https://

G's Reading List for March 19, 2017

2017-03-19T16:25:00.002-04:00

Virtual machine escape fetches $105,000 at Pwn2Own hacking contest [updated] by Dan Goodin @ Arstechnica.com Using 3 different exploits in Microsoft Edge browser, Windows 10, and then VMWare contestants were able to escape a virtual machine to compromise the host the VM was running on. Impressive. Link: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/

G's Reading List for Dec.4, 2016

2016-12-04T11:19:00.002-05:00

Some interesting quotes from a couple articles... The Hard Thing About Safe Things By Rich Seymour October 12, 2016 https://www.endgame.com/blog/hard-thing-about-safe-things Completeness "This is an especially useful distinction for infosec, which often fails to integrate the insider threat element or human vulnerabilities into the security posture." Clear Prioritization "...urges

G's Reading List for Nov.24, 2016

2016-11-24T19:23:00.000-05:00

I read a lot - at least I try to find time to. I have to...just like all my peers in this the industry of information security. My focus is in the threat intelligence and infosec/cyber attack space and that requires even more reading. Thankfully there are a lot of smart people in this space with interesting insights, and my plan is to start highlighting these interesting

Interesting analysis' of US OPM data breach

2015-06-27T15:35:00.001-04:00

If you are interested in the recent US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breach you'll want to check out the following articles and blog posts. For those not familiar with this breach, see here. Richard Bejtlich has a great blog post regarding what Einstein and Continuous Diagnostic Monitoring (CDM) does and does not. He talks about a debate going on in the Federal govt.

Chrome's weird DNS lookups

2015-02-08T21:28:00.003-05:00

SANS ISC Handler Bojan Zdrnja has a great post on the ISC diary about how Google Chrome performs DNS prefetching lookups in order to speed up browsing. I hope you find the post as interesting as I did. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Google+Chrome+and+(weird)+DNS+requests/10312 Adding to Bojan's post I found a tip on how to disable the function: http://hanxue-it.blogspot.com/2014/04/

Simple routing mistake breaks Internet on 18-SEP-2014

2014-09-19T17:57:00.001-04:00

Did you know the Internet broke down for a bit on 18-SEP-2014? It's true...and all it took was a simple mistake with a routing table. Just ask VolumeDrive. At around 06:49 UTC on 18-SEP-2014, VolumeDrive started advertising to one of it's upstream ISPs (Atrato) all the routes it knew from another one of it's ISPs (Cogent). How big was the mistake you ask? Well normally it

US Senate is concerned about Internet 'malvertising'

2014-06-15T01:21:00.001-04:00

The US Senate issued a report on the problems with Internet/online ad networks that are distributing malware to unsuspecting consumers. The investigation was conducted by the Committee on Homeland Security's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which stated the objective was to raise consumer awareness and pressure ad networks to clean up the problems. The report is called "

In the category of 'This is News?'

2014-05-24T21:52:00.002-04:00

Two recent news stories invoked a 'this is new news?' reaction from me. More like 'this is OLD news.' The one article is about Russians perpetrating cyber-espionage against American companies and the other is about online cyber-gangs hacking online companies. The victim of the latter news story is eBay (link here to story). Those of us in the information security industry

Highlighting Various Articles

2014-04-27T11:22:00.001-04:00

Some of these items are a bit dated but I thought I'd showcase them in case you missed them like I did. 10 Most Significant Hacks in 2013 by Nextgov (Jan 2014) Nextgov website publishes list of what they deem as the "...10 most significant infiltrations reported in 2013 as far as damage to national security, economic security and privacy."(#1) The titles from their list. See link to

Article Highlight: Q1-2014 SPAM study by Sophos shows interesting results

2014-04-27T10:46:00.000-04:00

Every quarter Sophos studies spam and releases the results. This years title is "The Dirty Dozen Spampionship: Who's who in the global spam-sending league?" The study shows the amount of spam sent by country. It's important to note that this does not necessarily correlate to the bad actor's physical location. Most of these actors don't send it directly from their networks but rather

Anti-DDoS protection added to BIND DNS

2013-11-26T23:55:00.000-05:00

A new version of BIND DNS has added a mechanism which will help combat against reflected Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, or specifically against a DNS amplification attack. This module was introduced into version 9.9.4. What is a DNS amplification attack? It's an attack where, using the UDP transport, the attacker uses a large group of open resolvers to execute a DNS lookups with

Retail thefts parallel to infosec

2013-08-24T13:23:00.001-04:00

I just re-discovered a great post by Richard Bejtlich about the parallels of retail crime and computer crime. I read this writing by Richard a few years ago (2010) when it was posted and while it is dated, I thought it is worthy of highlighting again because in my opinion it's still relevant. Maybe retailers should band together to share information about the criminals and losses similarly

Where you'll get hacked stats

2013-08-24T13:13:00.004-04:00

I found this graphic showing where you'll get hacked. Some interesting statistics in there. Link to graphic on Softpedia.com