Weekend Reads 042222


Agencies of the US Government have issued a joint warning that hackers have revealed their capability to gain full system access to industrial control systems that might help enemy states sabotage critical infrastructure.


Whether you consider them black swan cyber events or not, the SolarWinds attack and the Log4Shell exploit stressed some of the key ways in which organizations can prepare themselves and prevent crises.


The serious lesson from that is to acknowledge but forgive errors. “He’s said, many times, that he knew at that moment it was going to be OK,” Ellis says. “Creating a safe culture requires a lot of practices, and one of them is closure. Humor is a great way to provide closure because you rarely laugh about something that is still creating tension.”


To say that data governance and data compliance are rapidly becoming areas of immense strategic importance for businesses would be an understatement. Governments worldwide already have data protection laws in place or are busy drafting these laws.


On Sunday, an attacker managed to drain around $182 million of cryptocurrency from Beanstalk Farms, a decentralized finance (DeFi) project aimed at balancing the supply and demand of different cryptocurrency assets. Notably, the attack exploited Beanstalk’s majority vote governance system, a core feature of many DeFi protocols.


Leap seconds are announced by IERS six months prior to the event. All previous leap seconds have been positive and occurred on the last day of December or June. The most recent leap second as of now occurred on December 31, 2016.


Last month, Dark Reading released an enterprise application security survey that raised serious concerns by IT and security teams about the state of low-code/no-code applications.


With the rise of edge data centers and the increase in cloud-based computing expanding the potential attack surface, companies are now facing more challenges with things like misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and gaps within their end-to-end cybersecurity.


Blackbyte has been known to be a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) since July 2021. It was reported that it was used in infecting organizations in at least three US critical infrastructure sectors — government facilities, financial, and food and agriculture — as well as others outside the US.


On March 30, a pseudonymous security researcher posted a proof of concept of a remote code execution vulnerability in the Spring framework for Java. Early speculation likened this vulnerability to last year’s log4shell vulnerability.


The length of time attackers remained undetected on a victim’s network decreased for the fourth year in a row, sinking to 21 days in 2021, down from 24 days in 2020, according to a new report on incident response (IR) investigations conducted by Mandiant.


Specifically, DNS abuse is any activity that makes use of domain names or the DNS protocol to carry out harmful or illegal activity. Malicious activities on the DNS have been a frequent and serious issue for years, affecting online security, undermining trust on the Internet, and causing harm to users and third parties.


On May 12, 2021, United States President, Joe Biden, signed Executive Order 14028 to address the increasing nature of cybersecurity attacks and the effect that they have on businesses, the economy and ultimately, our global way of life.


A recent survey conducted by IBM and Censuswide of the UK market explored some of the drivers for modernisation and revealed some interesting challenges that organisations currently face as more and more businesses expand their digital boundaries.


The increased adoption of cloud infrastructure by companies looking to improve agility and support a hybrid workforce has led to more development teams adopting security-as-code as a way to build security into software and products.