According to a 2024 Verizon report, nearly 70% of data breaches occurred because a person was manipulated by social engineering or made some type of error. This highlights the importance of human-layer defenses in an organization’s security strategy. In addition to technology, tools, and processes, security requires awareness …

Steve Bellovin is retiring. Here’s his retirement talk, reflecting on his career and what the cybersecurity field needs next. [...]

Zero-day vulnerabilities are more commonly used, according to the Five Eyes: Key Findings In 2023, malicious cyber actors exploited more zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise enterprise networks compared to 2022, allowing them to conduct cyber operations against higher-priority targets. In 2023, the majority of the most frequently exploited vulnerabilities were …

Everybody is reporting about a new security iPhone security feature with iOS 18: if the phone hasn’t been used for a few days, it automatically goes into its “Before First Unlock” state and has to be rebooted. This is a really good security feature. But various police departments …

I’ve been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too. Turns out the same thing is true for non-technical backdoors: The advisory said …

This is a good point : Part of the problem is that we are constantly handed lists...list of required controls...list of things we are being asked to fix or improve...lists of new projects...lists of threats, and so on, that are not ranked for risks. For example …

After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA (and US CyberCommand), Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me …

An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs’s privacy policy— available elsewhere in the app —allows for blanket collection of user …

A good —long, complex—analysis of the EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act. [...]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces that it has successfully renewed the Portuguese GNS (Gabinete Nacional de Segurança, National Security Cabinet) certification in the AWS Regions and edge locations in the European Union. This accreditation confirms that AWS cloud infrastructure, security controls, and operational processes adhere to the stringent requirements …

Interesting social engineering attack: luring potential job applicants with fake recruiting pitches, trying to convince them to download malware. From a news article These particular attacks from North Korean state-funded hacking team Lazarus Group are new, but the overall malware campaign against the Python development community has been running …

When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emergency services to the tune of billions of …

Auto manufacturers are just starting to realize the problems of supporting the software in older models: Today’s phones are able to receive updates six to eight years after their purchase date. Samsung and Google provide Android OS updates and security updates for seven years. Apple halts servicing products …

Enlarge / A passenger sits on the floor as long queues form at the check-in counters at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, on July 19, 2024 in Manila, Philippines. (credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images) Millions of people outside the IT industry are learning what CrowdStrike is today, and that's a real …

Not a lot of details : Apple has issued a new round of threat notifications to iPhone users across 98 countries, warning them of potential mercenary spyware attacks. It’s the second such alert campaign from the company this year, following a similar notification sent to users in 92 nations …

Interesting research: “ Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities.” Abstract: LLM agents have become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Researchers have shown that LLM agents can exploit real-world vulnerabilities when given a description of the vulnerability and toy capture-the-flag problems. However, these agents still perform …

This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security. The fifty …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the successful renewal of the United Kingdom Cyber Essentials Plus certification. The Cyber Essentials Plus certificate is valid for one year until March 22, 2025. Cyber Essentials Plus is a UK Government–backed, industry-supported certification scheme intended to help organizations demonstrate …

RSA Conference 2024 drew 650 speakers, 600 exhibitors, and thousands of security practitioners from across the globe to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from May 6 through 9. The keynote lineup was diverse, with 33 presentations featuring speakers ranging from WarGames actor Matthew Broderick, to public and …

Enlarge (credit: JAVS) A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the latest episode of a supply-chain attack. The software, known as the JAVS Viewer …

IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed—but probably surprisingly small—sum. I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part if IBM’s cybersecurity offerings, mostly and …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently renewed the Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) High certification, upgrading to the latest version regulated under Royal Decree 311/2022. The ENS establishes security standards that apply to government agencies and public organizations in Spain and service providers on which Spanish public services …

Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft: Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and given the fact the …

Enlarge (credit: Joan Cros via Getty ) When Microsoft revealed in January that foreign government hackers had once again breached its systems, the news prompted another round of recriminations about the security posture of the world’s largest tech company. Despite the angst among policymakers, security experts, and competitors, Microsoft …

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery …