A “Logic Bomb” isn’t really logical, it’s a virus, designed to take down your corporate network and disable existing systems that may monitor data, protect it, back it up or access it. A logic bomb is designed to multiply like any virus and spread throughout a network multiplying its effects.

Location-based services utilize geo-location information to publish your whereabouts. In some cases, these services can also provide discounts or freebies as a reward for “checking in” at participating businesses and gathering “points.” These services can also be used to share photos and other media in real-time with your friends and followers.

A defensive posture no longer suffices for the protection of the devices and data that have become ubiquitous in today’s digital world. Rather than simply rushing to install defenses on computers, in networks, and in the cloud, we urgently need to step back and take a broader view of the security landscape, in order to take more calculated preemptive measures.

Hackers and crackers and data breaches! Oh my! Confused? Overwhelmed? Don’t care? You should, and there’s help.

The ever ongoing debate about quality IT staff once again received a nudge, this time by an article of J.Oquendo. In his article he takes another brutally honest stab at the Industry by pointing out that the new Shady RAT attacks aren't that new and would have been easily caught by capable personnel. I agree with that view very strongly and would also like to point out that Shady RAT is really no different than Night Dragon in that both attack waves used techniques that have been known for a decade or more. Oviously someone is asleep at the wheel, but who?

For any cave-dwelling, living-under-a-rock, head-in-the-sand, naïve, under-informed members of society who aren’t paying attention, we have serious cyber-security issues on our hands.

Black hat hackers, who break into networks to steal for financial gain, are wreaking havoc on banks, retailers, online gaming websites, and social media. Black hats cost these companies and their clients billions of dollars every year. They are using stolen usernames and passwords to transfer money through wire transfers, Automated Clearing House (ACH) and through billing fraud.

One in five online consumers has been a victim of cybercrime in the past two years. Social networking is a direct link to the problem. While social networks allow you to keep in touch with family and friends, there are issues to be concerned about.

Earlier this week news broke of Google's interruption of a large-scale phishing expedition, which alluded to some state involvement of China. This inspired a host of experts to write about it and J Oquendo's article on InfoSecIsland inspired me to write mine. In his article mr. Oquendo asserts that its remarkable (read: stupid) that US officials still seem to be using commercial email services such as GMail for exchange of security sensitive and sometimes mission-critical information, instead of using the available high-security services offered by the US Government that they should be using. In this day and age, with a nearly constant barrage of security breaches in the news, people don't seem to be getting any more aware of security issues.

1. Data Breaches: Businesses suffer most often from data breaches, making up 35% of total breaches. Medical and healthcare services are also frequent targets, accounting for 29.1% of breaches. Government and military make up 16.2%, banking, credit, and financial services account for 10.5%, and 9.2% of breaches occur in educational institutes.

A recent study of more than 150 organizations conducted by Aberdeen Group⁽¹⁾ found that the average total cost to remediate a single application security incident is approximately $300,000. As security incidents can happen at any point in the application life cycle, modernization initiatives can prove especially costly if they are not proactively secured from development to operations.

This week consumers are receiving messages from trusted companies such as 1-800-Flowers, Chase, Hilton HHonors and others, letting them know that their e-mail addresses have been exposed due to the recent Epsilon data breach.  This provides a perfect opportunity for cybercriminals, who may try to take advantage of the breach to send out phishing e-mails designed to steal user names and passwords.  Since consumers are receiving legitimate e-mails, they may be less suspicious of the phishing  or spear phishing ones.

The term "Cyber Deterrence" is gaining traction lately, with regard to the act of deterring cyber attacks. I've seen at least one author (Richard Clarke) use it in his book about Cyber Warfare. In many cases the proponents of this term invoke existing Deterrence Strategies such as the MAD doctrine that was used to prevent Nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and use it as a model on Cyber Warfare.