Security

As a security professional, I spend a lot of my time making sure that the bad guys aren't able to break in. I set up all the fancy firewalls and anti-virus to keep us safe. But what happens when a user unknowingly gives up...

There are many ways to carry out a cyber attack. You can go super technical with smashing the stack, super strength with brute forcing, or super easy with social engineering. If you have a...

Deep packet inspection is a methodology that network security professionals have been doing for many years. It involves looking at the data going over the network and determining if anything malicious is going on based on what's in those packets.

My last post on Ransomware was in 2013 when we were being hit by Cryptolocker. I mentioned that in around 2010 Data Doctor 2010 was the ransomware in the news. According to Wikipedia, the first "ransomware" was called the "AIDS Trojan" in 1989...

Three years ago, Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo demonstrated [1] an attack against one of the methods used in securing Internet traffic. 

They named their creation BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL...

In late September, 2014, a bug was released to the public in the popular Linux/Mac shell called bash.  For those that aren't familiar, the shell is the black box that some computer folks seem to spend...

A flurry of information is coming out about the Heartbleed vulnerability that is affecting Internet websites everywhere.  As the Information Security Officer at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), I worked closely with...

Martin Lee, the Threat Intelligence Technical Lead over at Cisco, posted a fascinating article about the dangers of clicking on links when tired.  There has recently been a campaign telling people that driving tired is as bad or worse than driving...

It has been a common thread in security talks since the inception of spam that it is a bad idea to give any type of response indicating that a human is reading the spam. For example, by clicking on the "unsubscribe" link in a spam, all you are...

Cryptolocker is a new piece of malicious software that has started circling the globe in the last half of 2013.  Deemed "rasomware" by security professionals, Cryptolocker encrypts your files and demands payment to receive the key to decrypt them. ...