Data Breach Fatigue, Security Breach Burnout: Whatever You Call It, Nobody Cares

More than 76 million people were affected by the JP Morgan security breach and at least 53 million credit and debit cards were compromised by the Home Depot breach. Now, you’d expect that this could negatively impact these two corporations. After all, Target claims a similar breach cost them $148 million. However, it appears that …

Hackers: You Can’t Beat Them, But You Can Sure Make Their Lives Difficult

This is one of the main ideas I came away with after attending the Mandiant/FireEye webinar yesterday. The webinar, “From the Front lines: What really happened at MIRcon” (Mandiant Incidence Response Conference) summarized some of the main talks from that conference. Mandiant was acquired by FireEye in January and, together, they are recognized as one …

In Two Years a Bot Will Win a Pulitzer Prize

At least that’s what Kristian Hammond of the company Narrative Science predicted in 2012. Is it possible? After looking through the data and assessing some of the technological advances in the emerging field of news writing bots, I can’t completely discount this claim. Already, Narrative Science technology is used to write corporate reports for Forbes, …

How You Can Help the FBI Identify the Foley-Sotloff Murderer

There is some disagreement among intelligence agencies as to whether Abdel Majed Bary is the man who beheaded Foley, Sotloff, and possibly British aid worker Alan Henning. But let there be no mistake about it, Bary was quite capable of it. He had the motive and a predisposition to violence. He was quite proud of …

Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse…BadUSB

If you haven’t already given up on trying to keep your network secure, you probably will after hearing about BadUSB. BadUSB is a vulnerability on almost all USBs. It allows the firmware within them to be reprogrammed to do malicious deeds. Apparently, US intelligence agents have known about this for some time. According to one …

How to Write a Spear Phishing Email

If you’re not willing to do the necessary work, forget about even trying to write a spear phishing email. This is not your usual spam email that you simply hope will get through spam filters. A spear phishing email has to be crafted well enough to avoid spam filters and have the attachments opened or …

Ponemon Study Finds IT Professionals Frustrated, Overwhelmed, and Outgunned

Corporate management is in denial. Despite Ponemon findings that an average breach costs a company $5.4 million, most company leaders (79%) do not equate a security breach with losing money. In fact, the recent study on Exposing the Cybersecurity Cracks paints a picture of management trying to avoid the truth while IT professionals become more …