Attending the BCAware Security Conference

Meeting Brian Krebs at the BCAware Conference

One of the most exciting parts of the BCAware conference was getting to meet Brian Krebs live in person!

During his talk he shared some interesting topics such as how cyber criminals are using websites similar to https://haveibeenpwned.com/  

Except, that these “other” websites will actually list out the users leaked password(s) in plaintext. And, with this method attackers can now attack various social media, banking and other commonly used services online to possibly find valid emails/passwords to accounts.

Another topic was related to how cyber criminals determine how much money to ask for during a ransomware attack. The typical amount seems to point at about 10% of total revenue a business makes from the previous year. This way, they do not ask for too much or too little. It gets close to an amount that the organization can afford, and finds would be cheaper than to recover from backups or rebuilding the environment.

Equifax Breach Lessons Learned

Equifax Breach Lessons Learned

After reading the Equifax breach report released by U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This would be a great post to summarize and list out key items that went wrong in the Equifax breach. Hopefully, it will lead to a wake up call for other companies in order to better their own information security. 

Security Representative on the Core team

It’s highly important to have someone that understands information security on your core team. Many times, the task gets pushed to the Legal or IT team core team members. This is one of the reasons that led to the breach. IT operational tasks and security tasks need to fall under a specific leader. Ideally, someone that understand security and not just IT. In Equifax’s case, security was represented by the IT team core member. However, their views were not in line with the security team leader. Therefore, something that may be of risk may not reach the CEO’s level and will get missed. However, Read The Full Post