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Last week, South Carolina’s (SC) Governor presented the results of the investigation over the exposure of the personal data of nearly 4 million individual filers and 700,000 businesses in the SC Department of Revenue (DoR) data breach.

The investigation provided a detailed timeline of the breach and revealed that data protection in the DoR was lacking to the extent that the DoR had almost no visibility to the attack. The damning results have even led to the resignation of SC’s DoR director. Recently, the state made the ...

Many Organizations Are Vulnerable to Encrypted Attacks, And the Probability Of Being Be a Victim of Such An Attack Is Increasing…

In 2012, we saw a significant rise in the amount of application level attacks and especially encrypted attacks over HTTPS. Many of the online organizations run the majority of their online services over encrypted traffic; services such as Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and many online financial services are available only over HTTPS. Therefore, handling security threats that are carried over encrypted ...

CyberCity has all the makings of a regular town. There’s a bank, a hospital and a power plant. A train station operates near a water tower. The coffee shop offers free WiFi.

But only certain people can get in: government hackers preparing for battles in cyberspace.

By Jon-Louis Heimerl on November 16, 2012

The Single Most Important Part of Dealing with a Phishing Attack is Preparing for the Attack Before it Actually Happens.

Phishing attacks come in all shapes and sizes. Well, pretty much all the same shape, but certainly different sizes. Victims are both users and organizations. Depending on the nature of the attack, those users can be organizational users or private consumers. I have written about phishing emails before, and ...

Cellphones are a visible symptom of our addiction to technology. We use them for everything; we can’t be separated from them and we clutch at them constantly – even obsessively. Since habits and addictions often become automatic, it’s important to do a bit of self-analysis sometimes. Our all-important interactions with our cellphones can have a big impact on our professional image. Consider that colleague who is constantly rushing to the office bathroom or kitchen to have “personal” conversations which everyone ...

• By William Jackson Nov 09, 2012

This is the last of a three-part series on developing a government cybersecurity ecosystem.

A plan to develop an automated system for defending agencies from cyber attacks could look to several existing agency projects that incorporate self-healing network features.

The concepts of a learning, self-healing network are being incorporated — or at least planned — in several current federal programs, including the Federal Aviation Administration’s 

• By William Jackson   Nov 08, 2012

This is the second in a three-part series on building a government cybersecurity ecosystem.

The Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology are spearheading an effort to develop a self-healing cyber “ecosystem” across government and industry organizations that could automatically assess and respond to threats.

The agencies, which asked for input on the idea in a recent request for proposals, say the seriousness ...

• By William Jackson   Nov 07, 2012

This is the first a three-part series on building a government cybersecurity ecosystem.

Since its inception, the Internet has grown wild, which has spurred innovation, activity and information sharing, but has left security and standards unattended. The result is an online environment where outlaws can roam free.

The cyberthreat environment has shifted from attacks that steal information to those that do real damage to systems and the operations they control. The Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) knows what to do to stop the types of attacks that are coming from nation states. The DSD has developed a list titled Top 35 Mitigation Strategies; it also found that implementing just the top four strategies can block 85 percent of targeted cyberattacks. Topping the list is whitelisting, followed by ...

Posted in advanced persistent threats, Cisco NetFlow, network security, Security on November 10th, 2012 by Adam Powers

Network forensics can be an intimidating subject. When IT personnel hear the word “forensics” ...