The following article was written by Eden's own Andy Sherman. It originally appeared on his blog, "My Security Musings." I received an interesting phishing email today. It was from a business acquaintance and contained a link gussied up to look like an online document. The content and format of the email screamed "suspect me" so I did. A URL lengthener confirmed that the tinyurl.com link went someplace having no connection to me or the acquaintance.

What is Ransomware? It seems that hardly a day goes by that we don’t read about a new strain of ransomware or a new victim of a ransomware attack. Ransomware is malware that encrypts the user’s or organization’s files and demands payment for the decryption key. The ransomware business model is often one that provides friendly customer service and really does deliver the key in exchange for the requested amount of Bitcoin. However, there is no guarantee that they will, and they don’t always, so it’s not a long term strategy for protecting your enterprise to depend upon the good will of criminals.

There’s a lot of buzz around Windows 10 security. For example, Infoworld dubs Windows 10 as “the most secure Windows ever.” Although that sounds like the hype cycle at work, in fact, some of the new security features in Windows 10 are game changers that will help change the balance of power between enterprise customers and the perpetrators of Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). There’s also at least one monstrously bad idea baked into Windows 10, and the usual collection of features where we think the default behavior is too open and should be modified.

The following excerpt has been taken from our ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Protecting Your Security Infrastructure in the Broader Data Center. Observe Proper Segregation of Duties System administration and security administration are not the same job, and those functions should be done by different people.

The following excerpt has been taken from our ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Protecting Your Security Infrastructure in the Broader Data Center. Isolate Security Services on a Protected Network While the subject of proper network security design over the entire data center will be the subject of a future article, we still need to consider the special needs of security infrastructure here.

Juniper’s NetScreen series of firewall and VPN devices have not one but two backdoor vulnerabilities, Juniper disclosed. One of these vulnerabilities is an authentication bypass for telnet or SSH logins to the firewall. The other is an encryption weakness that allows for eavesdropping on VPN traffic. Needless to say there has been a lot of discussion in the technicalpress, especially in light of the current political climate around encryption and back doors. Patches are available to cover both vulnerabilities. Juniper notes that no other Juniper products, in particular JunOS based products, are affected by these vulnerabilities.

Digital Guardian asked a bunch of security experts (including me) for their predictions on where the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) market was going in 2016 and beyond.

We recently posted about an uptick in wire transfer fraud through bogus email. Since then we and two of our clients have been the subject of such attacks. All were emails purporting to be from executive leadership (CEOs or Partners) to the people in their organization responsible for finance.

In its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ubiquity, Inc, a Silicon Valley networking equipment company, revealed that they had been the victim of a $46.7 million cyberheist. The swindle is an increasingly common one, known variously as CEO fraud, business email compromise (BEC) or man in the email (MITE) attacks, and it targets companies that make a lot of wire transfers, especially to overseas business partners.

On July 19th security blogger Brian Krebs broke a story on a security breach at adultery hookup site AshleyMadison.com. Actually AM is just the largest of three “adult” web properties owned by Avid Life Media (ALM), all having to do with hooking people up for sexual encounters. Credit was claimed by the “Impact Team” who have threatened to publish data on millions of users unless the Ashley Madison site is shut down. To date neither has happened, except for the identification of two hapless users, one in the US and one near Toronto (where ALM is based). While ALM’s websites remain online, their planned London IPO is said to be in trouble.