I first met Dave Piscitello in the late 1990s when we served together on the Interop+Networld conference program committee, and collaborated on several consulting reports. He went on to create his own conference on internet security that ran from 1997-2000, then went on to work on security for ICANN until 2018. He serves on several international do-gooder infosec boards and is part of a consultancy called the Cybercrime Information Center that produces some very excellent reports on the state of malware, phishing, and domain name abuses. The most current report is on phishing, which shows that monthly attacks have doubled since May 2020. What makes his report powerful is that includes data from four commercial information sources, which collected more than a million unique attacks and publish their own blocklists. I wrote about his work and the state of phishing for my latest Avast blog here.

Last summer, I wrote about a major international investigation of the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware. We described how it works and what you can do to protect your phone. NSO has gone through some difficult times as a result of that analysis. NSO was almost purchased by an American company that is closely linked to intelligence operations until the US Government put them, along with another Israeli spyware vendor Candiru, on a special block list that prevents both from obtaining government contracts. Candiru, you might recall, was discovered to be doing its own zero-day spying by Avast researchers.

In my post today for Avast’s blog, I review what transpired at a recent hearing held by the House Intelligence Committee. There were three witnesses who emphasized the threat of spyware to various democracies around the world, and provided lots of specifics about how Pegasus has operated.

The initial phases of a breach are often the most critical: The intruder is counting on your confusion, your lack of a plan or a clear chain of authority, and any early missteps. Given that it’s only a matter of time before a breach happens, what can you do after encountering an incident to minimize the damage?

For businesses of all sizes, incident response planning infrastructures have gotten very complex, with many interconnected relationships that might not be immediately obvious — until something goes wrong. In this blog for Avast, I outline how you can prepare for an incident in a well-thought-out and organized manner.

Magecart, the notorious credit card stealing cybercrime syndicate, is once again in the news. It is the gift that keeps on giving – it has recently taken root in three different online restaurant ordering websites: MenuDrive, Harbortouch, and InTouchPOS. The malware was found in more than 300 restaurants that used them and exposed more than 50,000 paid orders. The malware was present in some of these systems for many months before they were discovered. Indeed, some attacks began last November and are still active.

There are more details in my post for Avast’s blog here.

I’ve often made recommendations about patching your systems. Patching is a simple concept to explain: Keeping all your various digital components (hardware, software, and networking infrastructure) up to date with the most recent versions. However, it can be easier said than done – this is due to the fact that our day-to-day operations have become complex systems that interconnect and intersect in ways that are hard to predict. In this blog post for Avast, I review some of the benefits of timely patching, how to get a patching program established and operational, and some notable failures about patching over the years.

The war on passwords has entered a new and more hopeful era: their final battle for existence. The challenger is the passkey. Let’s talk about why this is happening now, what exactly the passkey is, and how the victory might just finally be in sight. The goal is a worthy one — according to Verizon DBIR 2022 report, 80% of data breaches still begin with a phishing or Man-in-the-Middle attack, using hijacked account credentials to take over an account. Spoiler alert: passkeys can help big-time in this fight.

Passkeys use a set of cryptographic keys – meaning a long string of digits – in a way that you, the user, doesn’t have to remember or type anything additional. They have been adopted by the major endpoint vendors (Google, Apple and Microsoft), and in my post for SC Magazine I describe how they work.

The next time someone sends you an email with a PDF attachment, take a moment before clicking to open it. While most PDF files are benign, hackers have recently been using PDFs in new and very lethal ways. Malicious PDFs are nothing new. In my post for Avast’s blog here, I explain their history and how two news items have shown that they are still an active threat vector and being exploited in new and interesting ways, such as this invoice which has different amount due items depending on the particular reader used to view the file.