Figuring out your appropriate certification program isn’t easy and involves almost as much studying as preparing for the certification exams themselves. But these programs can have big payouts in terms of job advancement, increases in responsibility and salary. I wrote two posts for Infosec Resources.

In our first post, we presented the issues a manager should consider in building a training program for their company. Training budgets tend to be the first ones to be cut in any economic downturn and often don’t get fully funded even when the economy is improving. But training can also have a significant impact on an enterprise: it can increase the pool of available skills, help pave the way for a department to take on new challenges, improve morale and create a sense of purpose for workers. In this first post, I talk about what are some of the benefits of training and ways to measure them, explore some of the costs, and the four different modalities that you can use to design your own training program.

In the second post, I explore the benefits and costs from the individual’s perspective and what you should expect from a certificate program and how to evaluate a program. This post also has a handy comparison chart that shows your costs and other considerations from the major infosec certs.

You may already have won! How many scams have begun with these words?

There is a new breed of scammers gaining popularity, thanks to the wild swings in the cryptocurrency market. I worked with Avast researcher Matěj Račinský who has tracked three different fake crypto exchanges, I show you some of the come-on messages, why their tactics are so compelling and — almost — believable — and how they ply their criminal trade, including phony news sites announcements (as shown here).

You can read more about these scammers, and ways to avoid them, in my blog post for Avast here.

Earlier this month, I had the unique opportunity to observe the National Guard conduct its cybersecurity exercises at Cyber Shield 21. This is perhaps the largest training effort of its kind, with more than 800 people across the U.S. taking part. It uses a series of real-world threats to train its “cyber warriors”. For the first time, the Guard took advantage of a virtual cyber range that the Department of Defense developed with more than a dozen contractors. It was an interesting experience, and it busted a few of my long-held myths about our military and demonstrated the value of public-private partnerships.  It was inspiring to see so many dedicated men and women who are willing to give so much time to support this effort, year after year.

You can read my full report for Avast’s blog here.

Mitre has created the D3FEND matrix to explain terminology of defensive cybersecurity techniques and how they relate to offensive methods. It is a common language to help cyber defenders share strategies and methods. It is a companion project to the company’s ATT&CK framework.

The goal is to figure out if vendors are using different ways to try to solve the same problem, such as verifying a particular (and potentially malicious) code segment. D3FEND could help IT managers find functional overlap in their current security product portfolios and guide any changes in their investments in a particular functional area, as well to help make them better defensive decisions to project their cyber infrastructure.

You can read more about Mitre’s D3FEND and its promise here in a post for CSOonline.

Nok Nok Labs came into being, a decade ago and is having its’ moment in the spotlight. The company has seen the FIDO standards become adopted around the globe, in some cases with very large scalable deployments that involve millions of end users and sold more than 500M key pairs. Along with helping to assemble the beginnings of the FIDO Alliance, Nok Nok engineers were co-creators of this now well-established set of authentication standards and have continued to innovate (with 50 patents filed), integrate and improve upon them in the past decade.

They are now one of the leaders in providing passwordless authentication, which now signifies a bona fide market segment, all thanks to FIDO protocols which make it easier for companies to transition, deploy, and manage a more secure solution that is focused on stronger security and privacy.

You can read my post on Nok Nok’s blog here.

Earlier in July, a group of security researchers revealed that they had been working together to uncover a widespread surveillance of journalists, politicians, government officials, chief executives, and human rights activists. The tool of choice for these activities was the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus, a tool that can be deployed on Android and Apple smartphones with a great deal of stealth. In this blog post for Avast, I explain the collaboration, link to various media reports about what they found out, and ways that you can protect yourself — although the chances that you will become a target of this spyware are pretty slim.

For many years, cybersecurity companies have invested in building sensor networks and detection capabilities to build a greater understanding of adversaries’ tactics, ever-changing techniques, and the threats posed to the world’s internet community.

One of the critical foundations of protecting all uses of the internet is for the security defenders to better understand what malicious activities look like and how to stop them. With that backstory of gaining greater insight, many security companies must not only understand their own data but also learn and share with others doing the same.

In my latest blog post for Avast, I take a closer look at two threat data sharing standards, STIX and TAXII.