One of the longest-running and more lethal malware strains has once again returned on the scene. Called Emotet, it started out as a simple banking Trojan when it was created in 2014 by a hacking group that goes by various names, including TA542, Mealybug and MummySpider. Emotet malware is back in the headlines and continues to be one of the most significant threats facing companies today. In this review for A10 Networks, I describe what it is and how it works and how to defend against it using a combination of network and security tools.

The 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have recently adopted a new international agreement regulating government access to its citizens’ private data. The OECD draws on its membership from countries on several continents, including the US, Israel, Japan, Chile, the Czech Republic, and the UK. The document was released with the rather ungainly title of the “Declaration on Government Access to Personal Data Held by Private Sector Entities.”

There are seven common principles that were adopted, all in the interest of serving to the free flow of data across country borders and promoting trust between citizens and their governments.

You can read more on my post for Avast’s blog today.

A July 2022 survey of 300 U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) IT contractors shows a woeful lack of information security in the majority of situations. These contractors are part of the DoD’s supply chain that, in typical government speak, is labeled the Defense Industrial Base (DIB). The report should be a warning even for those technology contractors that don’t do any DoD work, as I explain in my latest blog for Avast.

Last week, an international group of law enforcement agencies took down one of the biggest criminal operators of a spoofing-as-a-service enterprise. Called iSpoof, it collected more than $120M from victims across Europe, Australia, Ukraine, Canada, and the United States. During the 16 months of the site’s operation, the group took in more than $3.8M in fees from its victims. In my blog for Avast, I summarize what happened, why this gang was so significant, and how spoofing has gotten more advanced over the years since those early days when Paris Hilton spoofed her friend’s cellphone.

Network security starts with having a well-protected network. This means keeping intruders out, and continuously scanning for potential breaches, malware and flagging those attempted compromises. One of the biggest threats increasing in popularity is a very specific type of attack called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks are targeted at your internet servers, including web and database servers, and are designed to flood random traffic so that the servers can’t respond to legitimate users’ queries. They are very easy to mount, and without the right tools, very hard to prevent.

This post was part of the A10Networks glossary and can be found here.

AI is a double-edged sword. It has enabled the creation of software tools that have helped to automate tasks such as prediction, information retrieval, and media synthesis, which have been used to improve various cyber defensive measures. However, AI has also been used by attackers to improve their malicious campaigns. For example, AI can be used to poison ML models and thus target their datasets and steal login credentials (think keylogging, for example). I recently spent some time at a newly created Offensive AI Research Lab run by Dr. Yisroel Mirsky. The lab is part of one of the research efforts at the Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel. Mirsky is part of a team that published a report entitled “The Threat of Offensive AI to Organizations”. The Offensive AI Research Lab’s report and survey show the broad range of activities (both negative and positive) that are made possible through offensive AI.

You can read my latest post for Avast’s blog here.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has recently published a fact sheet on implementing phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA). The publication is in response to a growing number of cyberattacks that leverage poor MFA methods. “Not all forms of MFA are equally secure. Some forms are vulnerable to phishing, push bombing attacks, exploitation of Signaling System 7 (SS7) protocol vulnerabilities, or SIM swap attacks,” the agency writes. The strongest form of phishing protection is to employ FIDO2 or WebAuthn-based tokens as your MFA method, what CISA calls the “gold standard.”

You can read more at my latest blog post for Avast here.

The 2015 murder of the 23-year ago American student Nohemi Gonzalez is about to take center stage in a case that has made its way to the US Supreme Court. The woman was one of 129 people killed in Paris by a group of ISIS terrorists. Her estate and family members sued Google, claiming that a series of YouTube videos posted by ISIS are the cause of the attack (and her death), and requests damages as part of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

At the heart of the resulting Gonzalez v. Google case lies Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. This section has been routinely vilified by various political groups, who claim that the protections under this section against civil suits should be struck down. For my latest blog for Avast, I summarize the various issues that are facing the court and implications for online communications.

The arguments are transcribed here.