By now, many of you know that your online shopping and social media usage patterns can be tracked and recorded. This includes data about your political preferences, which is especially relevant given the approaching elections. Data brokers can use and abuse this information by bundling and selling your data to third parties who are interested in targeting you as a consumer, a buyer, or as a potential voter.

You can read more about this issue in my blog for Avast today and how you can use one of their products, BreachGuard, to help hide your data from brokers and keep improve your privacy posture on social media.

TrickBot is a malware network that is often described as one of the world’s largest with at least a million PCs. It is once again in the news. Earlier this month, the botnet was the focus of two independent efforts to take it down: from an industry group led by Microsoft and from the US Cyber Command. The TrickBot attempted takedown is just a sign of things to come. What is interesting is how the private and public sector has worked in tandem, using new strategies such as copyright violations and military-grade operations. I go into the details in

Last year I was fortunate enough to attend in person the CyberSecAI conference in Prague, a unique blend of academic and business researchers and practitioners involved in both cybersecurity and AI fields. This year the conference went completely virtual. I covered most of the sessions through live Tweets and wrote two blog posts that are now up on Avast’s website:

1. Creating and weaponizing deep fakes. Dr. Hany Farid of UC Berkeley spoke about their evolution, the four different types of fakes, and ways that we can try to solve their challenges. I found his analysis intriguing, and his use of popular figures that were deliberately fakes brought home how sophisticated AI algorithms is needed to flag them definitively.
2. Understanding bias in AI algorithms. A blue-ribbon panel of experts discussed how to reduce AI algorithmic bias. Should we hold machines at higher standards than we do of ourselves? It was moderated by venture capitalist Samir Kumar, who is the managing director of Microsoft’s internal venture fund M12 and included:
   • Noel Sharkey, a retired professor at the University of Sheffield (UK) who is actively involved in various AI ventures,
   • Celeste Fralick, the Chief Data Scientist at McAfee and an AI researcher,
   • Sandra Wachter, an associate professor at the University of Oxford (UK) and a legal scholar, and
   • Rajarshi Gupta, a VP at Avast and head of their AI and Network Security practice areas.

Part of the problem with defining bias is in separating correlation from causation, which was brought up several times during the discussion.

Most of us tend to think about the web as a single destination, available through our browsers on our laptops and phones. But over the years there is a much more sinister portion of the web, called the dark web that isn’t easily discoverable by traditional search engines and could contains threats to your business operations and harm your reputation. I describe this shady underbelly and what kinds of information is available there, along with suggestions of tools that you can use to be more proactive about your security such as EchoSec Beacon,  Dark Owl Scanner, SixGill’s Darkfeed, Recorded Future, ZeroFox and Digital Shadows’ Searchlight. These tools can help to provide near real-time access to threat data that is being shared on the darkweb on a variety of discussion forums and other places, again as a way to learn about the early stages of an attack.

Read my post on Network Solutions blog here.

A new vulnerability in Windows domain controllers has been discovered by security researchers at Secura. In a published paper in September, they found the cryptographic flaw and called it Zerologon. It takes advantage of the Netlogon Remote Protocol that is used in the authentication process. All that is to exploit this flaw – and compromise a wide variety of Active Directory identity services — is a TCP-level connection to the domain controller itself. Secura published a test tool on Github that can tell you whether a domain controller is vulnerable or not. Researchers have seen evidence of its use in the wild already, which is why you want to patch your servers asap.

You can read more about this scourge on my Avast blog post.

Nearly any website you visit asks you to accept cookies, and most of us don’t even think about this choice — we just click “yes” to rid ourselves from the pain of the pop-up. But what are we really agreeing to? What is a cookie, anyway? These small text files were first used in browsers back in 1994 and soon became ubiquitous. Cookies can be used for both productive and evil reasons, and I try to sort them out and show you how to avoid them.

You can read more in my blog post for Avast here.

Ransomware attacks are still very much a threat, and the ease of perpetuating them is a big reason why. All it takes for a ransom attack to begin is for a single employee to click on a phishing email. Sadly, these attacks aren’t going away anytime soon. Your organization doesn’t have to be such a tempting target for ransomware attacks. There are a few simple ways to minimize your exposure and make it more difficult for attackers to gain a foothold.

You can read my post for Network Solutions blog here and review several practical suggestions on how to prepare your network for the eventual attack.