NetWorks Group Blog

Is Your Collection Agency Business Secure From a Cyberattack?

What is PCI Compliance?

Have you opened your browser only to receive a message that you've been locked out of your system? What about an email that indicates you’ve made changes to financial accounts and directs you to click a link to correct the situation if you haven’t authorized these changes? Clicking these links or opening attachments from these messages can deploy a specific type of malicious software called ransomware, and it can debilitate your business. Discover what forms ransomware can take and what you can do to secure your business data from ransomware attacks.

Key findings from Verizon DBIR report for the Healthcare Industry

As an information security professional, it can be difficult to know where to concentrate your efforts. Some threats are overly hyped, while others slide in under the radar.

Essential Infrastructure in Peril 

Critical infrastructure industries are a required foundation for a functional society. Without these sectors, vital services and products are unavailable. Health care, finance and manufacturing are three examples of markets that fall under this designation. The huge shortage of personnel with cybersecurity skills puts this essential infrastructure in peril. The demand for these experts is higher than the supply, making it difficult for organizations to appropriately protect themselves from cybercriminals. In the United States, only 66.7 percent of employer demand is met. It's even worse in other countries, with Israel only filling 28.4 percent of demand. 

What the Verizon 2017 DBIR Means for You

Every year, Verizon publishes a new version of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). For its tenth year running, this report provides analysis on trends surrounding hacking and other data breaches during the past year.

We often hear from prospective clients that they have a third party perform external penetration testing every year, and it never finds anything serious, so if the attackers can’t get in from the outside, why bother testing anything else? At first, the logic seems sound – Using a castle as an analogy for the network: You’ve built a castle with really strong walls. – If nothing can breach the walls, then the squishy villagers, the rulers, and the royal jewels inside are safe and secure. This thinking follows the traditional 90’s style of network architecture, where the only route into the corporate network was through the border firewall, through the modem – the one hardline into the office.

 It happens all the time. A new penetration test work order comes into my inbox, and the customer is asking us to test only a handful of external IP addresses. A quick WHOIS request shows me that the customer owns an entire class C of public IP space, and that they didn’t even include their public webserver in the scope. In an ideal world, I’d get in touch with our Project Manager. We’d get in touch with the customer, and we talk about the scope, the customer would say it was a simple mistake, and give us a full list of IP addresses they control.

Adobe, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many other large organizations have had major password breaches in the last few years. Breaches where attackers have exfiltrated usernames, email addresses, passwords, and in some cases, plaintext password hints and other data from the company’s database. The initial response is always, "Log into that service, and change your password before the hackers get in and take over that account!" The sad truth is that it’s rarely that account that matters – it’s the other accounts where you (or your users) used the same password and email address that you’re (or they’re) already using on the compromised account with another service.

VENOM (Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation)

If you are currently utilizing Xen, KVM or QEMU virtualization products you need to apply patches. VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization products are not affected.