Background Almost a year ago as of this writing, the Russian state initiated a new and astoundingly brutal campaign against Ukraine. While Russia had effectively been at war with Ukraine since not long after the Revolution of Dignity, late February 2022 initiated a far wider, nastier, and inhumane phase of Read more
Questions concerning responsibility for the current epidemic of ransomware events are common, and seek to identify some concrete party to hold accountable for incidents. Yet the immediate perpetrators – largely (but not exclusively) criminal gangs operating in Eastern Europe and Russia – either represent too remote an entity for blame, Read more
The information security industry finds itself, as of this writing, in the midst of a ransomware pandemic. While Business Email Compromise (BEC) likely remains more financially successful overall, much of this success is due to far wider scope and selection of victims. Ransomware, while potentially less costly in a direct Read more
TrickBot was in the news quite a bit in early October 2020. Starting with reports of TrickBot disruption in late September 2020 subsequently linked to United States Cyber Command (USCC), events ramped up with an independent coordinated infrastructure take-down organized by Microsoft coming shortly thereafter. There are many avenues of Read more
I recently made a joke online relative to a major – and very respected, if geopolitically controversial – security company advertising its revised “Cyberthreat Real-Time Map”. As many members of the security community are aware, “threat maps” – referred to derisively as “pewpew” maps – are heavy on eye-candy but Read more
2020 has already been a WILD year to say the least – opening with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, proceeding through multiple ecological crisis, and continuing with a historical pandemic (and all its implications for information security), we live in very interesting times indeed. And yet, we’ve only just begun! Read more
My country, the United States, has experienced days of disruption and discord not witnessed since the late 1960s across multiple municipalities and regions. Adequately parsing and analyzing these events, their motivations, and what lasting impacts they may have will be the work for others. Instead, these chaotic events identify a Read more
Two recent articles appeared concerning possible implications of or prompts for the 01 May 2020 Executive Order on the US electric system. Notably, the Executive Order was quickly followed by a US Department of Commerce investigation into the supply of electrical transformers. While the latter would appear related to typical Read more
A new Twitter account appeared on 27 May 2020 for “NSA Cyber”, claiming the following: “Welcome to the intersection of threat intel, vulnerability analysis, and technical expertise! All to better equip you against malicious #cyber activity.” This was a very interesting development, and a separate effort from the US National Read more
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread throughout much of the world, I’ve covered how this slowly unfolding catastrophe will impact the business climate of information security, why cost-saving reductions in network defense may be deeply undesirable, and how responses to certain actions in a pandemic landscape will be difficult Read more