Sean Michael Kerner

Phishing and email security is big business, and on Feb. 26, email security vendor PhishMe announced that it is being acquired by a private equity consortium that includes BlackRock and Pamplona Capital, valuing the company at $400 million. As part of the acquisition, PhishMe is also being rebranded as Cofense, in a bid to better […]

The week of Feb. 19 was a busy one for cyber-security industry reports as at least nine different technology companies released studies that tried to provide insight into a wide array of cyber-risks. Among the organizations that released reports this week were Akamai, Cisco, RedLock, Fortinet, Trend Micro, Raytheon, Thales, Verizon and Centrify. Some of the […]

The global costs associated with cyber-crime have grown in recent years, according to a report released Feb. 21 by McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The 28-page report, titled “Economic Impact of Cybercrime – No Slowing Down” estimates the total cost of cyber-crime to the global community in 2017 at between […]

IBM reported on Feb. 21 that its’ X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) unit discovered a large Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack that is responsible for approximately $5 million in losses. According IBM X-Force IRIS, the attack is likely based out of Nigeria and has successfully targeted Fortune 500 companies. Though the source of […]

Number of DDoS Attacks Continues to Grow, Akamai Reports In the fourth quarter of 2017, the number of cyber-attacks once again grew, according to Akamai’s 4Q17 State of the Internet / Security Report, which it released on Feb. 20. The 28-page report revealed that the total number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks increased in the […]

Cisco released its 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report (ACR) on Feb. 21, revealing insights from its own efforts, as well as a survey of 3,600 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). Among the high-level findings in the 68-page report is that 39 percent of organizations stated they rely on automation for their cyber-security efforts. Additionally, according to Cisco’s […]

DevOps vendor Chef announced on Feb. 20 the latest edition of its open-source InSpec compliance tool in an effort to accelerate and enable a DevSecOps approach to IT security. The emerging discipline of DevSecOps (Developer Security Operations) involves using programmatic constructs and automation to improve and scale IT security. With InSpec 2.0, organizations can define policy […]

Over the past week, Apple device users have been hoping to avoid receiving a message with a specific Indian symbol that crashes devices simply by having a user view the symbol. Apple users can now breathe a sigh of relief as the so-called “text bomb” has been patched. On Feb. 19, Apple patched the text […]

FedEx is the latest company to have inadvertently left personally identifiable information, publicly exposed on a cloud storage server. On Feb. 15, security firm Kromtech publicly reported that it discovered an un-secured cloud storage repository, which contained 119,000 scanned documents from both U.S. as well as international citizens. The data came from Bongo International which […]

When organizations in the Ukraine first began reporting in June 2017 that they had been impacted by a ransomware attack known as NotPetya, there was early speculation that Russia was involved. Now seven months after the devastating NotPetya attack, that spread far beyond the Ukraine to impact organizations around the world, global governments including the […]

Spam Volume Down, Phishing Attacks Up in 2017, Kaspersky Lab Finds To no one’s surprise, spam and phishing attacks continued to be security challenges in 2017, according to Kaspersky Lab. What is a surprise, however, is that the volume of spam as a percentage of total email actually declined in 2017, while phishing attacks increased […]

The U.S. Air Force has once again engaged with hackers in a bid to help improve the security of the Air Force’s public facing digital assets.  The 20-day Hack the Air Force 2.0 security initiative was operated by the HackerOne bug bounty platform and involved security researchers from 26 countries that were all looking to […]