Fahmida brings over a decade of IT security news reporting along with ten years of network administration and software development to Decipher. Every security story has a human face, and her goal is to bring those stories to light. As the senior managing editor of Decipher, she will focus on ways security can impact how people live, work, and play. She enjoys working on stories that speak to those outside the security industry, highlighting the intersection of security and other technology areas. Over the years, she has seen enough to make her overzealous about her personal threat-model, but she doesn’t hold it against anyone for having a more relaxed worldview.
The breach of Capital One data on Amazon Web Services is a insider threat story. Defending from malicious insiders is a different ballgame than from outsiders.
VxWorks is the operating system no one has ever heard of, but it is widely used in industrial control systems, robotics and automation, industrial control systems, and Internet of Things. The URGENT/11 group of vulnerabilities in these devices can be exploited remotely.
Zero day vulnerabilities exploited in the wild is never good news, but if the user's machine is running the latest version of the operating system, the chances are good that the attack won't be successful against that machine, according to a Microsoft security engineer.
What a week for BlueKeep watchers. Chinese-language slide deck appears on GitHub with details on how to use the BlueKeep vulnerability, Immunity includes a working exploit in its penetration testing kit, and the WatchBog cryptocurrency-mining botnet now has a scanner looking for vulnerable Windows machines with Remote Desktop enabled.
Law enforcement officials and lawmakers asking the technology industry to provide backdoors into encryption products is not anything new, but U.S. Attorney General William Barr did something past officials hadn't done before: Barr specified that the backdoors and workarounds should be in encrypted messaging apps.