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No business is out of danger of cyberattacks today. However, specific industries are particularly at risk and a favorite of attackers. For years, the healthcare industry has taken the brunt of ransomware attacks, data breaches, and other cyberattacks. Why is the healthcare industry particularly at risk for a cyberattack? What are the unique challenges to cybersecurity in healthcare, and how can healthcare organizations address these? Healthcare at risk Attackers are targeting various industries across the board. However, attackers seem to have a particular affinity for healthcare organizations. For eleven consecutive years, in the  IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021 , healthcare had the highest industry cost of a breach. Additionally, Healthcare data breach costs increased from an average total cost of $7.13 million in 2020 to $9.23 million in 2021, a 29.5% increase. However, the tremendous cost sustained by healthcare organizations for data breach events is not only due to the

An effective cybersecurity strategy can be challenging to implement correctly and often involves many layers of security. Part of a robust security strategy involves performing what is known as a penetration test (pen test). The penetration test helps to discover vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your security defenses before the bad guys discover these. They can also help validate remedial efforts and solutions put in place to overcome previously discovered security vulnerabilities.  Let's look more closely at the pen test. What is included in a penetration test? How are they performed, and by whom? What steps should be taken after a penetration test? What is a penetration test? 1 — Simulated cyberattack A penetration test is, for all practical purposes, a simulated cyberattack on your business. However, it is carried out by the "good guys." An outside resource often conducts a penetration test, whether a third-party security consulting company or another security entity. Securit

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Although organizations commonly go to great lengths to address security vulnerabilities that may exist within their IT infrastructure, an organization's helpdesk might pose a bigger threat due to social engineering attacks. Social engineering is "the art of manipulating people so they give up confidential information," according to  Webroot . There are many different types of social engineering schemes but one is area of vulnerability is how social engineering might be used against a helpdesk technician to steal a user's credentials. The Process of Gaining Access With Social Engineering The first step in such an attack is usually for the attacker to gather information about the organization that they are targeting. The attacker might start by using information that is freely available on the Internet to figure out who within the organization is most likely to have elevated permissions or access to sensitive information. An attacker can often get this information

Google has announced plans to automatically enroll about 150 million users into its two-factor authentication scheme by the end of the year as part of its ongoing efforts to prevent unauthorized access to accounts and improve security. In addition, the internet giant said it also intends to require 2 million YouTube creators to switch on the setting, which it calls two-step verification (2SV), to protect their channels from potential takeover attacks. "2SV is strongest when it combines both 'something you know' (like a password) and 'something you have' (like your phone or a security key)," Google's AbdelKarim Mardini and Guemmy Kim  said  in a post, adding "having a second form of authentication dramatically decreases an attacker's chance of gaining access to an account." The rollout follows the  company's proposals  to beef up account sign-ins earlier this May, when it said it intends to "automatically enrolling users in 2SV i

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an unpatched security vulnerability in the protocol used by Microsoft Azure Active Directory that potential adversaries could abuse to stage undetected brute-force attacks. "This flaw allows threat actors to perform single-factor brute-force attacks against Azure Active Directory ( Azure AD ) without generating sign-in events in the targeted organization's tenant," researchers from Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a report published on Wednesday. Azure Active Directory is Microsoft's enterprise cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution designed for single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication. It's also a core component of Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), with capabilities to provide authentication to other applications via OAuth. The weakness resides in the  Seamless Single Sign-On  feature that allows employees to automatically sign in when using their corporate devices that

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new passwordless mechanism that allows users to access their accounts without a password by using Microsoft Authenticator, Windows Hello, a security key, or a verification code sent via SMS or email. The change is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks. "Except for auto-generated passwords that are nearly impossible to remember, we largely create our own passwords,"  said  Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Security, Compliance, and Identity. "But, given the vulnerability of passwords, requirements for them have gotten increasingly complex in recent years, including multiple symbols, numbers, case sensitivity, and disallowing previous passwords." "Passwords are incredibly inconvenient to create, remember, and manage across all the accounts in our lives," Jakkal added. Over the years, weak passwords have emerged as the entry point for a vast majority of attacks across enterprise and cons

There are plenty of pop culture references to rogue AI and robots, and appliances turning on their human masters. It is the stuff of science fiction, fun, and fantasy, but with IoT and connected devices becoming more prevalent in our homes, we need more discussion around cybersecurity and safety. Software is all around us, and it's very easy to forget just how much we're relying on lines of code to do all those clever things that provide us so much innovation and convenience. Much like web-based software, APIs, and mobile devices, vulnerable code in embedded systems can be exploited if it is uncovered by an attacker.  While it's unlikely that an army of toasters is coming to enslave the human race (although, the  Tesla bot  is a bit concerning) as the result of a cyberattack, malicious cyber events are still possible. Some of our cars, planes, and medical devices also rely on intricate embedded systems code to perform key tasks, and the prospect of these objects being compromised i

Microsoft's Active Directory is  said to be used by 95%  of Fortune 500. As a result, it is a prime target for attackers as they look to gain access to credentials in the organization, as compromised credentials provide one of the easiest ways for hackers to access your data. A key authentication technology that underpins Microsoft Active Directory is Kerberos. Unfortunately, hackers use many different attacks against Active Directory's implementation of the Kerberos authentication protocol. One of those is AS-REP Roasting. So what is AS-REP Roasting, and how can businesses protect themselves? What is Active Directory Kerberos? Kerberos was originally developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and centered around using tickets to establish trust. Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos found in Active Directory is based on Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5) as defined in  RFC 4120 . However, Microsoft has added to and enhanced Kerberos with it

One of the great resources available to businesses today is the large ecosystem of value-added services and solutions. Especially in technology solutions, there is no end to the services of which organizations can avail themselves. In addition, if a business needs a particular solution or service they don't handle in-house, there is most likely a third-party vendor that can take care of that for them. It is highly beneficial for businesses today to access these large pools of third-party resources. However, there can be security challenges for companies using third-party vendors and their services despite the benefits. Let's look at navigating vendor risk management as IT professionals and see how businesses can accomplish this in a highly complex cybersecurity world. How can third-party vendors introduce cybersecurity risks? As mentioned, third-party vendors can be highly beneficial to organizations doing business today. They allow companies to avoid building out technolo

Organizations today must give attention to their cybersecurity posture, including policies, procedures, and technical solutions for cybersecurity challenges.  This often results in a greater burden on the IT service desk staff as end-users encounter issues related to security software, policies, and password restrictions.  One of the most common areas where security may cause challenges for end-users is password policies and password changes. What are these issues? How can organizations reduce end-user password change frustration? First, let's consider the standard password policy, its role, and general settings affecting end-users. What are password policies? Most organizations today have a password policy in place. So, what is a password policy? Password policies define the types and content of passwords allowed or required of end-users in an identity and access management system. Various aspects of the password that businesses control may include the password's required

A software package available from the official NPM repository has been revealed to be actually a front for a tool that's designed to steal saved passwords from the Chrome web browser. The package in question, named " nodejs_net_server " and downloaded over 1,283 times since February 2019, was last updated seven months ago (version 1.1.2), with its corresponding repository leading to non-existent locations hosted on GitHub.  "It isn't malicious by itself, but it can be when put into the malicious use context," ReversingLabs researcher Karlo Zanki  said  in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "For instance, this package uses it to perform malicious password stealing and credential exfiltration. Even though this off-the-shelf password recovery tool comes with a graphical user interface, malware authors like to use it as it can also be run from the command line." While the first version of the package was put out just to test the process of p