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Disclosed earlier this year, potentially dangerous Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a large family of modern processors proven that speculative execution attacks can be exploited in a trivial way to access highly sensitive information. Since then, several more variants of speculative execution attacks have been discovered, including Spectre-NG , SpectreRSB, Spectre 1.1, Spectre1.2, TLBleed , Lazy FP , NetSpectre and Foreshadow , patches for which were released by affected vendors time-to-time. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. Now, the same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have uncovered 7 new transient execution attacks affecting 3 major processor vendors—Intel, AMD, ARM. W...

It's Patch Tuesday once again…time for another round of security updates for the Windows operating system and other Microsoft products. This month Windows users and system administrators need to immediately take care of a total of 63 security vulnerabilities, of which 12 are rated critical, 49 important and one moderate and one low in severity. Two of the vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month are listed as publicly known at the time of release, and one flaw is reported as being actively exploited in the wild by multiple cybercriminal groups. Zero-Day Vulnerability Being Exploited by Cyber Criminals The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8589 , which is being exploited in the wild by multiple advanced persistent threat groups was first spotted and reported by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs. The flaw resides in the Win32k component (win32k.sys), which if exploited successfully, could allow a malicious program to execute arbitrary code...

Another security vulnerability has been reported in Facebook that could have allowed attackers to obtain certain personal information about users and their friends, potentially putting the privacy of users of the world's most popular social network at risk. Discovered by cybersecurity researchers from Imperva, the vulnerability resides in the way Facebook search feature displays results for entered queries. According to Imperva researcher Ron Masas, the page that displays search results includes iFrame elements associated with each outcome, where the endpoint URLs of those iFrames did not have any protection mechanisms in place to protect against cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. It should be noted that the newly reported vulnerability has already been patched, and unlike previously disclosed flaw in Facebook that exposed personal information of 30 million users , it did not allow attackers to extract information from mass accounts at once. How Does the Facebo...

In 1999, Bruce Schneier wrote, "Complexity is the worst enemy of security." That was 19 years ago (!) and since then, cyber security has only become more complex. Today, controls dramatically outnumber staff available to support them. The Bank of America has a $400-million cyber budget to hire security staff and implement a broad array of products. But what if your budget and sophistication is just a tiny fraction of the Bank of America's? The remaining 99% of organizations understand that they don't have sufficient protection for their internal network, but they also realize that to be sufficiently secured they need to buy multiple solutions and hire a large team to maintain it – which isn't an option. So they either stay with just an AV or buy a point solution to defend a specific part of their internal environment from particular types of attacks – only to later find out it doesn't meet what they really need. Cynet wants to change all that. ...

Our partner Springboard, which provides online courses to help you advance your cybersecurity career with personalized mentorship from industry experts, recently researched current cybersecurity salaries and future earning potential in order to trace a path to how much money you can make. Here's what they found were the most important factors for making sure you earn as much as possible: 1) Choosing the right type of cybersecurity role and building your skill set The cybersecurity role you're in clearly makes a difference: the average salary for penetration testers is $55,000 according to U.S. data from Glassdoor. But cybersecurity engineers should expect to earn about $140,000—and engineers have a more natural path to becoming architects, who can earn even more. Cybersecurity analysts are somewhere in between, averaging about $80,000 a year. Of course, becoming a cybersecurity engineer requires more skills and experience than becoming a penetration tester, but you...