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An accountant and a security expert walk into a bar… SOC2 is no joke.  Whether you're a publicly held or private company, you are probably considering going through a Service Organization Controls (SOC) audit. For publicly held companies, these reports are required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and executed by a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). However, customers often ask for SOC2 reports as part of their vendor due diligence process.  Out of the three types of SOC reports, SOC2 is the standard to successfully pass regulatory requirements and signals high security and resilience within the organization — and is based on the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) attestation requirements. The purpose of this report is to evaluate an organization's information systems relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy — over a period of time (roughly six to twelve months).  As part of a SOC2 au...

Microsoft on Wednesday shed light on a previously undocumented Mac trojan that it said has undergone several iterations since its first appearance in September 2020, effectively granting it an "increasing progression of sophisticated capabilities." The company's Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team dubbed the new malware family " UpdateAgent ," charting its evolution from a barebones information stealer to a second-stage payload distributor as part of multiple attack waves observed in 2021. "The latest campaign saw the malware installing the evasive and persistent Adload adware, but UpdateAgent's ability to gain access to a device can theoretically be further leveraged to fetch other, potentially more dangerous payloads," the researchers  said . The actively in-development malware is said to be propagated via drive-by downloads or advertisement pop-ups that masquerade as legitimate software like video applications and support agents...

Cybersecurity researchers have turned the spotlight on a new wave of offensive cyberattacks targeting Palestinian activists and entities starting around October 2021 using politically-themed phishing emails and decoy documents. The intrusions are part of what Cisco Talos calls a longstanding espionage and information theft campaign undertaken by the  Arid Viper hacking group  using a Delphi-based implant called Micropsia dating all the way back to  June 2017 . The threat actor's  activities , also tracked under the monikers Desert Falcon and the APT-C-23, were first documented in  February 2015  by Kasperksy and subsequently in 2017, when Qihoo 360 disclosed details of  cross-platform   backdoors  developed by the group to strike Palestinian institutions. The Russian cybersecurity company-branded Arid Viper the "first exclusively Arabic APT group." Then in April 2021, Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed out the group's affiliations ...

The threat actor behind the supply chain compromise of SolarWinds has continued to expand its malware arsenal with new tools and techniques that were deployed in attacks as early as 2019, once indicative of the elusive nature of the campaigns and the adversary's ability to maintain persistent access for years. According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which  detailed the novel tactics  adopted by the Nobelium hacking group last week, two sophisticated malware families were placed on victim systems — a Linux variant of GoldMax and a new implant dubbed TrailBlazer — long before the scale of the attacks came to light. Nobelium, the Microsoft-assigned moniker for the  SolarWinds intrusion  in December 2020, is also tracked by the wider cybersecurity community under the names UNC2452 (FireEye), SolarStorm (Unit 42), StellarParticle (CrowdStrike), Dark Halo (Volexity), and Iron Ritual (Secureworks). The  malicious activities  have since been attributed to...

We hear about the need for better visibility in the cybersecurity space – detecting threats earlier and more accurately. We often hear about the dwell time and the time to identify and contain a data breach. Many of us are familiar with IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report that has been tracking this statistic for years. In the 2021 report, IBM found that, on average, it takes an average of 212 days to identify a breach and then another 75 days to contain the breach, for a total of 287 days. A new  solution overview document  provides insights on how XDR provider Cynet tackles the difficult problem of greatly improving threat visibility. Cynet takes a modern approach that includes a greater level of native technology integration and advanced automation purposely designed for organizations with smaller security teams than Fortune 500 organizations. A live webinar will discuss the same topic ( Register here ) Cynet's Keys for Threat Visibility Einstein said that the definition...

As many as 23 new high severity security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in different implementations of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) firmware used by numerous vendors, including Bull Atos, Fujitsu, HP, Juniper Networks, Lenovo, among others. The vulnerabilities reside in Insyde Software's InsydeH2O UEFI firmware, according to enterprise firmware security company  Binarly , with a majority of the anomalies diagnosed in the System Management Mode ( SMM ). UEFI is a software specification that provides a standard programming interface connecting a computer's firmware to its operating system during the booting process. In x86 systems, the UEFI firmware is usually stored in the flash memory chip of the motherboard. "By exploiting these vulnerabilities, attackers can successfully install malware that survives operating system re-installations and allows the bypass of endpoint security solutions (EDR/AV),  Secure Boot , and Virtualization-Based Securit...

A politically motivated hacker group tied to a series of espionage and sabotage attacks on Israeli entities in 2021 incorporated a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app as part of a conscious effort to stay under the radar. Cybersecurity company Cybereason, which has been tracking the operations of the Iranian actor known as Moses Staff, dubbed the malware " StrifeWater ." "The StrifeWater RAT appears to be used in the initial stage of the attack and this stealthy RAT has the ability to remove itself from the system to cover the Iranian group's tracks," Tom Fakterman, Cybereason security analyst,  said  in a report. "The RAT possesses other capabilities, such as command execution and screen capturing, as well as the ability to download additional extensions." Moses Staff came to light towards the end of last year when Check Point Research  unmasked  a series of attacks aimed at Israeli or...