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If you haven't heard of the  term , you will soon enough. SOC 2, meaning System and Organization Controls 2 , is an auditing procedure developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). Having SOC 2 compliance means you have implemented organizational controls and practices that provide assurance for the safeguarding and security of client data. In other words, you have to show (e.g., document and demonstrate) that you are acting in good faith with other people's information. In its simplest definition, it's a report card from an auditor.  At Rewind, before SOC 2, we had some processes in place, such as change management procedures for when emergency fixes need to be released to production quickly. But after beginning our SOC 2 journey we realized that we did not have a great way to track the reasoning behind a required emergency change, and this was required for our SOC 2 audit. So we worked with our auditor to set up a continuous auditing system for these requests, p...

The practice of blurring out text using a method called pixelation may not be as secure as previously thought. While the most foolproof way of concealing sensitive textual information is to use opaque black bars, other redaction methods like pixelation can achieve the opposite effect, enabling the reversal of pixelized text back into its original form. Dan Petro, a lead researcher at offensive security firm Bishop Fox, has  demonstrated  a new open-source tool called  Unredacter  to reconstruct text from the pixelated images, effectively leaking the very information that was meant to be protected. The tool is also seen as an improvement over an existing utility named  Depix , which works by looking up what permutations of pixels could have resulted in certain pixelated blocks to recover the text. The threat model works on the underlying hypothesis that given a piece of text containing both redacted and un-redacted information, the attacker uses the infor...

Cybersecurity researchers have unpacked a nascent Golang-based botnet called  Kraken  that's under active development and features an array of backdoor capabilities to siphon sensitive information from compromised Windows hosts. "Kraken already features the ability to download and execute secondary payloads, run shell commands, and take screenshots of the victim's system," threat intelligence firm ZeroFox  said  in a report published Wednesday. Discovered first in October 2021, early variants of Kraken have been found to be based on source code uploaded to GitHub, although it's unclear if the repository in question belongs to the malware's operators or if they simply chose to start their development using the code as a foundation. The botnet – not to be confused with a  2008 botnet  of the same name – is perpetuated using  SmokeLoader , which chiefly acts as a loader for next-stage malware, allowing it to quickly scale in size and expand its netw...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

The politically motivated Moses Staff hacker group has been observed using a custom multi-component toolset with the goal of carrying out espionage against its targets as part of a new campaign that exclusively singles out Israeli organizations. First  publicly documented  in late 2021, Moses Staff is believed to be sponsored by the Iranian government, with attacks reported against entities in Israel, Italy, India, Germany, Chile, Turkey, the U.A.E., and the U.S. Earlier this month, the hacker collective was observed incorporating a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called " StrifeWater " that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app to evade detection. "Close examination reveals that the group has been active for over a year, much earlier than the group's first official public exposure, managing to stay under the radar with an extremely low detection rate," findings from FortiGuard Labs show . The latest threat activity involves an atta...

State-sponsored actors backed by the Russian government regularly targeted the networks of several U.S. cleared defense contractors (CDCs) to acquire proprietary documents and other confidential information pertaining to the country's defense and intelligence programs and capabilities. The sustained espionage campaign is said to have commenced at least two years ago from January 2020, according to a  joint advisory  published by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). "These continued intrusions have enabled the actors to acquire sensitive, unclassified information, as well as CDC-proprietary and export-controlled technology," the agencies  said . "The acquired information provides significant insight into U.S. weapons platforms development and deployment timelines, vehicle specifications, and plans for communications infrastructure and information technology....

The increasing volume and sophistication of cyberattacks have naturally led many companies to invest in additional cybersecurity technologies. We know that expanded threat detection capabilities are necessary for protection, but they have also led to several unintended consequences. The "more is not always better" adage fits this situation perfectly. An upcoming webinar by cybersecurity company Cynet ( register here ) sheds light on alert overload, the result of too many alerts. Beyond discussing the stress and strain placed on cybersecurity teams trying to sift through an ongoing barrage of threat alerts, Cynet shows how this situation actually degrades cybersecurity effectiveness. Then Cynet will talk about the way out – something important to almost every company suffering from alert overload. The Real Impact of Alert Overload It's interesting that threat alerts, which are so vital to protection have also become an obstacle. Cynet lays out two key reasons why this has come about...

The notorious TrickBot malware is targeting customers of 60 financial and technology companies, including cryptocurrency firms, primarily located in the U.S., even as its operators have updated the botnet with new anti-analysis features. "TrickBot is a sophisticated and versatile malware with more than 20 modules that can be downloaded and executed on demand," Check Point researchers Aliaksandr Trafimchuk and Raman Ladutska  said  in a report published today. In addition to being both prevalent and persistent, TrickBot has  continually   evolved  its tactics to go past security and detection layers. To that end, the malware's "injectDll" web-injects module, which is responsible for stealing banking and credential data, leverages anti-deobfuscation techniques to crash the web page and thwart attempts to scrutinize the source code. Also put in place are anti-analysis guardrails to prevent security researchers from sending automated requests to command-and-con...