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Cyberattacks on small and midsized companies in 2019 cost $200,000 per company on average, mercilessly putting many of them out of business, says CNBC in its analysis of a recent Accenture report. In light of the global cybersecurity skills shortage, the number is set to soar in 2020. Solely in the UK, over 50,000 British SMEs could collapse next year following a cyberattack. This article brings a list of free tools that are already being used to combat these alarming challenges and enabling SMEs to arm themselves against a wide range of cyber offenders. Website Security Test with GDPR and PCI DSS Compliance Scan The problem: It would be hard to come across an SME without a website, or at least a web page on the Internet. Such websites are habitually poorly protected, becoming low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Even if the website does not store or handle any payment transactions or otherwise sensitive information, once breached, access to it can be sold in Dark Web mark

Zombieload is back. This time a new variant (v2) of the data-leaking side-channel vulnerability also affects the most recent Intel CPUs, including the latest Cascade Lake, which are otherwise resistant against attacks like Meltdown , Foreshadow and other MDS variants (RIDL and Fallout). Initially discovered in May this year, ZombieLoad is one of the three novel types of microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) speculative execution vulnerabilities that affect Intel processor generations released from 2011 onwards. The first variant of ZombieLoad is a Meltdown-type attack that targets the fill-buffer logic allowing attackers to steal sensitive data not only from other applications and the operating system but also from virtual machines running in the cloud with common hardware. ZombieLoad v2 Affects Latest Intel CPUs Now, the same group of researchers has disclosed details of a second variant of the vulnerability, dubbed ZombieLoad v2 and tracked as CVE-2019-11135 , that r

A team of cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of two new potentially serious CPU vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to retrieve cryptographic keys protected inside TPM chips manufactured by STMicroelectronics or firmware-based Intel TPMs. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a specialized hardware or firmware-based security solution that has been designed to store and protect sensitive information from attackers even when your operating system gets compromised. TMP technology is being used widely by billion of desktops, laptops, servers, smartphones, and even by Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to protect encryption keys, passwords, and digital certificates. Collectively dubbed as TPM-Fail , both newly found vulnerabilities, as listed below, leverage a timing-based side-channel attack to recover cryptographic keys that are otherwise supposed to remain safely inside the chips. CVE-2019-11090 : Intel fTPM vulnerabilities CVE-2019-16863 : STMicroelectronics

There's a natural human desire to avoid threatening scenarios. The irony, of course, is if you hope to attain any semblance of security, you've got to remain prepared to confront those very same threats. As a decision-maker for your organization, you know this well. But no matter how many experts or trusted cybersecurity tools your organization has a standing guard, you're only as secure as your weakest link. There's still one group that can inadvertently open the gates to unwanted threat actors—your own people. Security must be second nature for your first line of defense For your organization to thrive, you need capable employees. After all, they're your source for great ideas, innovation, and ingenuity. However, they're also human. And humans are fallible. Hackers understand no one is perfect, and that's precisely what they seek to exploit. This is why your people must become your first line of defense against cyber threats. But to do so, they need to learn how to defend thems

Complying with cyber regulations forms a significant portion of the CISO's responsibility. Compliance is, in fact, one of the major drivers in the purchase and implementation of new security products. But regulations come in multiple different colors and shapes – some are tailored to a specific vertical, while others are industry-agnostic. Some bare explicit consequences for failing to comply, while others have a more guidance-like nature. The Comprehensive Security Guide (download here) , for the first time, provides security executives with a single document that gathers standardized and easy to use templates of all main compliance frameworks: PCI-DSS, HIPAA, NIST Cyber Security Framework and GDPR. Employing an independent auditor is the common practice to ensure one complies with the desired regulation. However, before having an external auditor excavating through the organizations' security stack internals, it makes sense for the security stakeholders to independ

It appears that Facebook at the center of yet another issue involving privacy. Reportedly, multiple iPhone users have come forward on social media complaining that the Facebook app secretly activates their smartphone's camera in the background while they scroll through their Facebook feeds or looking at the photos on the social network. As shown in the Twitter videos below, when users click on an image or video on the social media to full screen and then return it back to normal, an issue with the Facebook app for iOS slightly shifts the app to the right. It opens a space on the left from where users can see the iPhone's camera activated in the background. However, at this moment, it's not clear if it's just an UI bug where Facebook app incorrectly but only accesses the camera interface, or if it also records or uploads something, which, if proven right, would be the most disastrous moment in Facebook's history. Found a @facebook #security & #pri

ZoneAlarm, an internet security software company owned by Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Technologies, has suffered a data breach exposing data of its discussion forum users, the company confirmed The Hacker News. With nearly 100 million downloads, ZoneAlarm offers antivirus software, firewall, and additional virus protection solutions to home PC users, small businesses, and mobile phones worldwide. Though neither ZoneAlarm or its parent company Check Point has yet publicly disclosed the security incident, the company quietly sent an alert via email to all affected users over this weekend, The Hacker News learned. The email-based breach notification advised ZoneAlarm forum users to immediately change their forum account passwords, informing them hackers have unauthorizedly gained access to their names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and date of births. Moreover, the company has also clarified that the security incident only affects users registered with the "

Security researchers at Bitdefender have discovered a high-severity security vulnerability in Amazon's Ring Video Doorbell Pro devices that could allow nearby attackers to steal your WiFi password and launch a variety of cyberattacks using MitM against other devices connected to the same network. In case you don't own one of these, Amazon's Ring Video Doorbell is a smart wireless home security doorbell camera that lets you see, hear and speak to anyone on your property from anywhere in the World. The smart doorbell needs to be connected to your WiFi network, allowing you to remotely access the device from a smartphone app to perform all tasks wirelessly. While setting up the device for the very first time and share your WiFi password with it, you need to enable the configuration mode from the doorbell. Entering into the configuration mode turns on a built-in, unprotected wireless access point, allowing the RING smartphone app installed on your device to automati

Cloud services and networking are driving the concept of digital businesses, yet traditional networking and cybersecurity architectures are far from meeting the demands of the digital business. Gartner's " The Future of Network Security Is in the Cloud " report spells out the potential for the transformation of networking and security in the cloud, built upon a new networking and security model. That model is called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) , a term coined by Gartner's leading security analysts Neil MacDonald, Lawrence Orans, and Joe Skorupa. Gartner claims that SASE has the potential to invert the established networking and security service stack from one based in the data center into a design that shifts the focal point of identity to the user and the endpoint device. SASE addresses the numerous problems that have been discovered with traditional cybersecurity methods used in the cloud. Many of those problems have roots with the ideology that netwo