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For as long as corporate IT has been in existence, users have been required to change their passwords periodically. In fact, the need for scheduled password changes may be one of the most long-standing of all IT best practices. Recently, however, things have started to change. Microsoft has reversed course on the best practices that it has had in place for decades and  no longer recommends that organizations require users to change passwords periodically . Organizations are being forced to consider, perhaps for the first time, whether or not requiring periodic password changes is a good idea. Microsoft password reset recommendations According to Microsoft, requiring users to change their passwords frequently does more harm than good.  Humans are notoriously resistant to change. When a user is forced to change their password, they will often come up with a new password that is based on their previous password. A user might, for example, append a number to the end of their password

Four Eastern European nationals face 20 years in prison for Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) charges after pleading guilty to providing bulletproof hosting services between 2008 and 2015, which were used by cybercriminals to distribute malware to financial entities across the U.S. The individuals, Aleksandr Grichishkin, 34, and Andrei Skvortsov, 34, of Russia; Aleksandr Skorodumov, 33, of Lithuania; and Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia, have been accused of renting their wares to cybercriminal clients, who used the infrastructure to disseminate malware such as Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel, and the Blackhole Exploit Kit that were capable of co-opting victim machines into a botnet, and stealing sensitive information. The deployment of malware caused or attempted to cause millions of dollars in losses to U.S. victims, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement on Friday. "A key service provided by the defendants was helping their clients to evade detection by

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Colonial Pipeline , which carries 45% of the fuel consumed on the U.S. East Coast, on Saturday said it halted operations due to a ransomware attack,  once again demonstrating  how critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks. "On May 7, the Colonial Pipeline Company learned it was the victim of a cybersecurity attack," the company  said  in a statement posted on its website. "We have since determined that this incident involves ransomware. In response, we proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems." Colonial Pipeline is the largest refined products pipeline in the U.S., a 5,500 mile (8,851 km) system involved in transporting over 100 million gallons from the Texas city of Houston to New York Harbor. Cybersecurity firm FireEye's Mandiant incident response division is said to be assisting with the investigation, according to reports from  B

WhatsApp on Friday disclosed that it won't deactivate accounts of users who don't accept its  new privacy policy  rolling out on May 15, adding it will continue to keep reminding them to accept the new terms. "No one will have their accounts deleted or lose functionality of WhatsApp on May 15 because of this update," the Facebook-owned messaging service  said  in a statement. The move marks a turnaround from its previous stance earlier this year when the company outlined plans to make the accounts completely inaccessible should users choose not to comply with the data-sharing agreement and opt not to have their WhatsApp account information shared with Facebook. "If you haven't accepted by [May 15], WhatsApp will not delete your account. However, you won't have full functionality of WhatsApp until you accept," the company had  previously said . "For a short time, you'll be able to receive calls and notifications, but won't be able to

Cyber operatives affiliated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) have switched up their tactics in response to previous public disclosures of their attack methods, according to a  new advisory  jointly published by intelligence agencies from the U.K. and U.S. Friday. "SVR cyber operators appear to have reacted [...] by changing their TTPs in an attempt to avoid further detection and remediation efforts by network defenders," the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)  said . These include the deployment of an open-source tool called  Sliver  to maintain their access to compromised victims as well as leveraging the ProxyLogon flaws in Microsoft Exchange servers to conduct post-exploitation activities. The development follows the  public attribution  of SVR-linked actors to the  SolarWinds  supply-chain attack last month. The adversary is also tracked under different monikers, such as Advanced Persistent Threat 29 (APT29), the Dukes, CozyBear, and Yttrium. T

Google has announced a number of user-facing and under-the-hood changes in an attempt to boost privacy and security, including rolling out two-factor authentication automatically to all eligible users and bringing iOS-styled privacy labels to Android app listings. "Today we ask people who have enrolled in  two-step verification  (2SV) to confirm it's really them with a simple tap via a Google prompt on their phone whenever they sign in," the company  said . "Soon we'll start automatically enrolling users in 2SV if their accounts are appropriately configured." Google Play To Get Apple-Like Privacy Labels The Google Play Store for Android is also getting a huge overhaul on the privacy front. The search giant said it plans to include a new  safety section  for app listings that highlights the type of data being collected and stored — such as approximate or precise location, contacts, personal information, photos and videos, and audio files — and how the dat

As many as six zero-days have been uncovered in an application called Remote Mouse, allowing a remote attacker to achieve full code execution without any user interaction. The unpatched flaws, collectively named ' Mouse Trap, ' were disclosed on Wednesday by security researcher Axel Persinger, who said, "It's clear that this application is very vulnerable and puts users at risk with bad authentication mechanisms, lack of encryption, and poor default configuration." Remote Mouse is a remote control application for Android and iOS that turns mobile phones and tablets into a wireless mouse, keyboard, and trackpad for computers, with support for voice typing, adjusting computer volume, and switching between applications with the help of a Remote Mouse server installed on the machine. The Android app alone has been installed over 10 million times. In a nutshell, the issues, which were identified by analysing the packets sent from the Android app to its Windows ser

Security researchers Thursday disclosed a new critical vulnerability affecting Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers that could be exploited by adversaries to carry out reflection-based denial-of-service attacks against authoritative nameservers. The flaw, called  'TsuNAME ,' was discovered by researchers from SIDN Labs and InternetNZ, which manage the national top-level internet domains '.nl' and '.nz' for the Netherlands and New Zealand, respectively. "TsuNAME occurs when domain names are misconfigured with cyclic dependent DNS records, and when vulnerable resolvers access these misconfigurations, they begin looping and send DNS queries rapidly to authoritative servers and other resolvers," the researchers said. A recursive DNS resolver is one of the core components involved in  DNS resolution , i.e., converting a hostname such as www.google.com into a computer-friendly IP address like 142.250.71.36. To achieve this, it responds to a client's r

An unknown threat actor with the capabilities to evolve and tailor its toolset to target environments infiltrated high-profile organizations in Asia and Africa with an evasive Windows rootkit since at least 2018. Called  'Moriya ,' the malware is a "passive backdoor which allows attackers to inspect all incoming traffic to the infected machine, filter out packets that are marked as designated for the malware and respond to them," said Kaspersky researchers Mark Lechtik and Giampaolo Dedola in a Thursday deep-dive. The Russian cybersecurity firm termed the ongoing espionage campaign  'TunnelSnake .' Based on telemetry analysis, less than 10 victims around the world have been targeted to date, with the most prominent targets being two large diplomatic entities in Southeast Asia and Africa. All the other victims were located in South Asia. The first reports of Moriya emerged last November when Kaspersky said it discovered the stealthy implant in the networks