Security

If you thought that Kilos were just a metric measure of weight, then we've got news for you. It's also the name of a dark web search engine that's becoming the Google of the internet underworld.

Thought to have evolved from an earlier search engine Grams -- see what they did there? -- Kilos clearly imitates Google's look and feel. Researchers at Digital Shadows believe that since going live towards the end of 2019 Kilos has indexed more platforms and added more search functionalities than Grams ever did.

When I started my 10-year career in IT, it was common in smaller companies to see IT departments managing physical security. IT teams knew when new staff were onboarded and offboarded, and access control was just another task to add to their processes. While larger organizations had IT departments as well, they also may have leaned more on a facilities department or even dedicated physical security staff.

Since then, the worlds of physical security and IT have converged. While some of this system has stayed the same, there’s been one major change: regardless of who’s in charge of managing physical security, IT is involved by either owning the system or individual parts of it -- tasks like network or server provisioning, database management, backups and firmware upgrades. Enterprises are starting to understand this convergence and that they must take a more active role in security and where it fits in the organization’s overall strategy. Teams responsible for security -- both physical security and IT -- will face increased calls to work together and address their companies’ ever-evolving security needs.

Vulnerability researchers were able to hijack a series of subdomains belonging to Microsoft after the company was found to be employing poor DNS practices.

Subdomains including mybrowser.microsoft.com and identityhelp.microsoft.com were among ten hijacked by a team of security researchers from Vullnerability. In all, more than 670 Microsoft subdomains were found to be at risk of being taken over.

A new report from Kaspersky shows 61 percent of companies globally have implemented IoT applications as the technology benefits businesses with savings, new income streams and increased production efficiency.

But 28 percent of organizations have experienced cybersecurity incidents targeted at connected devices, highlighting the need to protect IoT technology.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is a vendor-neutral authentication protocol that allows email domain owners to protect their domains from unauthorized use or spoofing.

A new report from anti-phishing specialist Valimail reveals that as of January 2020, nearly a million (933,973) domains have published DMARC records -- an increase of 70 percent compared to last year, and more than 180 percent growth in the last two years.

Let's Encrypt has discovered a bug in its Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) code and will have to revoke millions of certificates today unless customers force a renewal of their certificates.

Any site that fails to renew its certificate will display security warnings to visitors until the problem is rectified. While no specific sites have been mentioned, with up to three million certificates involved, there is a chance that some high-profile sites could be affected.

Cyber criminals launched a barrage of attacks in 2019, spurred on by botnets of infected IoT devices and by attacker interest in the Eternal Blue vulnerability.

Security company F-Secure's global network of honeypots saw 5.7 billion attacks during the year. For comparison, 2018 saw just over one billion attacks, while 2017 saw 792 million.

Companies are putting more resources into security technologies to detect and respond quickly to a data breach, but the number of breaches is still increasing according to a new report.

The latest annual corporate preparedness study from Experian, based on research carried out by the Ponemon Institute, shows 68 percent of respondents are putting more resources into security, with 57 percent also reporting that they believe their data breach response plans are 'very' or 'highly' effective, up from 49 percent in 2018.

An unsecured database has been found online that contains 146 million records about people who have used free Wi-Fi at railway stations in the UK.

The database was discovered by a security researcher on Amazon web services storage. It was found to include personal details such as usernames, dates of birth, email addresses and details of travel arrangements. Network Rail and the service provider C3UK have confirmed the data leak.

With the switch to the Chromium engine, there's a lot more to like about Microsoft Edge these days. Microsoft is now pushing the browser hard, with the promise of serious speed improvements being used as a lure.

The latest update offers something extra -- protection against potentially unwanted applications (PUA). Microsoft Edge will now step in and block adware, cryptocurrency miners and other unwanted nonsense, particularly when downloading free software. The Microsoft Edge Team explains how to get the most from the protection.

Despite a surge in app usage, with consumers downloading over 200 billion apps and spending more than $120 billion in app stores worldwide in 2019, Google's new security controls mean blacklisted apps available in the Play store dropped 76.4 percent.

The latest Mobile App Threat Landscape report from RiskIQ shows total blacklisted apps across all stores are down 20 percent.

Malwarebytes is today launching a new set of enhanced enterprise features for its business cloud platform, Malwarebytes Nebula.

The platform offers cloud delivery and management across the entire Malwarebytes’ product portfolio including Incidence Response, Endpoint Protection, and Endpoint Detection and Response. Native capabilities include guided UI, threat reporting, and simple API integrations, which enable security teams to overcome gaps in team experience and bandwidth.

Security teams can often spend as much time managing security tools as they do defending against threats, and this can lead to extra risk such as misconfigured controls.

Enterprise security company ReliaQuest is introducing a new capability to its GreyMatter platform. Called Verify it uses both provided and customizable attack simulations to verify that security investments are performing as expected.

A 1,500 percent increase in IoT traffic over the past year and a rise in unauthorized devices being used in the workplace represents a major threat to enterprise security, according to a new report.

The latest IoT report from cloud security company Zscaler reveals its customers are now generating more than a billion IoT transactions each month. Analysis of just two weeks of this traffic through Zscaler cloud found 553 different IoT devices across 21 categories from 212 manufacturers.

The UK's financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), has revealed details of a data breach that took place last year.

The FCA says that personal details of people who had made complaints against the watchdog were exposed following the online publication of a response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Among the exposed information are the names and numbers of those who had lodged complaints.