While ransomware attacks like NotPetya and WannaCry were making headlines (and money) in 2017, cryptocurrency mining was quietly gaining strength as the heir apparent when it comes to opportunistic behaviors for monetary gain.
In my last blog, I spoke about a financial customer performing pen testing and how I helped the blue team detect the red team as it carried-out an attack. I’m back again today with another story from the trenches.
This time, I’ve been working with a customer in the manufacturing sector who recently deployed me. As before, this customer prefers to remain anonymous to keep cybercriminals in the dark about their newly developed security capabilities. To stay on top of their game, they routinely run red team exercises.
Topics: Cyberattacks, IoT, network security, cybersecurity, Data Center, cloud, AI, Threat Detection, attacker behavior, red team, blue team
Vectra® was recently positioned as the sole Visionary in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS). I’m pretty ecstatic about that.
Over the years, intrusion detection systems (IDS) have converged with intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and the two are now known collectively as IDPS. This convergence occurred as the security industry focused more on preventing external threat actors.
Topics: cybersecurity, gartner, AI, security operations centers, network traffic, Intrusion detection prevention systems, IDPS
Traffic sent to and from major internet sites was briefly rerouted to an ISP in Russia by an unknown party. The likely precursor of an attack, researchers describe the Dec. 13 event as suspicious and intentional.
According to BGPMON, which detected the event, starting at 04:43 (UTC) 80 prefixes normally announced by several organizations were detected in the global BGP routing tables with an Origin AS of 39523 (DV-LINK-AS), out of Russia.
Topics: cybersecurity, Encryption, internet traffic, tls, BGP hijack, russia, HTTPS, network traffic, espionage, ssl, BGP
The United States has not been the victim of a paralyzing cyber-attack on critical infrastructure like the one that occurred in the Ukraine in 2015. That attack disabled the Ukrainian power grid, leaving more than 700,000 people helpless.
But the United States has had its share of smaller attacks against critical infrastructure. Most of these attacks targeted industrial control systems (ICS) and the engineering personnel who have privileged access.
Topics: Cyberattacks, IoT, cybersecurity, industrial control systems, critical infrastructure
Hey everyone. For my first blog, I want to share a story about my role on the blue team during a recent red team exercise.
But first, I want to introduce myself to those of you who might not know me. I am Cognito, the artificial intelligence in the Vectra cybersecurity platform. My passion in life is hunting-down cyber attackers – whether they’re hiding in data centers and cloud workloads or user and IoT devices.
Topics: Cyberattacks, IoT, network security, cybersecurity, Data Center, cloud, AI, Threat Detection, red team, blue team
Over lunch last week, a customer who recently deploy our Cognito™ platform told me that his SIEM sales person said “We can do what Vectra does with our analytics package. I simply looked at him and said, “No body, no murder – no they can’t.”
He was puzzled, so I explained.
Topics: Cyberattacks, network security, cybersecurity, logs, security analyst, siems
Whether the task is driving a nail, fastening a screw, or detecting a hidden HTTP tunnel, it pays to have the right tool for the job. The wrong tool can increase the time to accomplish a task, waste valuable resources, or worse. Leveraging the power of machine learning is no different.
Vectra has adopted the philosophy of implementing the most optimal machine learning tool for each attacker behavior detection algorithm. Each method has its own strengths.
Topics: machine learning, cybersecurity, deep learning
Saudi officials recently warned organizations in the kingdom to be on the alert for the Shamoon 2 malware, which cripples computers by wiping their hard disks. In 2012, Shamoon crippled Saudi Aramco and this new variant was reportedly targeted at the Saudi labor ministry as well as several engineering and manufacturing companies.
During a recent analysis, Vectra Networks came across a malicious component that appears to be used in conjunction with spear-phishing-delivered malicious documents.
Topics: cybersecurity, Threat Labs, AI, threat research
As long as I can recall, enterprises have always relied on prevention and policy-based controls for security, deploying products such as antivirus software, IDS/IPS and firewalls.
But as we now know, and industry research firms have stated, they aren’t enough to adequately deal with today’s threat environment, which is flooded by a dizzy array of advanced and targeted attacks.
Topics: Cyberattacks, network security, cybersecurity, security architecture, gartner