Cybersecurity Expert

A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, January 2021. Throughout January further details about the scale and sophistication of SolarWinds suspected nation-state hack came to light. A growing number of cybersecurity vendors like CrowdStrike, Fidelis, FireEye, Malwarebytes, Palo Alto Networks, Qualys and Mimecast all confirming as being targeted in the supply-chain espionage attack. The  finger of suspicion is pointing directly at Russia, with the Russian backed hacking group APT29 'Fancy Bear' cited as the culprits by many security researchers and intelligence analysts. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr both publically stated they believe Moscow are behind the attack, as did the chairs of the Senate and House of Representatives' intelligence committees.  US government investigators and Microsoft have uncovered additional evidence, con...

Microsoft's annual flagship 'Ignite' conference  is underway, amongst the hundreds of announcements and content  covered, there are a number of interesting security-related updates and new releases by Microsoft, highlighted below. Microsoft Ignite Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2019/11/04/further-enhancing-security-microsoft Microsoft is extending their endpoint detection and response capability in Microsoft Defender ATP to include MacOS, now in preview. Microsoft is planning to add support for Linux servers. Application Guard for Office https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2019/11/04/further-enhancing-security-microsoft Now available in preview, Application Guard for Office provides hardware-level and container-based protection against potentially malicious Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. It utilises Microsoft Defender ATP to establish whether a document is either malicious o...

Security researchers found there were able to find numerous sensitive documents by searching Microsoft’s Office 365 documents made publically accessible through the Docs.com website. Documents found included business confidential information, passwords and personal data. The issue was not caused by any security vulnerability in O365, but by its use rs misconfiguring or not understand the access permissions on their Microsoft O365 file storage, inadvertently permitting public access to t heir confidential data.  Businesses and users need to meet cloud services halfway when it comes to security, that starts obtaining a clear understanding of what security the cloud service does and does not do, so ensure your security homework is done before adopting the cloud. A patch for a critical vulnerability in Apache (Server) Struts was released this month, the vulnerability, which is being actively exploited by cyber criminals in ransomware attacks, allows the remote execution of comma...