GoldenEye Ransomware: Shaken, Not Stirred - Notes from the Underground
Author: Jim Hansen
GoldenEye Ransomware: Shaken, Not Stirred - Notes from the Underground
What do action, adventure, cool gadgets, Vodka martinis—shaken not stirred—and ransomware all have in common? One word – GoldenEye. For my fellow Gen Xers, you probably remember this iconic James Bond film starring Pierce Brosnan as 007. I sure do. It was one of the best James Bond films ever made. The film involved an insidious plot…
Ransomware+: A New Shade of Evil
Ransomware has become an ever growing topic of conversation and concern in the security community during the last several years. According to the ZDNet article earlier this year — Ransomware is now the biggest cybersecurity threat — Danny Palmer asserts that ransomware has replaced the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) as the most problematic cyber threat. He’s not wrong.…
What is File Integrity Monitoring?
We hear a lot in the news today about how important it is to make sure that critical files have not been tampered with – whether its malware, hackers, or employees/contractors - if we can be alerted the moment critical system files and sensitive data files have experienced unauthorized changes, then we’ve gone a long way in…
Open Threat Exchange (OTX) Introduces New Features
AlienVault is releasing another major new feature called Private Groups in Open Threat Exchange (OTX) today. This new feature allows users within OTX to create a private group of other OTX users and control access to the threat data shared within that group. Threat data contained within the private group stays in the private group and is not shared more…
Windows XP End-of-Life: How USM and OTX can help avoid the security armageddon - Part 2
This is the second of a two-part blog focused specifically on Windows XP end-of-life. Recently, I sat down with our Director of Sales Engineering, Tom D’Aquino, to talk about the Windows XP End-of-Service that has everybody riled up. The end of service date should be no surprise. Microsoft has a pretty well-defined software lifecycle policy, and they make…
Windows XP end-of-life: Security armageddon or just another day in the trenches? Part 1
This is the first of a two-part blog focused specifically on Windows XP end-of-life. When Microsoft announced their decision to End-of-Life Windows XP on April 8th, 2014, it caused quite the media stir, and continues to as we reach that date. I decided to sit down with our Director of Sales Engineering, Tom D’Aquino, to talk about what exactly…