A decade inside Microsoft Security

Ten years ago, I walked onto Microsofts Redmond campus to take a role on a team that partnered with governments and CERTs on cybersecurity. Id just left a meaningful career in US federal government service because I thought it would be fascinating to experience first-hand the security challenges...

From Regular Expressions to AI

Three generations of attack detection methodology The oldest and well-studied approach is based on signatures and heuristics. From before the internet times, this approach was implemented in most kinds of detection systems from firewalls to anti-viruses. The second genera- tion represents an...

Reduce cloud adoption risks and deliver superior digital experiences with Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform - Part 1

Businesses are rapidly moving to the cloud and a recent IDG survey indicates that 70% of businesses have at least 1 application in the cloud and 16% plan to take their first app to the cloud in the next 12 months. However public cloud providers present their own challenges. They are unreliable...

Fraud Detection in Pokémon Go

I play Pokémon Go. There, I've admitted it. One of the interesting aspects of the game I've been watching is how the game's publisher, Niantic, deals with cheaters. There are three basic types of cheating in Pokémon Go. The first is botting, where a computer plays the game instead of a person. Th...

Machine Learning: Identify the Unpredictable – Whiteboard Wednesday [Video]

When it comes to identifying insider threats, the fundamental challenge is how to determine when data access appears out of the ordinary for a typical user or system, and of those instances, which ones are dangerous versus merely unusual. A lot of solutions today serve up so many policy violation...

Monitor More, Worry Less. Outpace Threats With Machine Learning.

In the past two years, enterprises have created more data than has been created in the entire history of humankind. At scale, securing this amount of data requires a re-think of how we grant and revoke access to sensitive files and, more importantly, how we identify and track the inevitable acces...

Technology to Out Sex Workers

Two related stories: PornHub is using machine learning algorithms to identify actors in different videos, so as to better index them. People are worried that it can really identify them, by linking their stage names to their real names. Facebook somehow managed to link a sex worker's clients unde...

Why ArtsSEC decided to partner with Wallarm

by Maximiliano Soler, @maxisoler by Maximiliano Soller, CTO of ArtsSEC The greatest thing with partnerships is how well the organisations’ expertise complement each other. Our partnership with Wallarm has incredibly exceeded our expectations in their innovation and expertise in web application...

X-Pack Alerting and Kibana 5.6.1 security update

X-Pack alerting privileged user multiple issues An error was found in the permission model used by X-Pack alerting whereby users mapped to certain built-in roles could create a watch that results in that user gaining elevated privileges. Affected Versions: 5.0.0 to 5.6.0 Solutions and Mitigations...

The New Email Security Technologies Powered by XGen™

Today we are excited to introduce new email security technologies powered by XGen™ and a new product, Smart Protection for Office 365. This new service combines the advantages of both an email gateway with an API service integrated solution to provide complete threat protection for Microsoft Offi...

Threatpost News Wrap, September 22, 2017

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook recap the news of the week and look back at the Equifax saga so far. They also discuss a Google HTTPS warnings paper, cryptocurrency mining at the Pirate Bay, and bringing machine learning to passwords. Download: ThreatpostNewsWrapSeptember222017.mp3 Show notes: Equifa...

Trend Micro Security’s Layered Protection, XGen™ Machine Learning, and Folder Shield Protect You Against Unknown Ransomware and Malware

On May 12 of 2017, the WannaCry ransomware struck across the globe, encrypting computers by exploiting a critical vulnerability in Windows, first discovered by the US National Security Agency. Among its first targets were the British National Health Service, Federal Express, and Telefonica, but...

Explained: False positives

What are false positives? False positive, which is sometimes written as f/p, is an expression commonly used in cybersecurity to denote that a file or setting has been flagged as malicious when it’s not. In statistics, false positives are called Type I errors, because they check for a particular...

An Established Solution for Mobile Threats

As much as smartphones and applications have evolved over the years, so has mobile malware. We’re seeing an increasing number of threats—from mobile ransomware and auto-clicking adware to dangerous backdoors that can compromise your privacy. And there are also legitimate personal applications tha...

Sensitive Data Access: Where Traditional UBA Solutions Fall Short – Whiteboard Wednesday [Video]

In today’s global information economy an ever-increasing amount of sensitive data is collected, used, exchanged, analyzed, and retained. And with that comes an ever-increasing number of accidental or intentional data breaches. Identifying inappropriate access to data is paramount in stopping a...

Mobile Menace Monday: Implications of Google Play Protect

Along with the recent release of Google’s new OS, Android 8.0 Oreo, they also released a new security suite known as Google Play Protect. As blogged about in July in Play Protect: Android’s new security system is now available, this new suite has been available since mid-May. To reiterate As note...

What’s new in Gartner WAF Magic Quadrant 2017?

To tell the truth, I was not much interested in Web Application Firewall market since the time when I was doing competitive analysis in Positive Technologies. And a few days ago Gartner published a fresh WAF research with interesting Magic Quadrants. I decided to figure out what's new there. Here...

Amazon Macie and Deep Security

Amazon S3 stores trillions of objects and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second. By any metric, it’s massive. With unparalleled durability and availability, it’s the backbone of AWS’ data services. This morning at the AWS Summit in New York City, AWS launched a new service: Amazon...

Confusing Self-Driving Cars by Altering Road Signs

Researchers found that they could confuse the road sign detection algorithms of self-driving cars by adding stickers to the signs on the road. They could, for example, cause a car to think that a stop sign is a 45 mph speed limit sign. The changes are subtle, though -- look at the photo from the...

Windows Defender ATP machine learning: Detecting new and unusual breach activity

Microsoft has been investing heavily in next-generation security technologies. These technologies use our ability to consolidate large sets of data and build intelligent systems that learn from that data. These machine learning ML systems flag and surface threats that would otherwise remain...