How I Found CVE-2018-8819: Out-of-Band (OOB) XXE in WebCTRL

I like to do bug bounties from time to time, mostly when I am sacrificing sleep once the kids are finally out cold. This seemed like a worthy experience to document. Let me just start by saying I dont plan on going into the whole recon bits too deeply here. Maybe I will someday if I ever have...

Continuous Monitoring in the Cloud

I recently spoke at the Cloud Security Alliances Federal Summit on the topic "Continuous Monitoring / Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation CDM Concepts in the Cloud." As government has moved and will continue to move to the cloud, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure continuous...

NIST SP 800-171: What U.S. Government Contractors Need to Know

In December 2016, NIST released Special Publication 800-171, Revision 1: Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems. Since that publication, I have worked with dozens of government contractors to help them understand this publication and determine if and how it applies t...

Capital One Fraud Seminar Recap

Recently, I was honored to be invited as a panelist at a recent seminar hosted by Capital One Spark Business to share some views on fraud prevention and cybersecurity with their customers. I was joined by a few other industry experts, Gerald Glickman, a Manager of Capital Ones Fraud Analysis team...

Accelerating Point-to-Point (P2PE) Adoption

How Coalfire is Helping Increase Access to PCI-listed P2PE Solutions - Use of a PCI-listed P2PE solution offers significant security and compliance benefits. However, merchants and service providers are still challenged to take full advantage of this opportunity. Coalfire has invested in solving...

New York State Implements Cybersecurity Regulation 23 NYCRR 500

On March 1st, 2017, sweeping new cybersecurity requirements were placed on organizations regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services. The law applies to a broad set of covered entities that are supervised by the NYDFS, including banks, trusts, budget planners, check cashers,...

What’s Your Computer Thinking About? Examining Random Access Memory (RAM)

How valuable would it be to be able to read another persons mind? To know what theyre thinking or planning to do would be invaluable. Or, how valuable would it be to know what they have done in the recent past, especially if you believed they were involved in some criminal activity? Who they were...

Is the “Day of Reckoning” getting closer for a large scale cyber-attack?

The "Phony War" is how commentators described the seven-month period of eerie quiet that prevailed in Western Europe between Germanys 1939 invasion of Poland and its later move into the Benelux countries, when erstwhile allies Britain and France avoided offensive operations and simply waited for...

The Federal Government in Financial Services' Cybersecurity

Its no secret that the internet has changed the way we do business in nearly every industry. On the other hand, the dangers of limited cyber regulations are quickly becoming a focus for the government due to the frequency and impact of data breaches. Its becoming apparent that convenience comes a...

Cyber Security Awareness - Are you Doing All You Can to Stay Safe?

Every company has vulnerabilities and must learn to protect themselves from fast-moving cyber threats. Below are a few tips to keep in mind as you examine your network security:...

Phishing Season: Spam on the rise

Within the past two weeks there have been several reports on the increase in email spam, which can be directly correlated to an increase in phishing schemes and malware attacks. These attacks are frequently being delivered under the guise of legitimate business: they come in the form of shipment...

Guardians of IoT: Strengthening the security of IoT-connected medical devices in the healthcare industry

The healthcare ecosystem requires stakeholders to have a comprehensive grasp of the industry-specific vulnerabilities, especially in its emerging technology. Coalfire examines key healthcare-specific IoT vulnerabilities, helping healthcare IoT manufacturers and medical facility administrations kn...

Threat-informed defense: The evolution of red teaming in cybersecurity

While there are several approaches to vulnerability management like pen testing and red teaming, adversary emulation is the only method that contributes to a threat-informed defense cybersecurity strategy...

Threat-informed defense: The evolution of red teaming in cybersecurity

While there are several approaches to vulnerability management like pen testing and red teaming, adversary emulation is the only method that contributes to a threat-informed defense cybersecurity strategy...

End the compliance management blues

Coalfire teamed up with one of the worlds leading security technology engineering firms, anecdotes, to expand Compliance Essentials capabilities - automating compliance workflows and risks, evidence collection, and audit execution. All within one platform...

Highlights from FedRAMP®’s new Penetration Test Guidance

In an effort to stay on top of the evolving threats being faced by the cloud community, the FedRAMP PMO released Version 3.0 of their Penetration Test Guidance, dated June 30, 2022. 3PAOs and CSPs should begin using the updated pen test guide for pen tests beginning shortly after June 5, 2022,...

Properties of secure hash functions

The news of NIST and their SHA-3 algorithm competition and a recent lunch and learn at Denim Group reminded me of the Cryptographic lectures I gave at UTSA. One of the hardest concepts my students had grasping was secure cryptographic hash functions, partially because of the number theory, but al...

Mining Splunk's Internal Logs

Splunk is great about logging its warnings and errors, but it wont tell you about them - you have to ask! As the leading machine-generated data analysis software, its not surprising that Splunk excels at creating robust logs. The current version of Splunk Enterprise v 8.05 generates 22 different...

Deserialized Double Dirty

Recently I was able to fully root a NetApp OnCommand Performance Manager appliance using a Java Deserialization vulnerability and Dirty COW...

The Dangers of Client Probing on Palo Alto Firewalls

While performing a routine internal penetration test, I began the assessment by running Responder in analyze mode just to get an idea of what was being sent over broadcast. Much to my surprise, I found that shortly after running it, a hash was captured by Responders SMB listener...

IoT Discussion at the Leidos Supplier Innovation & Technology Symposium

Coalfire was asked to participate on a technical panel about the Internet of Things IoT at the Leidos Supplier Innovation & Technology Symposium on June 6. This event is a dynamic day enabling Leidos largest suppliers as well as targeted start-ups to showcase their offerings and capabilities to a...

New SEC Cyber Risk Disclosure Guidance: What Does It Mean for Public Companies?

On February 21, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission SEC issued the long overdue cybersecurity interpretive guidance to address the methods and timing of cybersecurity risks and incidents disclosures. To signify the importance of this updated guidance, five SEC commissioners issued the...

Deploying and Troubleshooting Compliance Baselines

If you are in the IT space, youve most likely encountered or are bound by some form of regulation/framework such as PCI, HIPAA, FISMA, and/or CGIS. Most of these compliance programs require a hardened baseline to be implemented within your information systems to reduce the risk and impact of an...

How Twitter, Amazon, and others were impacted by last Friday's DDOS attack - and what you might want to do about it.

Our partner, Chertoff Group issued the following advisory. Client Advisory: October 21 distributed denial of service DDoS attack. A major distributed denial of service DDoS attack recently 10/21/16 disrupted Internet communications throughout parts of the United States in several waves, and there...

Creating a Cyber Insurance Policy

According to research from PartnerRe and Advisen, the global cyber-insurance market is currently worth $2 billion a year, a number which is expected to double by 2020.With 60% of underwriters and brokers seeing a significant demand in cyber-insurance from customers, there is clearly a great...

AWS releases PCI DSS Quick Start for Deploying PCI DSS In-Scope Workloads

In the next step to help customers adopt their platform for PCI, Amazon Web Services AWS has released their PCI DSS Quick Start program. The PCI DSS Quick Start program is the next evolution of cloud providers developing tools for rapid deployment of standardized configurations to drive adoption ...

In Memory of Our Friend, Rick Dakin

We are deeply saddened to announce that our founder and CEO Rick Dakin passed away suddenly over the weekend...

Is penetration testing required for HIPAA compliance?

In this blog post were going to focus our discussion on the technical requirement part of this standard. The evaluation is supposed to establish the extent to which a covered entitys or business associates security policies and procedures meet the requirements of the HIPAA Security Rule. A questi...

What does PCI DSS 3.1 and PA-DSS 3.1 mean for you and your organization

In the wake of the POODLE vulnerability identified by NIST and subsequent attacks, the PCI SSC has announced its intent to release the first revision of the PCI DSS 3.0 and PA-DSS 3.0 standards. The PCI DSS 3.1 and PA-DSS 3.1 standards will indicate that the SSL v3.0 protocol no longer meets the...

Heartbleed Aftershocks: Community Health Systems Breach, 4.5 Million Records Lost

The news this week that hackers from China compromised 4.5 million customer records held by Community Health Systems is just the latest indication that companies are not adequately protecting the information of the consumers they serve...

New National Exam Program Risk Alert

In case you missed the most recent National Exam Program Risk Alert, you might want to head over to their website and determine what this may mean for you and your company. Since this may be a topic at your next board meeting, you should be prepared to answer any potential questions. Your board...

PCI DSS 3.0 ROC Reporting Template Released

Heads up for our PCI customers: the PCI SSC released the "ROC Reporting Template for v3.0" this last weekend and it is available here. This document supports the PCI DSS 3.0 standard and must be used by all QSA organizations to create and submit a Report on Compliance ROC. What does this mean?...

Agencies to report progress with FedRAMP

The FedRAMP PMO recently conducted webinars on April 23 and 25 regarding Agencies requirement to report their progress on compliance with FedRAMP. The discussion covered the FedRAMP progress to date, the reporting requirements and process for moving services to FedRAMP authorized cloud service...

Information Governance: Get Data Classification Right First

Data classification is one of the most crucial elements of an effective information governance process--yet its also one that many companies fail to implement well. In its simplest terms, data classification is the process of categorizing data based on its level of sensitivity. When done properly...

War on Passwords? Check with Your QSA First!

Passwords have long been the workhorse of user authentication schemes, and many security experts are speaking out on the need for more effective controls. It seems like hardly a week goes by when we dont see a password breach in the news...

The FFIEC proposes guidance on social media - can you stay two steps ahead?

On January 22, 2013, the FFIEC put out a press release called "Financial Regulators Propose Guidance on Social Media". We should begin by saying that even without a social media presence, every company should address social media risks in their annual risk assessment. In this day and age where th...

Recent Surveys Reveal Trends and Spending Habits for Retailers in PCI Compliance

Recently, Gartner Research released two separate research reports on retailer PCI DSS compliance progress, trends and strategies. These reports are based on a survey of 77 merchants of varying sizes and covers a wide range of topics, including compliance status, spending and the incidence of...

Improving compliance management with mappings and automation

Based on the research in Coalfires 2023 Securealities Compliance Report, the third blog in this series examines one of the top concerns of CISOs and compliance program managers: realizing the value of a platform to simplify compliance...

Guardians of IoT: Safeguarding connectivity of input and output channels

Ensuring the security of the Internet of Things IoT demands a meticulous examination of industry-specific vulnerabilities and a profound comprehension of data handling. Have you taken the necessary steps to confirm that your chosen third-party security vendor possesses a comprehensive understandi...

What are the impacts of FedRAMP® Rev. 5?

The FedRAMP PMO released the final Rev. 5 security control baselines and transition guidance for cloud service providers CSPs who have achieved authorization to operate ATO and those still in the planning stages. All CSPs should review the guidance as soon as possible and start developing a plan...

Top 10 challenges of building an in-house application security program

Building a successful application security program can be a daunting task, as it involves many different skill sets. Resource constraints, lack of expertise, and cultural resistance are among the many challenges preventing organizations from reaping the full benefits of an in-house AppSec program...

HIMSS 2023 Conference recap

HIMSS 2023, the largest annual healthcare technology conference, was a great success. The conference highlighted the importance of compliance, data privacy, and cyber security for healthcare organizations. With the increasing use of electronic systems and devices, protecting patient data has beco...

Maximizing ROI on cybersecurity training

Most awareness training strategies fail to promote a strong cybersecurity culture and meaningfully influence workers's behavior. It's time to leverage motivation to change attitudes and improve the ROI on training...

FedRAMP® CSPs face a new challenge meeting FIPS Compliance

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program FedRAMP requires Cloud Service Providers CSPs to meet federal mandates and achieve or maintain a FedRAMP authorization. One of those mandates require the consistent use of FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules everywhere cryptography is...

Hacking Ham Radio: WinAPRS – Part 2

In part one of this series on vulnerability research in ham radio software, we discussed ham radio and digital communications via packet radio. We reviewed some relevant packet radio protocols such as AX.25, APRS, and KISS. We then chose WinAPRS as our target application. In this installment we...

Accelerating CMMC compliance

The reason the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program is so critical to national security can be traced back to the second World War: To counter German submarine attacks against Allied supply chains, British intelligence hacked a German Enigma machine, stole the code, intercepted enem...

Applied ThreadFix: Seeding Your Application Portfolio with OWASP Amass

OWASP Amass is a great tool for asset discovery and enterprise attack surface mapping. It pulls data from a number of different data sources and identifies potential hosts and applications associated with organizations, domains, IP CIDRs and other identifiers. As we have noted, having a solid...

So your company has decided to do FedRAMP - What does that mean?

The exponential increase in cloud adoption in recent years has led to a dramatic increase in technology companies evolving from software and application companies to Software as a Service SaaS, Platform as a Service PaaS or Infrastructure as a Service IaaS providers. The 2011 release of the Cloud...

How to strengthen your cybersecurity program

The first step toward becoming physically fit is looking in the mirror, acknowledging your weaknesses, and making a commitment that youll do whatever it takes to improve yourself. This is true for personal fitness, but can this approach also apply to the cybersecurity program at your growing...

Background Checks on AIs and Other Challenges in the PCI World

Coalfire has noted a number of leading-edge technological challenges for enterprises managing the rapid pace of innovation while also aiming for PCI compliance. Wed like to review our recent experience and offer suggestions for these comparatively novel situations...