Insights blog.

Bitsight is proud to announce the release of new features that provide expanded data breadth to all customers. These new innovations enable customers to better identify risks in third party networks and their own networks. Annotations, a new innovation in the security ratings market that allows customers to add tags to specific parts of their network asset maps, providing context for customers to take appropriate action with new events on their network or the network of a third party. Furthering Bitsight’s mission to provide actionable data, Patching Cadence, the newest Diligence risk vector, is expanding data breadth in the platform. This risk vector evaluates a company’s responsiveness in patching major vulnerabilities. Learn more about these features that are helping customers better manage and streamline their security risk management efforts:

GhostPush is an Android malware that was first discovered in September 2015. Once installed on a user’s device, it will display unsolicited advertising, and install unwanted applications on the user’s device. This malware is also known for rooting the user’s device and making itself very hard to uninstall.

Touted as “history’s biggest data leak”—with over 2.6 terabytes of information compromised—the “Panama Papers” is one recent data breach that has drawn a great deal of press over the past few weeks. Over 11 million documents were leaked from a renowned Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in offshore holdings. The firm claims their email server was breached, which compromised the files. The papers were obtained by a German newspaper, shared with International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and revealed over 200,000 offshore companies. It is not yet clear how many of these holdings are facilitating illegal or unlawful activity.

Some of the largest data breaches in history happened in 2015. Notable breaches on that list include PNI Digital Media, Anthem Insurance, and The Office Of Personnel Management. These three weren’t necessarily the top data breaches of last year in terms of size or impact, but they were important because these organizations were so highly trusted and recognized in their respective industries.

This is the final entry in a three-part series on Bitsight’s new Event Store. In the first and second posts, we described some key components of the architecture. Because of the limited number of access patterns we had to support (bulk inserts, mostly in chronological order; full scans, coarsely filtered by key range and time), we were able to implement a simple NoSQL-style database, using flat Parquet files on Amazon’s S3 as the storage layer.

The financial services industry is a leader in many aspects of cybersecurity performance and has set the standard in areas like vendor risk management. Why? Because risk is built into their culture. Inherent in the financial services industry is how to measure and mitigate risk, and they’ve become very effective at it.

It goes without saying that the following data breaches were incredibly damaging, both to the companies and to those affected. Each has resulted in some level of data loss, financial loss, and reputational harm. Below, we’re exploring what some of the top breaches in 2015, 2014, and 2013 were and examining the commonalities and differences between them.

This is a two-part blog post. First, you'll discover 5 things to keep in mind when selecting a vendor management software. In the second part, you'll read on to uncover the pros and cons of the many vendor risk management tools that organizations have to assess third party vendors. 

Students and faculty from the University of Central Florida (UCF) have filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the university failed to notify affected individuals of data loss resulting from a cyber attack in a timely manner.

This post was updated on September 14, 2020.

A new security vulnerability in an older version of TLS / SSL was announced this week and has been named “DROWN” by its authors (Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption). It’s estimated to affect up to 11 million servers using the TLS / SSL protocol, from websites to e-mail servers. This unique attack allows a third-party who has intercepted encrypted traffic between a client and an unaffected server, such as one only supporting TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2, to use another server that is using the same RSA private / public key-pair to act as an oracle to decrypt the intercepted traffic. This leads to a larger attack surface than would normally be exposed if the vulnerability were isolated to a single host since it allows an adversary to perform a “cross-protocol” attack by taking advantage of servers sharing the same TLS / SSL certificates.

Creating a vendor risk management program is of utmost importance in today’s threat landscape. So if you don’t have a program in place already, you may be wondering where—and how—you should get started. One of the building blocks for any security program is the creation of actionable cybersecurity metrics. These will help you go beyond “yes” and “no” answers in your own organization (and your vendors’) and see exactly how well-prepared your company is to protect against cyberthreats.

Cyberhacks in the online tax software service and software realm have been extremely prevalent in the last year. In August of 2015, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that hackers had gained access to sensitive information about over 334,000 Americans by taking advantage of the IRS's Get Transcript database. This function allowed taxpayers to gather data from their previous tax returns, but hackers were able to leverage this function to their advantage in order to gather enough personally identifiable information to steal identities.

On October 15, 2015, UltraDNS experienced a technical issue that led to a widely publicized outage, bringing down websites for Netflix, Expedia, and others for over an hour. In a separate incident on April 8, 2015, Sendgrid, a cloud-based email delivery service, experienced a breach where an undisclosed number of customers and employee usernames, email addresses, and passwords were stolen using a compromised employee email account. Bitsight has just published its latest Bitsight Insights report, Risk Degrees of Separation: The Impact of Fourth Party Networks on Organizations, finding that a surprising number of companies examined were associated with these and other popular cloud providers.

Ransomware is a cash-in machine for criminals and we have just spotted another one come alive this week. Since 16th February, AnubisNetworks Labs team is tracking Locky, a malware that given the high volume of its distribution campaigns will rival with the big ones such as CryptoWall.