While the COVID-19 pandemic brought much of the world to work together to advance medical research and slow the spread of the disease, it may be of little surprise that cyber threat actors took advantage of the pandemic for their own personal gain. While all industries can be affected by a cybersecurity incident, the nature of the health and human services industry’s mission poses unique challenges.
While the C-suite is becoming increasingly aware of the threats bad cyber actors pose, many still harbour an antiquated impression of cybercriminals. We imagine hooded “hackers”, working alone in a basement, and of course, the stock image that accompanies the vast majority of media articles about cyber attacks depicts just this.
Contrary to what the name suggests, rainbow tables are nowhere as picturesque and pose a severe threat to users and businesses using the digital world. This article will attempt to break down the hows and whats of a rainbow table and arm you with knowledge on preventing a rainbow table attack. Primarily used as the base of a password cracking tool, this table helps crack password hash values or crack passwords.
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This blog was written by an independent guest blogger. Credential stuffing attacks essentially doubled in number between 2020 and 2021. As reported by Help Net Security, researchers detected 2,831,028,247 credential stuffing attacks between October 2020 and September 2021—growth of 98% over the previous year. Of the sectors that did experience credential stuffing during that period, gaming, digital and social media, as well as financial services experienced the greatest volume of attacks.
The dangers of email security are often understated. One successful email attack can lead to malware injection, system compromise, impersonation, espionage, ransomware and more. After all, phishing remains the top attack vector used by hackers. The FBI reported phishing scams were extremely prominent, with 323,972 complaints being made in the U.S. in 2021, compared to 241,342 the previous year. Adjusted losses resulting from these attacks is more than $44 million, a $10 million decrease from 2020.
The security community took a step backward last week in our ability to deal with the crisis involving Okta. Instead of exercising well-thought-out and practiced contingency plans to objectively assess risk, many individuals took a trolling posture on social media. The reaction was neither professional nor conducive to our mission as defenders against threat actors seeking to do us harm.