China is eyeing dominance of the Internet of Things (IoT) market and may use vulnerabilities in these technologies as the next front on its ongoing cyberwar with the United States, according to a new report.
Threats
Sextortionist Campaigns Get Personal, Creative to Force Payouts
Two security firms warn of a flurry of “sextortion” campaigns recently that use new, creative and sometimes extreme methods that leverage personal information, sex-related activity and even death threats to spur victims to pay thousands in ransom fees to hackers.
Podcast Episode 118: White Hat Eye on the Gaming Guy
In this week’s episode, #118: modern computer games are like mini economies and that makes them a big target for hackers. We talk with four leading researchers from Bug Crowd about how even popular games fall down on security. Also: Srinivas Mukkamala, the CEO of RiskSense about how artificial intelligence and risk based approaches to securing elections systems could pay off.
Report: Obvious Security Flaws Make ICS Networks Easy Targets
Industrial control systems (ICSs) remain easy targets for nation-states actors because of security gaps such as plain-text passwords, direct Internet connections and weak anti-virus protections, a new report has found.
Podcast Episode 117: Insurance Industry Confronts Silent Cyber Risk, Converged Threats
In this episode of the podcast (#117), we go deep on one of the hottest sectors around: cyber insurance. In the first segment, we talk with Thomas Harvey of the firm RMS about the problem of “silent cyber” risk to insurers and how better modeling of cyber incidents is helping to address that threat. In part II, we invite Chip Block of the firm Evolver back into the studio to talk about the challenge that “converged” cyber physical systems pose to insurance carriers as they try to wrap their arms around their exposure to cyber risk. Editor’s note: as an experiment this week, we’re posting each interview as a separate download, to see if that makes it easier for listeners to jump to the content they’re most interested in. Use the comments section or Twitter (@securityledger) to let us know what you think or whether you prefer the single download!
