Cyber criminals have been leveraging trending cultural and viral news items that drive interest from millions of individuals as mechanisms to target and distribute malware easily and effectively.  In the past, cyber criminals have used topics including international sports championships, celebrity divorces, and political elections to spread their malware.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is the latest vehicle for these types of attacks.  The conditions of this pandemic are ripe for wide-scale malware distribution: large geographic base affecting both businesses and consumers, fear and uncertainty on the impact of the virus, and the increased use of social media and person-to-person electronic communications to spread news, information, and opinions.

Last week, a new malware attack focused on these effects.  A cyber criminal group created a fake Corona Map application for Windows embedded with information stealing malware that once downloaded and installed by the user starts collecting and sending sensitive data like passwords, credit card numbers, bank accounts, and other sensitive data.

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Threat hunting, an often misunderstood but powerful security practice, is gaining traction, as more organizations reap benefits from it and get better at it. However, there is still a lot of room for adoption to increase and for practices to improve.

Those were key findings from the SANS Institute’s 2018 threat hunting study, which experts from SANS, Qualys and other companies discussed recently in the two-part webcast “Threat Hunting Is a Process, Not a Thing.”

“Over the past two to three years, threat hunting has been moving from a ‘What is it?’ discussion into a more formal mentality of: ‘This is what it is. Am I doing it right?’,” said Rob Lee, a SANS instructor. “But we’re still in a transition.”

For starters, there’s still considerable confusion about what threat hunting is. For example, it’s very common for many to equate it with reactive practices such as incident response. Rather, threat hunting is by definition proactive. It assumes that the organization’s prevention defenses have been bypassed, and the IT environment breached, without any alerts being triggered.

Using threat intelligence analysis and other tactics, hunters formulate and act on a hypothesis about where the intruders are likely to be lurking in silence while pursuing their nefarious goals.

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In this blog series, we’re discussing solid security practices that are key for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, and today we’ll address another crucial one: Indication of compromise (IOC).

In a nutshell, IOC can help customers who are dealing with unauthorized access to customer personal data by an external threat actor or adversary.

This makes IOC particularly relevant to GDPR’s stringent requirements for providing integrity, control, accountability and protection of EU residents’ personal data.

Read on to learn why IOC is critical for complying with GDPR, which went into effect in May, and how Qualys can help you.

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In this ongoing blog series on preparing for complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we’ve explained the importance of having solid, foundational security practices like asset management and threat prioritization. Today, we’ll discuss how another such practice can help organizations stay on the right side of GDPR: Indication of Compromise (IOC).

In a nutshell, IOC can help customers who are dealing with unauthorized access to customer personal data by an external threat actor or adversary. This makes IOC particularly relevant to GDPR’s stringent requirements for data integrity, control, accountability and protection.

To comply with GDPR, which goes into effect on May 25, companies worldwide — not just in the EU — must know what personal data of EU residents they have, where it’s stored, with whom they’re sharing it, how they’re protecting it, and what they’re using it for.

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This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.32 includes updates and new features for AssetView, EC2 Connector, File Integrity Monitoring, Indication of Compromise, Security Assessment Questionnaire, Web Application Scanning, and Web Application Firewall, highlights as follows.  (Post updated 3/23 to include new FIM features for this release.)

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For almost 10 years, thousands of organizations eager to solidify their security and compliance foundations have found clarity and direction in the the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls (CSCs).

This structured set of 20 foundational InfoSec best practices, first published in 2008, offers a methodical and prioritized approach for securing your IT environment. Mapping effectively to most security control frameworks, government regulations, contractual obligations and industry mandates, the CSCs can cut an organization’s risk of cyber attacks by over 90%, according to the CIS.

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Most successful cyber attacks exploit known vulnerabilities for which patches are available, or take advantage of weak configuration settings that could have been easily hardened. You can significantly lower the risk of being victimized by this type of common, preventable attack by adopting the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls (CSCs).

This set of 20 structured InfoSec best practices offers a methodical and sensible plan for securing your IT environment, and maps to most security control frameworks, government regulations, contractual obligations and industry mandates.

The CSCs were first developed in 2008 and are periodically updated by a global community of volunteer cybersecurity experts from government, academia and industry. “The CIS Controls provide a prioritized approach to cyber security, starting with the most essential tasks and progressing to more sophisticated techniques,” Tony Sager, CIS Chief Evangelist, wrote recently.

In this blog series, we’re explaining how Qualys Cloud Platform — a single, integrated, end-to-end platform for discovery, prevention, detection, and response — and its Qualys Cloud Apps can help security teams of any size to broadly and comprehensively adopt the CIS controls.

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