Author: nlqip
We’re celebrating our one-year anniversary here at F5 Labs, the application threat intelligence division of F5! Although F5 researchers have been providing threat-related, F5-specific guidance to our customers for many years through DevCentral, the time was right a year ago today to launch a dedicated website that provides the general public with vendor-neutral, application-focused, actionable…
Read MoreWe’re in an exciting time in our profession. There is a lot of new technology, a huge demand for our skills, and a bright future that promises only more work for us. Yet, this excitement is a two-edged blade. We often hear from peers about how hard it is to hire good security folks. My…
Read MorePreviously, I’ve talked about four primary risk treatment options: mitigate, avoid, accept, and transfer. Over the history of the security industry, we’ve tended to focus on mitigation. Implementing controls is where the action is. As IT has largely become a consumption model, I would argue that risk transfer is catching up with mitigation and becoming…
Read MoreEmail attachment containing wire transfer instructions Many buyers, in their eagerness to follow instructions to the letter so they can get into their new homes quickly, have followed similar wiring instructions and found themselves not only without a new home but stripped of their entire life savings—stolen by scammers. It nearly happened to Brown…
Read MoreWhether it’s coming from the business units or the IT organization, every company wants to pull off new tech initiatives to create business impact. Thus, we see new functionality. We think it’s cool. We introduce it. …but then a user slips up because of some unforeseen slack in the system. When that happens, suddenly we’re…
Read MoreForward Secrecy’s day has come – for most. The cryptographic technique (sometimes called Perfect Forward Secrecy or PFS), adds an additional layer of confidentiality to an encrypted session, ensuring that only the two endpoints can decrypt the traffic. With forward secrecy, even if a third party were to record an encrypted session, and later gain…
Read MoreEvery day, your web servers are increasingly being scanned—and likely attacked—by adversaries attempting to gain access to your infrastructure. Between 2015 and 2017, our data partner, Loryka, observed these types of scans grow from 200 per minute to as much as 2,000 per minute. These kinds of attackers are professionals; they do this for a…
Read MoreAs I write this, the industry is still wagging its fingers at the latest big breach. But in the time that it takes to get this published, there could easily be another colossal security disaster that leaves large numbers of people’s private information exposed. And with every headline announcing a security failure comes the anger…
Read MoreWe’ve heard this story before: an employee leaves a laptop in their car and it gets stolen. In January 2018, 43,000 patients had their personal medical history exposed in this manner.1 In fact, stolen physical devices containing confidential data were the cause of over a million records leaked in 2017 alone. A recent article in…
Read MoreLast week, a malware campaign targeting Jenkins automation servers was reported by CheckPoint researchers.1 The attackers exploited a deserialization vulnerability2 in Jenkin’s bidirectional channel (CVE-2017-1000353)3 to deploy Monero cryptomining malware that generated an estimated profit of $3 million. Following this disclosure, F5 researchers observed what appears to be the same threat actor group, as they…
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