Introduction F5 Labs education articles help you understand basic threat-related security topics.  At the most fundamental level, IT security is about protecting things that are of value to an organization. That generally includes people, property, and data—in other words, the organization’s assets. Security controls exist to reduce or mitigate the risk to those assets. They…

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APIs and Sectors As more APIs are published, both by large enterprises who want to make their data more available (such as Google) and by smaller, industry-specific organizations hoping to generate value, some interesting industry patterns are also emerging. Of the organizations for which we had sector information, social networking organizations made up the largest…

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There’s something undeniably compelling about a good myth. Maybe that’s because a dose of escapism does our brain good, and it’s fun to spend a few moments wondering about deadly alligators populating the New York City sewer system or Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen head waiting to be brought back to life. But while those myths…

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Password login attacks, especially credential stuffing attacks, are still one of the most common cyberattacks on the Internet. F5 Labs and Shape Security extensively looked at the patterns and trends associated with credential stuffing in the 2021 Credential Stuffing Report. In part 2 of this series on credential stuffing tools and techniques, we dive deeper…

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Apply the stable channel update provided by Apple to vulnerable systems immediately after appropriate testing. (M1051: Update Software)o Safeguard 7.1 : Establish and Maintain a Vulnerability Management Process: Establish and maintain a documented vulnerability management process for enterprise assets. Review and update documentation annually, or when significant enterprise changes occur that could impact this Safeguard.o…

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This is the second part of a two-part series based on firsthand research into pig butchering scams from the end of 2022 into early 2024. In this post, we delve into the types of investment scams perpetrated by pig butchers to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from victims, including in the form of cryptocurrency…

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So How Good Are Sectors for Predicting Risk? Based on these analyses, it appears that the answer is “not bad, but it depends.” On one hand, we can identify specific patterns that seem to map to characteristics about those sectors. We already knew that the Retail Trade sector is heavily targeted by attacks that are…

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In general, organizations should implement just enough necessary cybersecurity to mitigate risk and meet compliance requirements. We’ve talked about how to mitigate known, foreseeable cyberthreats, but what is the lowest bar for a typical organization with respect to cybersecurity? To figure this out, we need to think about universal compliance and legal obligations for any…

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F5 Labs in collaboration with Effluxio researches global attack traffic to gain a better understanding of the cyberthreat landscape. In this installment of regional threat analysis, F5 Labs researchers break down the data collected by our sensors on attacks targeting Latin America from January 1 through March 31, 2021. Cyberattacks happen in many forms, but…

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What Is SQL Injection? SQL injection is a technique used by attackers to gain unauthorized access to one of an organization’s most critical assets: the database that supports its website. In most cases, it is website vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to insert (or inject) instructions where the application is expecting only data. SQL injection…

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