

Bombardier looks to be the latest victim to be hit following the discovery of vulnerabilities in Accellion FTA software. Rather than exposing customer information, the attackers have shared Bombardier’s Intellectual Property which will have massive ramifications for the company. It is positive to see that Bombardier has come clean on the breach and the more the company communicates information to its shareholders, the better. The attack is another lesson on the dangers of not running security
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This case highlights the importance of proper procedures in design and implementation, particularly for a sensitive product/solution aimed at monitoring children. The current actions of the vendor are right in taking down the service until a solution can be implemented. Organisations would be well-advised to embrace secure-by-design practices to avoid similar incidents. They should also work closely with security professionals to identify issues sooner rather than later.

This second breach of a customer of Accellion highlights the importance of ensuring that services used by an organisation are properly secured and that vendor security is taken seriously, as when you use their services you are still responsible for the data they handle for you. In order to manage and identify any risks introduced by third-parties, it is best practice to include them in the security assessments of your organisation. When doing this make sure that contracts with vendors allow for
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Ransomware, just like all the various flavours of malware before it are here to stay. The motivations of the authors of malware have changed over the years, and as a result the methods they employ have changed too. The good thing this report is highlighting is how important it is to ensure every security patch is implemented and that it is implemented quickly. Some of the reports oldest highlighted vulnerabilities were not in Operating Systems but third party applications such as JBoss AS and a
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As many IoT devices are essentially blackboxes of components used to do a specific single job, they use specialist embedded System-on-Chips (SoC) which have small amounts of storage. Therefore, it is understandable that so many have implemented barebones TCP/IP stacks that have re-introduced old security vulnerabilities, as these are devices that often have to work with limited resources and sometimes in real-time with limited CPU processing power.
So choices were made, however, the
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Vulnerabilities in embedded devices are problematic due to their potential for being invasive in environments and having little functionality for end-users to manage coordinated updates, as many devices are ‘blackboxes’ of components pulled together to perform a single job. Depending on the device function there could be hundreds of devices, if not more, running vulnerable hardware modules. As a result, it is good practice to treat IoT devices as insecure by default and build controls
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The targeting of enterprise infrastructure by ransomware is a good example of why it is important to carry out updates and patching for all elements within the enterprise. A significant level of effort is put into updating and patching your normal Desktop and Server operating systems, but the underlying systems for virtualisation that support these are often overlooked.

It is safe to assume the worst and Foxton customers should look to protect themselves from identity fraud and card fraud as a result of this breach. With both personal information and payment card information lost, Foxtons customers should take some time to validate payments and potential credit history interactions since October and flag anything suspicious to their bank. Even though a subset of the entire customer data has been leaked with the attackers claiming they have the entire data and
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The breach against Pixlr shows how cybercriminals are actively targeting organisations to monetise on data.
To help limit the damage, Pixlr should look to improve its internal processes by holding user information within application databases or a dedicated SSO systems, such as those offered by AWS. This would allow for dedicated password hashing that includes a Salt Work Factor to help mitigate against brut force attacks.
Any users of Pixlr who may have been affected by the breach are
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