Author: HackWatchit
Health Net Federal Services (HNFS) and its parent company, Centene Corporation, have agreed to pay $11,253,400 to settle allegations that HNFS falsely certified compliance with cybersecurity requirements under its Defense Health Agency (DHA) TRICARE contract. The U.S. government contracted HNFS to provide managed healthcare support services for TRICARE’s North region, covering 22 states. The contract required compliance with cybersecurity standards, specifically 48 C.F.R. § 252.204-7012 and 51 security controls from NIST Special Publication 800-53 (Security and Privacy Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations). According to a U.S. Department of Justice announcement, between 2015 and 2018, HNFS allegedly failed to…
In 2021, Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu and Yizhar Gilboa came together to found Finout, an enterprise-focused toolset to help manage and optimize cloud costs. (We covered the company’s launch out of stealth in 2022.) Ravhon, Finout’s CEO and previously the director of engineering at observability platform Logz.io, says that he was spurred to start Finout by the roadblocks he personally encountered in trying to make sense of cloud costs. “One of the main challenges enterprise faces is wide cloud cost management tool adoption, which is first and foremost organizational change,” Ravhon told TechCrunch. “AI has the potential to have huge…
In March 2018, Atlanta’s municipal government ground to a halt as ransomware paralyzed their systems. For days, emergency dispatch operators resorted to paper and pen. The city’s security team worked around the clock, but they lacked the hands-on experience to quickly contain the breach. The final price tag? Over $17 million in recovery costs—all because their security practitioners had learned from books and lectures, but never practiced fighting a real attacker. This isn’t a one-off incident. In February 2021, an attacker breached Oldsmar, Florida’s water treatment plant and tried to poison the water supply by ramping up sodium hydroxide to…
In An SMB Relay Race – How To Exploit LLMNR and SMB Message Signing for Fun and Profit, Jordan Drysdale shared the dangers of lack of SMB Signing requirements and demonstrated an attack path which can allow an attacker to escalate from zero to Domain Admin (DA) in an Active Directory environment. In this article, we will build off the SMB relay techniques discussed in that blog post and demonstrate an SMB to LDAP(S) relay attack. Background Machine Account Quota The domain attribute used to determine how many computers a user can join to the domain is called ms-ds-machineaccountquota. By…
Spotting fake news in your feed has always been tough. Now it just got tougher, thanks to AI. Fake news crops up in plenty of places on social media. And it has for some time now. In years past, it took the form of misleading posts, image captions, quotes, and the sharing of outright false information in graphs and charts. Now with the advent of AI, we see fake news taken to new levels of deception: Deepfake videos that mimic the looks and parrot the words of well-known public figures. AI-generated voice clones that sound spooky close to the voices…
Apple said Friday (Feb. 21) that its Apple Intelligence suite of artificial intelligence (AI) features will be added to another platform — Vision Pro, the company’s mixed-reality headset — in April. Apple Intelligence will be available in beta in a software update, visionOS 2.4, with support for U.S. English, the company said in a press release. More features and support for other languages will be added throughout the year. “With Apple Intelligence for Vision Pro, users will be able to proofread, rewrite and summarize text using Writing Tools; compose text from scratch using ChatGPT in Writing Tools; explore new ways to express…
I recently became involved in a cyber-physical risk analysis project assessing the potential risks associated with the future use of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS). While there have been no confirmed cyber attacks on BESS to date, findings indicate that the consequences of such an attack could be severe, affecting operations, safety, and financial stability. This article focuses on identifying risks—not mitigations—related to deploying BESS in an industrial facility that integrates renewable energy to reduce costs, highlighting potential threats and their impact on plant processes. Since effective security starts with awareness, we need to identify risks before planning defenses. Or…
The post Talkin’ About Infosec News – 2/6/24 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security.
Introduction PCI DSS for e-commerce is essential for SAQ A-EP merchants who manage complex payment environments, including custom payment pages, interactive checkout flows, and third-party payment integrations. These merchants—such as SaaS platforms, online retailers, travel booking sites, and digital service providers—must comply with stringent security requirements to protect sensitive payment data. While traditional compliance solutions often fall short, modern tools like Feroot PaymentGuard AI provide tailored security, ensuring continuous compliance and robust protection against emerging threats in e-commerce transactions. Understanding SAQ A-EP Merchant Environments SAQ A-EP classification typically applies to merchants operating sophisticated e-commerce environments, including: SaaS and subscription platforms…