TRAC

January 13, 2014

SECURITY

Detecting Payment Card Data Breaches Today to Avoid Becoming Tomorrow’s Headline

6 min read

A few months ago we discussed the various ways that consumer PII is compromised. The recent attacks against Target and Neiman Marcus illustrate the constant threat that payment card accepting retailers of all sizes face. Yesterday Reuters reported that similar breaches over the holidays affected “at least three other well-known U.S. retailers”. Given the current […]

January 9, 2014

SECURITY

Fake German Bill Spam Campaign Spreads Malware

2 min read

Update 2014-01-10: This malicious campaign has expanded to include emails that masquerade as bills from NTTCable and from VolksbankU Update 2014-01-21: We’ve updated the chart to include the Vodafon emails and latest URL activity English language has emerged as the language of choice for international commerce. Since people throughout the world are used to receiving English […]

January 9, 2014

SECURITY

Malicious Ads from Yahoo Just the Tip of the Iceberg

3 min read

When Fox-IT published their report regarding malvertisements coming from Yahoo, they estimated the attack began on December 30, 2013, while also noting that other reports indicated the attack may have begun earlier. Meanwhile, Yahoo intimated a different timeframe for the attack, claiming “From December 31 to January 3 on our European sites, we served some […]

January 8, 2014

SECURITY

Are Third Parties Your Greatest Weakness?

2 min read

There are many advantages in outsourcing functions to specialist providers that can supply services at lower cost and with more functionality than could be supplied in-house. However, companies should be aware that when buying services, you may also be buying risk. Organisations that have successfully implemented strategies to reduce the probability of experiencing a breach, […]

December 13, 2013

SECURITY

Big Data in Security – Part V: Anti-Phishing in the Cloud

8 min read

In the last chapter of our five part Big Data in Security series, expert Data Scientists Brennan Evans and Mahdi Namazifar join me to discuss their work on a cloud anti-phishing solution. Phishing is a well-known historical threat. Essentially, it’s social engineering via email and it continues to be effective and potent. What is TRAC currently doing […]

December 12, 2013

SECURITY

Big Data in Security – Part IV: Email Auto Rule Scoring on Hadoop

6 min read

Following part three of our Big Data in Security series on graph analytics, I’m joined by expert data scientists Dazhuo Li and Jisheng Wang to talk about their work in developing an intelligent anti-spam solution using modern machine learning approaches on Hadoop. What is ARS and what problem is it trying to solve? Dazhuo: From a high-level view, Auto […]

December 11, 2013

SECURITY

Big Data in Security – Part III: Graph Analytics

6 min read

Following part two of our Big Data in Security series on University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab stack, I caught up with talented data scientists Michael Howe and Preetham Raghunanda to discuss their exciting graph analytics work. Where did graph databases originate and what problems are they trying to solve? Michael: Disparate data types have a lot of connections between […]

December 10, 2013

SECURITY

Big Data in Security – Part II: The AMPLab Stack

7 min read

Following part one of our Big Data in Security series on TRAC tools, I caught up with talented data scientist Mahdi Namazifar to discuss TRAC’s work with the Berkeley AMPLab Big Data stack. Researchers at University of California, Berkeley AMPLab built this open source Berkeley Data Analytics Stack (BDAS), starting at the bottom what is Mesos? AMPLab is looking at […]

December 9, 2013

SECURITY

Big Data in Security – Part I: TRAC Tools

9 min read

Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with the talented data scientists from Cisco’s Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC) team to discuss Big Data security challenges, tools and methodologies. The following is part one of five in this series where Jisheng Wang, John Conley, and Preetham Raghunanda share how TRAC is tackling Big Data. Given the hype surrounding […]