Cybersecurity is a constantly evolving field. New threats, vulnerabilities and exploits appear daily and need to be identified quickly to avoid risk of damage or disruption to systems. Keeping abreast of cybersecurity news alerts professionals to emerging issues and positions them as trusted advisors able to recommend the necessary precautions or patches to mitigate risks.
In addition to requiring technical knowledge, cybersecurity specialists must also be people-oriented because breaches don’t just take the form of someone hacking into a server. They can happen through careless employees who send data to the wrong recipients, disgruntled former employees with access to company assets or a password written on a sticky note in a cubicle.
Security researchers have spotted a new variant of ransomware dubbed HybridPetya that combines features from the notorious Petya and NotPetya malware. The latest variant targets NTFS-formatted partitions by encrypting the Master File Table, which contains important metadata about files on a computer’s hard drive.
A new artificial intelligence (AI) penetration testing framework has popped up on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository, dubbed Villager. The tool, assessed to be the work of Chinese firm Cyberspike, aims to streamline red teaming workflows by automating penetration test tasks with machine learning. However, it could also be repurposed for malicious purposes.