What’s New in PCI DSS 4.0?

Get Ready for the 2024 PCI Compliance Update The new, stringent, PCI DSS 4.0 will replace PCI DSS version 3.2.1 on March 31, 2024. At that time, you will be required to be compliant with the new specifications. (Do not become confused by the March 31, 2025, date which is when the requirements labeled “best… Read more »

Is This Thing On? Privacy and Your Smartphone Sensors

Smartphone Snooping Without Microphone Access Can your smartphone sensors still enable apps to eavesdrop on your conversations even after the app has been denied microphone access? It does seem possible. We dug into this question based on two research papers, “AccEar: Accelerometer Acoustic Eavesdropping with Unconstrained Vocabulary”, and “Side Eye: Characterizing the Limits of POV… Read more »

Tales From the Road: Oops, We Did it Again! Breaking the Bank During a Red Team Assessment

Plus: 10 Tips to Keep Your Organization Out of the Red A financial institution enlisted our services to perform a Red Team assessment – an effective approach to simulate a real-world threat actor attempting to compromise an organization from the outside in. Using an email phishing campaign combined with a physical breach, DirectDefense consultants uncovered… Read more »

Tales From the Road: The Best Defense Against Injection Attacks is to Protect Your Legacy App

How DirectDefense accessed sensitive financial and personal data through injection vulnerabilities The best defense against injection attacks is to secure legacy applications by leveraging an app security assessment. Got a legacy app? Then listen up: Legacy applications can be particularly susceptible to injection attacks and organizations should take immediate action to remediate this vulnerability before… Read more »

Tales From the Road: How DirectDefense Got a Free, Round Trip Ticket to an Airline’s Internal Network During a Physical Pen Test

Using Simulated Security Attacks to Test Network and Physical Vulnerabilities DirectDefense was asked by an airline to conduct security testing through simulated security attacks to help identify vulnerabilities that could put the airline’s data and operations at risk. As part of the engagement, DirectDefense: Spoiler Alert: Through effective tactics, like tailgating, we were able to… Read more »

A New Content Agnostic Solution for Fake News Detection

Exploring Fake News Detection as a Service Automated or machine-learning solutions for fake news detection are both necessary and challenging in the fight against misinformation. This post explores the first automatic, content-agnostic approach to fake news detection, FNDaaS, which considers both new and unstudied website features. The Challenges of Fake News Detection Using Current Methods… Read more »

Does Using an AI Coding Assistant Generate Insecure Code?

The Pros and Cons of Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Code Development Using an AI coding assistant is rapidly becoming an attractive choice for developers. Instead of analyzing your own problem-solving processes and translating them into code, why not draw on the massive body of developed software that has likely solved your problem a hundred times?… Read more »

2023 Security Operations Threat Report

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