CornCon gets some good press on Local News WHBF Channel 4! Register today on corncon.net

According to a recent survey from Barkly, cyberattacks targeting SMBs are plummeting, with two-thirds of the respondents reported increased sophistication of those attacks. In fact, SMBs have seen an exponential increase in the type of attacks that are different from the usual threat vectors. The top five biggest attacks faced by SMBs in the last one year are:

1. Attacks abusing Microsoft Office programs
2. Attacks installing cryptominers
3. Ransomware attacks
4. Attacks abusing other legitimate Windows apps
5. Attacks utilizing worming/lateral movement components.

Despite the increasing number of attacks, only 36% of SMBs expect to see an increase in their security budget for 2019. [via TechRepublic] Read More

The Justice Department is trying to force Facebook to break the encryption on its Messenger app so it can listen to a suspect’s voice as part of a criminal probe, Reuters reported late last week. Facebook is said to be resisting. The ACLU’s Jennifer Granick tweeted about how the case wasn’t exactly a repeat of the encryption fight a few years ago between Apple and the FBI. Security engineer Alec Muffett predicted the case might go all the way to the Supreme Court. In related news, ZDNet reported that the government is seeking source code from tech companies in court, and the tech companies are largely losing. [via POLITICO’s Morning Cybersecurity]

U.S. President Donald Trump signed the NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Act, formerly known as the MAIN STREET Cybersecurity Act, into a law on August 14 this year. The law would require the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “disseminate clear and concise resources to help small business concerns identify, assess, manage, and reduce their cybersecurity risks.” The new law will attempt to provide the necessary tools to small businesses to strengthen their cybersecurity infrastructure as well as fight online attacks. Jessica Ortega, a member of the SiteLock research team said, “The NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Act aims to provide cyberdefense resources for small businesses by creating a set of guidelines for basic security measures that should be easy to follow and implement affordably. It also creates guidelines for making security best practices a required component of corporate training and workplace culture, something that is very needed as cyberthreats continue to evolve.”

The US Army put on a bug bounty program, highlighting pen testing techniques at Black Hat and R00tz Asylum in Las Vegas this past week at the Defcon hacking conference. They will bring this same program for both kids and adults to CornCon in Davenport, Iowa on September 8, 2018. Join us there!

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