Vectra AI Security Research team

Explore the pervasive impact of Shodan on network security, from its origin to its contemporary applications in cybersecurity.

The escalating influence of generative AI on business and cybersecurity in 2024: its growing adoption, potential challenges, and the critical need for regulatory oversight.

Identify five key areas exposing your AWS deployments to security threats, including common misconfigurations, increased access risks, informal sign-offs, high-risk services, and regional investigation challenges.

T-Mobile investigates a hacker who claims to breach data of 100 million customers. See what possible outcomes this could result in for the telecoms company.

As organizations continue to build on AWS with no sign of slowing down, it's important to know where the security blind spots are and how to address them.

The State of Security Report: PaaS and IaaS takes a close look at how organizations are addressing security in AWS and the challenges they face.

Discover how Microsoft and Vectra partner to deliver Zero Trust security solutions, focusing on key principles: verify explicitly, use least privileged access, and assume breach.

Attackers intent on stealing personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) can easily exploit gaps in IT security policies and procedures to disrupt critical healthcare-delivery processes.

The rapid shift to cloud-everything left users and apps vulnerable to security threats across all environments. Andras Cser from Forrester joined Joe Malenfant and Gokul Rajagopalan from Vectra to discuss cloud trends among organizations.

Vectra is honored to be named Cloud Security/SaaS Disruptor Company of the Year with a Gold Globee® Award in the Annual 2021 Awards.

DarkSide ransomware as a service (RaaS) group provided hackers with a convenient way to extort money from organizations after access was gained. Here are five things you need to know about this prominent cybercriminal group.

Vectra introduces Detect for AWS, solving threat detection and response for Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments.

Vectra researchers dissect the SolarWinds supply chain attack, tracking backdoor to persistent access in data centers and cloud, with a focus on Office 365

Most solutions today provide siloed views of an account, making it impossible to track attack progression across the cloud and network-except ours. We're excited to release a unified view of an account, one that tracks attacker behaviors across network and cloud.

With more than 200 million monthly subscribers, Office 365 is a rich target for cybercriminals. Learn why MFA no longer stops attackers in this new cybersecurity landscape but network detection and response can.

Learn why we are celebrating our placement in the Deloitte Fast 500 list as an achievement and testament to a customer-first approach rather than a numbers goal.

Learn how Vectra protects users and data beyond the traditional network by detecting malicious intent and tracking and stopping attackers who move between cloud, hybrid, and enterprise-ultimately reducing the risk of breach.

Discover how ransomware has evolved into targeted, double extortion attacks and learn proactive defense strategies to protect your organization.

The goal of an efficient incident response process is to free-up security analyst's time to focus on higher value work that requires critical thinking. Learn how automation can be applied to a detection and response process.

When you factor in how long it takes to discover a data breach, it suggests that healthcare is losing the battle. Discover a fundamental approach being advocated by a growing number of healthcare security professionals.

Vectra announces the expansion of the partnership with Splunk as a launch partner for Splunk Mission Control, a cloud-based and future-ready unified security operations platform.

Attackers areusing legitimate toolsbuiltintoMicrosoft Office 365toperform reconnaissance, move laterally,and extend their attacks. OurSpotlightReport on Office 365 identifies whatthey're up to and where you should be looking.

Learn more about how Vectra's new Detect Lockdown feature, made possible by integrating with CrowdStrike Falcon Insight Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), enables you to automatically thwart cyberattackers on the device level.

Discover how maturity and capability can be defined and measured across the five stages of the maturity model based on the desired level of risk awareness.

Read the Office 365 Spotlight Report to learn about the primary cybersecurity threats that can lead to Office 365 takeovers and breaches.

A mature incident response process provides the benefit of faster response to reduce the amount of time an attacker has access to organization resources. Discover the metrics security teams can use to measure risk and mitigation.

Analyzing the psychology of an insider threat case is a complex task because there is little evidence and scant public data about threat incidents. Develop an improved understanding of the mind of malicious insiders with the multiple life-stage model.

Evaluating risk factors is the first step in implementing an effective insider threat program. Learn why implementing preventative solutions like network detection and response can minimize financial loss and risk of a breach.

What danger do malicious and negligent insiders constitute and what kind of insider threats exist? Learn to spot the two types of insider threats.

Discover step-by-step how Vectra AI identified early indicators of the Maze ransomware attack and prevented the encryption of the company files.

We need more than just APIs. When security vendors truly collaborate and integrate their tools, we enable our customer's security teams to further improve the agility, efficiency and efficacy of their security operations.

The newly announced Vectra services enable our customers to produce positive security outcomes, optimize security operations, and backup their teams when it matters most, with access to Vectra experts.

Healthcare's shift to the cloud is not new. However,COVID-19 has accelerated the roadmap for cloud adoption leaving healthcare security teams in a reactive mode rather than staying proactive to head-off the spread of potential attacks.

The long-awaited Gartner Market Guide for Network Detection and Response (NDR) has been released and there are a few critically important things we believe you should note before diving into the document and the redefined category.

Vectra is pleased to announce the launch of two new training certification tracks for our partners. The VPSE certification is geared toward sales engineers, while our VSP certification focuses on positioning and selling Vectra Cognito.

Together, Vectra and Sentinel One lead to fast and well-coordinated responses across all resources, enhance the efficiency of security operations and reduce the dwell times that ultimately drive risk for the business.

Together, Cognito and Cybereason provides visibility into all enterprise environments, supporting hybrid, multi-cloud, or on-premises deployments with ease to combat against today's modern cyberattacks.

With increasingly sophisticated threats,cyber-risk is becoming an escalating concern for organizations around the world. Data breaches through Office 365 lead the pack as 40% of organizations suffer from account takeovers despite the rising adoption of incremental security approaches like multi-factor authentication.

Vectra now integrates with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Ingress Routing and that our AI platform is currently available in the AWS Marketplace.

That's why we are happy to announce the integration of Vectra Cognito automated threat detection and response platform with the Swimlane security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform.

The integration of the Cognito network detection and response platform with the Forescout device visibility and control platform provides inside-the-network threat detection and response, a critical layer of defense in today's security infrastructure.

The integration between the Cognito automated network detection and response platform and Check Point Next Generation Firewalls empowers security staff to quickly expose hidden attacker behaviors, pinpoint specific hosts involved in a cyberattack and contain threats before data is lost.

By analyzing data in the 2019 Black Hat Edition of the Attacker Behavior Industry Report from Vectra, we determined that RDP abuse is extremely prevalent in the real world. 90% of the organizations where the Cognito platform is deployed exhibited some form of suspicious RDP behaviors from January-June 2019.

The combination of network detection and response (NDR), endpoint detection and response (EDR) and log-based detection (SIEM) allows security professionals to have coverage across threat vectors from cloud workloads to the enterprise.

Modern ransomware has been heavily weaponized, has a sweeping blast radius and is a staple tool in the attacker's arsenal. In a call to arms, cloud and enterprise organizations everywhere are scrambling to detect and respond early to ransomware attacks.

Earlier this month, the Gartner Market Guide for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems that describes the market definition and direction of requirements that buyers should look for in their IDPS solution as well as the top use-cases that drive IDPS today.

There are multiple phases in an active cyberattack and each is a perilous link in a complex kill-chain that gives criminals the opportunity to spy, spread and steal critical information in native and hybrid cloud workloads and user and IoT devices.

As the transformation of healthcare through new medical technology continues to move forward, healthcare organizations must remain mindful about what technologies are in place, how they are utilized, and when unauthorized actions occur.

Vectra customers and security researchers respond to some of the world's most consequential threats. And they tell us there's a consistent set of questions they must answer when investigating any given attack scenario. Starting with an alert from Cognito Detect, another security tool, or their intuition, analysts will form a hypothesis as to what is occurring.

Although NDR and EDR can provide perspective on this, NDR is more critical because it provides perspective where EDR cannot. For example, exploits that operate at the BIOS level of a device can subvert EDR.

The collection and storage of network metadata strikes a balance that is just right for data lakes and SIEMs. Metadata enables security operations teams to craft queries that interrogate the data and lead to deeper investigations.

When considering how to equip your security teams to identify lateral movement behaviors, we encourage the evaluation of the efficacy of your processes and tools to identify and quickly respond to the top 5 lateral movement behaviors that we commonly observe.

There is a new breed of SIEM-less security architecture that allows companies to leverage intelligent people with general IT experience to become the next-generation of security analysts.

The United States has not been hit by a paralyzing cyberattack on critical infrastructure like the one that sidelined Ukraine in 2015. That attack disabled Ukraine's power grid, leaving more than 700,000 people in the dark.

Recently, Vectra published the 2018 Black Hat Edition of the Attacker Behavior Industry Report, which covers the period from January through June 2018. While there are plenty of threat-research reports out there, this one offers unique insights about real-world cyberattacker behaviors found in cloud, data center and enterprise networks.

Recently, we made an alarming discovery: hackers are using hidden tunnels to break into and steal from financial services firms! Clearly, this is serious business if it involves bad guys targeting massive amounts of money and private information. But what exactly are we dealing with? Let's dig into what hidden tunnels are and how I find them to uncover the answer.

Cybersecurity analysts are overwhelmed with security events that need to be triaged, analyzed, correlated and prioritized. If you're an analyst, you probably have some incredible skills but are being held back by tedious, manual work.

While ransomware attacks like NotPetya and WannaCry were making headlines (and money) in 2017, cryptocurrency mining was quietly gaining strength as the heir apparent when it comes to opportunistic behaviors for monetary gain.

In my last blog, I spoke about a financial customer performing pen testing and how I helped the blue team detect the red team as it carried-out an attack. I'm back again today with another story from the trenches.

Vectra® was recently positioned as the sole Visionary in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS). Over the years, intrusion detection systems (IDS) have converged with intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and the two are now known collectively as IDPS.

Explore a comprehensive guide to TensorForest in TensorFlow, including random forest methods, implementation, and comparisons with scikit-learn.

Learn how Vectra AI detects and responds to WannaCry ransomware and its variants using behavioral analysis and continuous monitoring.

A ransomware attack is spreading very rapidly among unpatched Windows systems worldwide. This morning, the attack was initially believed to target the UK National Health Service, but throughout the day, it has become apparent this is a global attack.

Integration decreases cost and increases effectiveness. For this reason, Vectra is adaptive by design. Everything we do considers how to help our customers be more efficient and faster at fighting attacks. Sometimes it involves determining where to deliver sophisticated threat intelligence beyond the Vectra. Working with Splunk is a great example of this integration.

In 2012, Shamoon crippled Saudi Aramco and this new variant was reportedly targeted at the Saudi labor ministry as well as several engineering and manufacturing companies. During a recent analysis, Vectra Networks came across a malicious component that appears to be used in conjunction with spear-phishing-delivered malicious documents.

As long as I can recall, enterprises have always relied on prevention and policy-based controls for security, deploying products such as antivirus software, IDS/IPS and firewalls. But as we now know, and industry research firms have stated, they aren't enough to adequately deal with today's threat environment, which is flooded by a dizzy array of advanced and targeted attacks.

In the Information Security (InfoSec) community, AI is commonly seen as a savior-an application of technology that will allow businesses to more rapidly identify and mitigate threats, without having to add more humans. That human factor is commonly seen as a business inhibitor as the necessary skills and experience are both costly and difficult to obtain.

This is a prediction made by Gartner analyst Avivah Litan in her latest blog entry, The Disappearing UEBA Market. Of course it caught our attention here at Vectra. We are not a standalone UEBA company, nor do we want to be. First and foremost, we are an AI company that empowers threat hunters. But we often find ourselves in this discussion with people who believe UEBA alone will solve the world's problems (and possibly make coffee in the morning, too).

Enterprises have a strategy to encrypt everything. With this encryption however, attempts to perform SSL decryption mean there will be large volumes of encrypted data to process.

Vectra Threat Labs researchers have uncovered the activities of a group of individuals currently engaged in targeted attacks against entities in the Middle East. These attacks are themed around Middle Eastern political issues and the motivation appears to relate to espionage, as opposed to opportunistic or criminal intentions.

Sitting at the edge of the network and rarely configured or monitored for active compromise, the firewall today is a vulnerable target for persistent and targeted attacks.

Security researchers with Vectra Threat Labs recently uncovered a critical vulnerability affecting all versions of <a href="https://www.vectra.ai/news/vectra-networks-discovers-critical-microsoft-windows-vulnerability-that-allows-printer-watering-hole-attacks-to-spread-malware">Microsoft Windows</a> reaching all the way back to Windows 95. The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code at system level either over a local network or the Internet. As a result, attackers could use this vulnerability both to infect an end-user from the Internet, and then spread through the internal network.

Ransomware is clearly the scourge of 2016. Every week there is a new and notable enterprise-level outbreak of this insidious class of malware-crippling and extorting an ever widening array of organizations.

In light of Apple's response to the FBI's request to gain access to San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook's iPhone, it appears that there is some confusion in the connection of this request from the FBI with the bigger government debate on providing backdoors and encryption.

How do attackers hack webcams? Learn how webcams can be hacked using a backdoor and how to prevent attackers to exploit them.

The need to block threats within milliseconds locks IDS/IPS into using signatures for detections. While signatures can detect a wide variety of threats, they rely on the fast-pattern-matching of known threats.

Recently, it came to our attention that HP DVLabs has uncovered at least tenvulnerabilitiesin the Belkin N300 Dual-Band Wi-Fi Range Extender (F9K1111). As this is the first update issued for the F9K1111 and there were not any public triggers for the vulnerabilities, we thought it would be interesting to take a deeper look.

Recently, Kasperky Labs disclosed that it was the victim of a sophisticated cyber attack, which they have named Duqu 2.0. The team at Kaspersky Labs has published a detailed analysis of Duqu 2.0 and it's definitely worth a read.

Updated June 3, 2015 11:00 AM(see details)Recently a popular privacy and unblocker application known as Hola has been gaining attention from the security community for a variety of vulnerabilities and highly questionable practices that allow the service to essentially behave as a botnet-for-hire through its sister service called Luminati. Vectra researchers have been looking into this application after observing it in customer networks over the past several weeks, and the results are both intriguing and troubling. In addition to its various botnet-enabling functions that are now part of the public record, the Hola application contains a variety of features that make it an ideal platform for executing targeted cyber attacks.

Security breaches did not stop making headlines in recent months, and while hackers still go after credit card data, the trends goes towards richer data records and exploiting various key assets inside an organization. As a consequence, organizations need to develop new schemes to identify and track key information assets.The biggest recent breach in the financial industry occurred at JP Morgan Chase, with an estimated 76 million customer records and another 8 million records belonging to businesses stolen from several internal servers. At Morgan Stanley, an employee of the company's wealth management group was fired after information from up to 10% of Morgan Stanley's wealthiest clientele was leaked. Even more sensitive was the largest health-care breach thus far: at Anthem, over 80 million records containing personally identifiable information (PII) including social security numbers were exposed. Less well-known, but potentially more costly in terms of damage and litigation is the alleged theft of trade secrets by the former CEO of Chesapeake's Energy (NYSE: CHK).

Not all breaches come from external malicious actors. Learn all about insider threats, the common indicators and useful prevention strategies in our blog post.

While the insider threat in government agencies and big companies is a known problem with somewhat implemented mitigation strategies, less is known about the insider threat to critical US infrastructure, such as water purification or nuclear power plants.

On June 6th, Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill wrote about an NSF researcher who misused NSF-funded supercomputing resources to mine Bitcoin valued between $8,000 and $10,000. The article points to a student at London Imperial College and a researcher at Harvard University who are also alleged to have used their University's computers to mine a similar virtual currency called Dogecoin.