Welcome to the Vectra Blog

Can machines think? The question itself is deceptively simple in so far as the human ability to introspect has made each of us intimately aware of what it means to think.

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.

Explore Alan Turing's pioneering contributions to machine intelligence, the Turing Machine, and his perspectives on the development of modern computing.

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.

Cisco recently <a href="https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1854555" target="_blank">announced</a> the term "intent-based networking" in a press release that pushes the idea that networks need to be more intuitive. One element of that intuition is for networks to be more secure without requiring a lot of heavy lifting by local network security professionals.

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.

It seems like a new variant or victim of ransomware is in the news every day. It's newsworthy because it works so well and causes widespread destruction. So when the recent wave of stories hit about PetrWrap, a variation of the widely known Petya ransomware strain, it was easy to miss the significance. The "no-honor-among-thieves" narrative crowded out its true importance.

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.

Printers present an interesting case in the world of IoT (Internet of Things), as they are very powerful hardware compared to most IoT devices, yet are not typically thought of as a "real" computer by most administrators. In this case, we investigate how to use the special role that printers have within most networks to actually infect end-user devices and extend the footprint of their attack within the network.

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).

Keeping data from getting out into the wild or being damaged by cyber attackers is what keeps CISOs, the executive team and boards of directors up at night. To protect organizations, cybersecurity needs to be automated and real-time, it needs to learn contextually like we do and it needs to monitor for threats at every corner of the network in a way that organizations can afford without sacrificing coverage.

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.

Explore the risks of the Heartbleed vulnerability within internal networks and how to mitigate these threats.