Posts

Guest Post: Why Cities Need to Get Serious About Cyber Defense

A special thank you to Maha Amircani for her guest post discussing the reality of cyber vulnerabilities faced by major cities. Maha is an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia and founder of Amircani Law. A Georgia native born to immigrant parents from Egypt, Maha represents clients in city, state and federal court litigation as well as administrative proceedings. Her practice specializes in the areas of personal injury, criminal defense, and real estate closings.


 

There has been a lot of interest in protecting businesses from the threat of ransomware. But, city governments are at real risk and the impact reverberates to people like me who interact with them daily. After the City of Atlanta ransomware attack in March 2018, this became crystal clear.

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What Fornetix Has Planned for the 2018 RSA Conference

Is RSA really less than a week away? It feels like just a few short months ago that the team at Fornetix was lamenting the fact that we’d have to wait until mid-April for the one event we all look forward to year-after-year.

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Smart Meters — Securing Utilities, One Bit at a Time

“Smart” Doesn’t Mean “Secure”

Prior to 1975, there was no such thing as a smart home. Prior to 1985, all radio systems were analog. Prior to 1990, all phone systems were analog. Prior to 1974, all utility metering was analog. But all of that has changed; we now live in a digital world. 1’s and 0’s “run” our lives, and picking up an analog landline phone (POTS) is virtually a thing of the past. The new “hotness” is smart everything. Smart cars, smart phones, smart TVs, smart homes, and now smart grids.

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Spectre & Meltdown: Processor Design Flaw Leads to Executable Side-Channel Attack

Starting in late December, the Linux kernel development lists started buzzing about some commits going into the kernel without the usual documentation that adjoins such code changes. When an AMD developer added some code on December 26th with the following comment, security researchers started zeroing in on the problem:

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With Great Code Comes Great Vulnerability

How Auto Makers Are Working to Secure Connected Cars

Last week, Fornetix attended the inaugural Auto-ISAC summit. “ISAC” stands for Information Sharing and Analysis Center. There are several long-standing ISACs for other industries including aviation, electricity, natural gas, and financial services. You can find the full list here if you are curious.

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