Cyber Security Today, Week in Review for Sept. 17, 2021

I’m Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada, sitting in today for Howard Solomon. With me to discuss some of the news is Dinah Davis, Kitchener, Ont., based-vice president of research and development and Arctic Wolf.

But first, before we get to that, a quick look at some of the headlines and the stories Howard has been covering for the past seven days:

 

Many employees working from home see cybersecurity as a hindrance, according to a survey. And they admit that they’re trying to bypass security controls. That’s one of the topics Dinah and I will discuss. Another is a report showing that password brute force or vulnerability exploitation are still leading ways organization’s environments are being compromised.

Apple users should update their devices as soon as possible because the company has issued security patches for two serious vulnerabilities. One of them was discovered by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, and was allegedly used to compromise the devices of activist reporters. Threat actors are also using a Linux version of the Cobalt Strike hacking tool. This means IT teams with Linux infrastructure have to worry about detecting the signs of this tool before the malware gets installed. And lastly, researchers discovered an unsecured database open to the internet with 61 million records from wearable fitness devices that apparently belong to an American application developer.  That company’s website has been offline since the news broke.

(The following is an edited version of my talk with Dinah Davis. To hear the full conversation play the podcast.)

Jim: I’ve been dying to ask you one question since I’ve met you: Where did the name Arctic Wolf come from?

Dinah: We have two founders at Arctic Wolf, one based in Canada — Kim Trombley — and one based in the U. S. — Brian Naismith. At the time most of the employees were going to be in Canada. They had a few criteria for figuring out what the name could be. One was that they wanted it to start with an ”A” so that anytime things were listed alphabetically we would be at the top. They floated a few different animal names — I don’t know why, I guess they liked animals – and Arctic Wolf stuck….