Hold on to your digital assets, the World’s Most Famous Hacker is coming to the Queen City! We're excited to announce that legendary hacker, bestselling author, and now a top security consultant, Kevin Mitnick will keynote at this year's OktoberTekfest.

Have you transitioned your company’s network away from IPv4 and over to IPv6 yet? If not, why? For years now, we’ve heard apocalypse-type theories of how we need to move to IPv6 or the internet will die. IPv4 exhaustion has been rumored since the 1990s and IPv6 has been around for 19 years, so if you haven’t made the jump, you’re not alone. Google tracks IPv6 statistics and, as of December 2017, only 18.67% of the world has deployed IPv6, with the United States adopting at a faster approximate 25% rate. If we all know that IPv6 will be the standard at some point, then why is it taking so long to transition?

With the internet, in all its glory, playing host to over 1.8 billion websites that can be accessed by virtually anyone in the world, it stands to reason that businesses may not want users accessing some of these websites due to security threats, inappropriateness, or other factors while on their network. How can businesses control what websites their users gain access to? Typically, most organizations have utilized a blacklist, which identifies websites that users are not allowed to access. This method is not very restrictive and can be problematic in that it allows access to everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, that is not on the blacklist. A whitelist, as you might guess, is the exact opposite of a blacklist, and only grants access to websites explicitly identified on the list. If the site isn’t on the list, then the user isn’t granted access to it. The concept of a whitelist has been around for many years in website filtering but has seldom been implemented. It can also be problematic because, given the breadth and depth of the internet, only a fraction of the available websites would be allowed.

With cybercrime predicted to reach $6 trillion annually by 2021 and to be more profitable—and therefore, more attractive to criminal organizations—than the global combined trade of all major illegal drugs, businesses can no longer rely on traditional network security tools and expect to achieve protection.[1]

InfraGard recently put out a Flash Alert for a piece of malware called Fruit Fly. I sat through this briefing during last year’s Black Hat/DefCon conference and this malware is unique because it can live in an environment for months, if not years, undetected. There are no ransomware screens alerting the user that they’ve been infected or the ominous blue screen of death. It was first discovered in January of 2017 by Thomas Reed who works for Malwarebytes, who’s also a top Mac OS security researcher and conducted the initial analysis, but since then other variants been identified, dissected, and monitored.