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CISO Q&A: How AvidXchange manages COVID-related threats and risk

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Like many CISOs, Christina Quaine’s team is supporting the payment processor’s work-at-home employees and managing internal pandemic-specific risks. It also helps its mid-market customers meet new security challenges.
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CSO caught up with Christina Quaine, the CISO of AvidXchange, a North Carolina-based payments processor that focuses on mid-market companies. We talked to her about how this mid-sized company, with 1,400 or so employees, has dealt with the changes wrought by the COVID pandemic. Given the company’s role in financial transactions, we were particularly keen to hear how the rise in coronavirus fraud instances were affecting her job. Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.

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18 (new) ways attackers can compromise email

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Researchers have discovered eighteen new vulnerabilities in how email systems authenticate senders, making it even easier for criminals to fool users.
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All organizations wrestle with chronic phishing attacks that are the primary vectors through which malicious actors breach systems and spread malware.

Most phishing attackers deliver their payloads on networks by crafting spoofed emails that look like they come from legitimate, authoritative senders. Those look-alike emails instead derive from domains deployed solely for malicious purposes. It’s virtually impossible for most email recipients to detect the differences between real and spoofed email accounts, making phishing an intractable and seemingly never-ending problem for users and organizations alike.

Now computer science researchers have discovered eighteen new vulnerabilities in how email systems authenticate senders. Vern Paxson, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Corelight, Jianjun Chen, Post-Doc researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and Jian Jiang, Senior Director of Engineering at F5 (Shape Security), presented the result of their research at Black Hat last week in a talk entitled “You Have No Idea Who Sent That Email: 18 Attacks on Email Sender Authentication.”

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.

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Mathematical Mesh alpha release promises better end-to-end encryption

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Web pioneer proposes a new cryptographic system that relies on threshold key infrastructure to improve end-to-end encryption.
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One of the main challenges posed by the internet has been the need to secure communications across a massive tangle of public and private networks. Security experts agree that end-to-end communication encryption is the best means of defending users against third-party interception or breaches that could expose the potentially sensitive content.

End-to-end encryption, however, has been more of a dream than a reality, particularly given the rise of “walled gardens” led by internet giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Each always maintains some form of access to their users’ communications.

A new approach to end-to-end encryption called Mathematical Mesh was quietly introduced at this year’s HOPE (Hackers of Planet Earth) conference by esteemed cryptographer Phillip Hallam-Baker, who is currently a principal scientist at Comodo and was formerly a member of the CERN team that designed the World Wide Web, among many other accomplishments.

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.