Particularly if you live on the East Coast, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident has given you practical familiarity with ransomware. Bleeping Computer provides the latest details on the denouement of the incident.

On Wednesday, President Biden issued an executive order on cybersecurity. Here’s link to the accompanying fact sheet and Nextgov and Cyberscoop also report on the EO. The EO focuses attention on the federal government and its information technology and operations technology contractors. The FEHBlog expects that the EO will kick loose a couple of Federal Acquisition Regulation cases a couple of related FAR cases (2017-013 and 2017-016) that have been under development for going on four years.

Health IT Security reports on “recent federal threat alerts detail ongoing Russian-backed and Avaddon ransomware campaigns targeting global entities, including healthcare and COVID-19 vaccine developers.”

ZDNet informs us that

Web applications represented 39% of all data breaches in the last year with phishing attacks jumping 11% and ransomware up 6% from a year ago, according to the Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report. 

The report, based on 5,358 breaches from 83 contributors around the world, highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic move to the cloud and remote work opened up a few avenues for cybercrime.

Here are some more figures to ponder in the Verizon Business DBIR [which alway worth a gander]:

• 85% of breaches involved a human element.
• 61% of breaches involved credentials.
• Ransomware appeared in 10% of breaches, double the previous year.
• Compromised external cloud assets were more common than on-premises assets in incidents and breaches.