Posts by Patrick Hellen

1 min Verizon DBIR

Nightmare on Pwn Street

We've gone a little Halloween-crazy this year over here at Rapid7 Towers. Check out this week's Whiteboard Wednesday video to hear how organizations are like the protagonists of horror movies; making decisions that may ultimately make them vulnerable to attack. In addition, while we were carving our pumpkins and sewing our costumes, we got to thinking about one of the most horrifying realities in information security: many organizations keep falling victim to the same tricks they've seen in the

3 min

It's the Great Pumpkin Patching Contest, Charlie Brown!

It's October! You all know what that means! That's right! It's National Cyber Security Awareness Month [/2013/10/02/national-cyber-security-awareness-month-foiling-phishing]! Oh...some of you thought Halloween...right. Well let's see if we can shoe-horn those two together. Browsing the internet can be a little scary at times.  Kind of like trick or treating, there are houses you know to avoid because the lights are out, but how do you avoid the house where they've gone on a health kick and are

1 min

SecurityStreet Talks - Houston

Join UHY Advisors and Rapid7 for an afternoon of learning, networking and discussion with your peers from the Houston security community. Presenters include Zate Berg, Internal Security Manager at Rapid7, Chris Ward with Vinson & Elkins LLP, Security Evangelist's Quincy Jackson and Kenneth Sayles, and more. The afternoon will consist of short, 30-45 minute presentations focused on hacking industrial control systems, building risk management methodologies, security philosophy and information sec

1 min Networking

Leveraging Security Risk Intelligence to Improve Your Security Posture

As most of you probably know, attackers routinely target exploitable weaknesses of security systems rather than pre-identifying victims for their attacks. Also, most breaches that occur in database security systems are avoidable without expensive or sophisticated countermeasures. In its 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon [http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/reports/rp_data-breach-investigations-report-2012_en_xg.pdf] registered 174 million compromised records for 2011, compar