The second Tuesday of April has been christened “Identity Management Day” by the Identity Defined Security Alliance, a trade group that provides free, vendor-neutral cybersecurity resources to businesses.
Today, indeed, is a good a time as any to raise awareness about cyber exposures that can result from casually or improperly managing and securing digital identities. Here are five tips for securely managing identities across the new, hybrid work environment:
•Think granularly. The first mistake a lot of organizations make when planning their identity management strategy is not considering every identity on their network. Sure, a lot think about their users and what types of credentials they’ll need for their various systems. But what about the numerous machines on a company’s network, like mobile devices, servers, applications, and IoT devices?
Machines are dramatically increasing, and require a solution that will identify these identities, authenticate them, and then secure their interactions across the network. IT leaders need to consider PKI-based solutions for managing their machine identities, so their IT teams can issue certificates to their machines, track what is on their network, and encrypt the communication between the devices. This will prevent falsified entities from entering the network and putting data at risk.
•Verify email. In the face of phishing threats, many companies focus their investments on anti-malware software or new technology to prevent threats from getting through. Unfortunately, some of these emails will inevitably slip through the cracks. (more…)
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has assumed a very visible and vocal role. Mayorkas has been championing an extensive portfolio of initiatives to rally public-private collaboration to fend off cyber criminals and state-sponsored threat actors.
Mayorkas announced a series of 60-day sprints to quell ransomware and to bolster the cyber defenses of industrial control systems, transportation networks and election systems. Mayorkas also pledged to increase the diversity of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s workforce, noting that roughly a third of CISA’s workers are part of minority groups.
This reminds me of how President Obama used his bully pulpit back in 2015 to promote accelerated sharing of threat intelligence and to push for a consumers’ bill of rights for online privacy.
The good news is that passwordless technologies are not only ready for prime time, they appear to be gaining traction in ways that suggest we’re on the cusp of a period of wide-scale adoption. That’s the upshot of a new report, The State of Passwordless Security 2021, put out by HYPR, a New York City-based supplier of advanced authentication systems.
HYPR polled 427 IT professionals and found a high level of awareness about passwordless authenticators — and not just for enhanced security. The IT pros also recognized how passwordless systems contribute to operational agility, as well, and they’ve begun to factor this into their planning.
Some 91 percent of the respondents agreed that passwordless authentication was important to stop credential theft and phishing. Meanwhile, 64 percent saw value in improving user experiences and 21 percent said it could help achieve digital transformation.
“Adoption of passwordless authentication is moving faster than we expected,” says George Avetisov, HYPR’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “The rise of remote work has created a huge urgency around adopting passwordless multifactor authentication, and the no.1 use case is remote access.”
I recently sat down with Avetisov to discuss a few other notable findings in HYPR’s study. For a full drill down on our conversation, please give a listen to the accompanying podcast. Here are a few big takeaways.
As digital transformation kicks into high gear, it’s certainly not getting any easier to operate IT systems securely, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses.
SMBs are tapping into cloud infrastructure and rich mobile app experiences, making great leaps forward in business agility, the same as large enterprises. Yet all organizations today, no matter their size or sector, face the same daunting security challenge: how to preserve the integrity of their IT systems when the attack surface is expanding and intrusion attempts are intensifying.
I recently spoke to Maurice Côté, VP Business Solutions, Devolutions, a Montreal, Canada-based supplier of remote desktop management services about this. Côté outlined how and why many SMBs are in a position to materially improve their security posture – by going back to a few security basics, in particular by paying closer attention to privileged account management, or PAM. For a deeper dive into our discussion please give the accompanying podcast a listen. A few key takeaways:
How SMBs got here
Some context: privileged accounts first arose 20 years ago as our modern business networks took shape. Privileged accounts assigned special logon credentials to system administrators in charge of onboarding and off boarding users, updating and fixing IT systems and carrying out other network-wide tasks.
Right off the bat, it became an engrained practice to ‘share’ the logon credentials to privileged accounts, that is to use one username and password to authenticate multiple users of a given shared account. Just as quickly, other lax security practices became the order of the day. Not nearly enough thought was put into issuing, monitoring and, when appropriate, proactively shutting down shared accounts.
Like a couple of WWE arch rivals, Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have squared off against each other in a donnybrook over consumer privacy.
Cook initially body slammed Zuckerberg — when Apple issued new privacy policies aimed at giving U.S. consumers a smidgen more control over their personal data while online.
Zuckerberg then dropped kicked Cook by taking out full-page newspaper ads painting Apple’s social responsibility flexing as bad for business; he then hammered Cook with a pop-up ad campaign designed to undermine Apple’s new privacy policies.
But wait. Here’s Cook rising from the mat to bash Z-Man at the Brussels’ International Privacy Day, labeling his tormentor as an obsessive exploiter who ought to be stopped from so greedily exploiting consumers’ digital footprints for his personal gain.
This colorful chapter in the history of technology and society isn’t just breezing by unnoticed. A recent survey of some 2,000 U.S. iPhone and iPad users, conducted by SellCell.com, a phone and tech trade-in website, shows American consumers are tuned in and beginning to recognize what’s at stake.
Fully 72 percent of those polled by SellCell said they were aware of new privacy changes in recent Apple software updates, not just in a cursory manner, but with a high level of understanding; some 42 percent said they understood the privacy improvements extremely well or at least very well, while 21 percent said they understood them moderately well.
Another telling finding: some 65 percent of respondents indicated they were extremely or very concerned about websites and mobile apps that proactively track their online behaviors, while only 14 percent said they were not at all concerned.
Regardless of how familiar you are with Information Security, you’ve probably come across the term ‘malware’ countless times. From accessing your business-critical resources and sensitive information to halting business operations and services, a malware infection can quickly become an organization’s worst nightmare come true.
As a business owner, you must be aware of the implications of different types of malware on your company’s bottom line, and what steps you can take to protect your company from future attacks.
This article will walk you through the various types of malware, how to identify and prevent a malware attack, and how to mitigate the risks.
What is Malware
Malware, a combination of the terms ‘malicious’ and ‘software,’ includes all malicious programs that intend to exploit computer devices or entire network infrastructures to extract victim’s data, disrupt business operations, or simply, cause chaos.
There’s no definitive method or technique that defines malware; any program that harms the computer or system owners and benefits the perpetrators is malware.
Network breaches also increased steadily and dramatically month-to-month in 2020. This development is delineated in a recent report from technology research firm Forrester.
In its summary report – The State of Network Security, 2020 To 2021—Forrester combined findings derived from several surveys the firm conducted during the course of last year; Forrester polled security decision makers in organizations across North America and Europe.
The overarching takeaway: more organizations were breached, more often, in 2020 that 2019; some 58% of security decision-makers in North America and Europe reported dealing with at least one breach in 2020 as compared to 48% in 2019.
Notably, the number of organizations that said they were breached more than three times in the 12-month period was up significantly, as well.
Both external and internal cyber assaults were pervasive. Attacks routinely routed through through employees, contractors and vendors; in short, folks granted access for legitimate reasons in order to participate in cloud-based commerce.
Some 40% of respondents who experienced a breach due to an internal incident said it was due to intentional abuse of access rights from current or former employees; 38% said it was from accidental or inadvertent misuse by employees; and 22% said it was a combination of both.
This bad news from UScellular follows similarly troubling disclosures from networking software supplier SolarWinds and from email security vendor Mimecast.
The SolarWinds hack came to light in mid-December and has since become a red hot topic in the global cybersecurity community.
Meanwhile, Mimecast followed its Jan. 12 disclosure of a digital certificate compromise with a Jan. 26 posting confirming that the compromise was at the hands of the same nation-state threat group behind the SolarWinds hack and subsequent attacks on various technology companies and federal government agencies.
And now UScellular admits that it detected its network breach on Jan. 6, some two days after the attackers gained unauthorized access. The intruders got in by tricking UScellular retail store employees into downloading malicious software on store computers.
Thanks to a couple of milestone hacks disclosed at the close of 2020 and start of 2021, they will forever be associated with putting supply-chain vulnerabilities on the map.
Similarly, the SolarWinds and Mimecast hacks are precursors of increasingly clever and deeply-damaging hacks of the global supply chain sure to come.
Supplier trojans
Quick recap: SolarWinds supplies the Orion platform to some 33,000 enterprises that use it to monitor and manage their entire IT stack. On Dec. 8, security vendor FireEye reported that it had been compromised by a state-sponsored adversary; then on Dec. 13, FireEye and Microsoft published this technical report, disclosing how the adversary got in: via trojan malware, dubbed Sunburst, carried in an Orion software update sent to FireEye.
SolarWinds subsequently disclosed to the SEC that threat actors inserted Sunburst into the Orion updates issued to customers between March and June 2020. The threat actors, it was noted, were careful not to tamper with Orion’s source code.
That advice resonates today, even as we deepen our reliance on number crunching — in the form of the unceasing machine learning algorithms whirring away in the background of our lives, setting in motion many of the routine decisions each of us make daily.
However, as Plato seemingly foresaw, the underlying algorithms we’ve come to rely on are only as good as the human knowledge they spring from. And sometimes the knowledge transfer from humans to math formulas falls well short.
Last August, an attempt by the UK government to use machine learning to conjure and dispense final exam grades to quarantined high-schoolers proved to be a disastrous failure. Instead of keeping things operable in the midst of a global pandemic, the UK officials ended up exposing the deep systemic bias of the UK’s education systems, in a glaring way.
Then, in November, the algorithms pollsters invoked to predict the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election proved drastically wrong — again, even after the pollsters had poured their knowledge into improving their predictive algorithms after the 2016 elections.
How did we get to this level of disinformation? How did we, the citizens of the United States of America, become so intensely divided?
It’s tempting to place the lion’s share of the blame on feckless political leaders and facile news media outlets. However, that’s just the surface manifestation of what’s going on.
Another behind-the-scenes component — one that is not getting the mainstream attention it deserves — has been cyber warfare. Russian hacking groups have set out to systematically erode Western democratic institutions — and they’ve been quite successful at it. There’s plenty of evidence illustrating how Russia has methodically stepped-up cyber attacks aimed at achieving strategic geopolitical advantage over rivals in North America and Europe.
I’m not often surprised by cybersecurity news developments these days. Yet, one recent disclosure floored me. A popular meme site, called iFunny, has emerged as a haven for disaffected teen-aged boys who are enthralled with white supremacy. iFunny is a Russian company; it was launched in 2011 and has been downloaded to iOS and Android phones an estimated 10 million times.
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, investigators at Pixalate, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based supplier of fraud management technology, documented how iFunny distributed data-stealing malware and, in doing so, actually targeted smartphone users in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The public is unlikely to ever learn who ordered this campaign, and what they did — or intend to do, going forward — with this particular trove of stolen data.
Advertising practices
Even so, this shared intelligence from Pixalate is instructive. It vividly illustrates how threat actors have gravitated to hacking vulnerable mobile apps. The state of mobile app security is poor. Insecure mobile apps represent a huge and growing attack vector. Mobile apps are being pushed out of development more rapidly than ever, … more
Company networks have evolved rather spectacularly in just 20 years along a couple of distinct tracks: connectivity and security.
We began the new millennium with on-premises data centers supporting servers and desktops that a technician in sneakers could service. Connectivity was relatively uncomplicated. And given a tangible network perimeter, cybersecurity evolved following the moat-and-wall principle. Locking down web gateways and erecting a robust firewall were considered the be-all and end-all.
Fast forward to the 21st Century’s third decade. Today, connectively is a convoluted mess. Company networks must support endless permutations of users and apps, both on-premises and in the Internet cloud. Security, meanwhile, has morphed into a glut of point solutions that mostly serve to highlight the myriad gaps in an ever-expanding attack surface. And threat actors continue to take full advantage.
These inefficiencies and rising exposures are not being ignored. Quite the contrary, there’s plenty of clever innovation, backed by truckloads of venture capital, seeking to help networks run smoother, while also buttoning down the attack surface. One new approach that is showing a lot of promise cropped up in late 2019. It’s called Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, as coined by research firm Gartner.
SASE (pronounced sassy) replaces the site-centric, point-solution approach to security with a user-centric model that holds the potential to profoundly reinforce digital transformation. The beauty of SASE is that it accomplishes this not by inventing anything new, but simply by meshing mature networking and security technologies together and delivering them as a single cloud service — with all of the attendant efficiency and scalability benefits.
To get a better idea of SASE, I had the chance to visit with Elad Menahem, director of security, and Dave Greenfield, secure networking evangelist, at Cato Networks, a Tel Aviv-based startup that’s in the thick of the SASE movement. Here are the key takeaways … more
Most of time we take for granted the degree to which fundamental components of civilization are steeped in mathematics.
Everything from science and engineering to poetry and music rely on numeric calculations. Albert Einstein once observed that “pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”
An accomplished violinist, Einstein, no doubt, appreciated the symmetry of his metaphor. He was keenly aware of how an expressive Haydn symphony applied math principles in a musical context in much the same way has he did in deriving breakthrough physics theorems.
Math once more is being conjured to help civilization make a great leap forward. Digital technology, like music, is all about math. We’ve come a long way leveraging algorithms to deliver an amazing array of digital services over the past 30 years; yet so much more is possible.
Math is the linchpin to innovations that can dramatically improve the lives of billions of people, perhaps even save the planet. However, a quintessential math conundrum, is, for the moment, holding these anticipated advancements in check. The math community refers to this bottleneck as “indistinguishability obfuscation,” or iO.
Our top math geniuses point to iO as a cornerstone needed to unleash the full potential of artificially intelligent (AI) programs running across highly complex and dynamic cloud platforms, soon to be powered by quantum computers. Simply put, iO must be achieved in order to preserve privacy and security while tapping into the next generation of IT infrastructure.
A confluence of technical and social developments points to username-and-password logons becoming obsolete over the next few years. What’s more, this shift could very well kick into high gear as part of the solidifying of post Covid-19 business practices and online habits.
I had a chance to discuss this seminal transition with George Avetisov, co-founder and chief executive officer of HYPR, a Manhattan-based supplier of advanced authentication technologies. For a full drill down on our eye-opening conversation, please give a listen to the accompanying podcast. Here are a few big takeaways.
Password tradeoffs
Passwords have always been a big pain. They must be convoluted to be any good, which means they’re difficult to remember, especially since the average person has to juggle passwords to access dozens of online accounts. From a business perspective, managing and resetting passwords chews up scarce resources, and yet even with the best possible maintenance passwords are trivial to hack.
For most of the Internet era, we’ve learned to live with these tradeoffs. However, in the last couple of years the harm wrought by the abuse of passwords has spiked exponentially. The reason: credential stuffing. This is a type of advanced, brute-force hacking that leverages automation.
By deploying botnets pre-loaded with stolen data, credential stuffing gangs are able to insert stolen usernames and passwords into web page forms, at scale, until they gain access to a valuable account. Credential stuffing has enabled criminal hacking rings to turbo-charge their malware spreading and account hijacking campaigns. And when Covid-19 hit, these attackers opportunistically pivoted to plundering Covid-19 relief funds at an ungodly scale.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has come a long, long way since precocious students at Carnegie Melon University installed micro-switches inside of a Coca-Cola vending machine so they could remotely check on the temperature and availability of their favorite beverages.
That was back in 1982. Since then, IoT devices have become widely and deeply integrated into our homes, businesses, utilities and transportations systems. This has brought us many benefits. And yet our pervasive deployment of IoT systems has also vastly expanded the cyber attack surface of business networks, especially in just the past few years.
And now Covid-19 is having a multiplier effect on these rising IoT exposures. Nine months into the global pandemic an ominous dynamic is playing out.
This shift is just getting started. IoT-enabled scams and hacks quickly ramped up to a high level – and can be expected to accelerate through 2021 and beyond. This surge can, and must, be blunted. The good news is that we already possess the technology, as well as the best practices frameworks, to mitigate fast-rising IoT exposures.
However, this will require a concerted, proactive effort by the business community — enterprises and small- and mid-sized businesses alike. Individual citizens, consumers and workers have a big role to play as well. Each one of us will have to cooperate and make sacrifices. A lot is at stake. Here’s what all companies and individuals should fully grasp about our IoT systems under attack, post Covid-19.
In the U.S. alone, in fact, there are more than 5,000 cybersecurity vendors. For organizations looking to improve their security posture, this is causing confusion and vendor fatigue, especially for companies that don’t have a full time Chief Information Security Officer.
The vendors are well-intentioned. They are responding to a trend of companies moving to meet rising compliance requirements, such as PCI-DSS and GDPR. Senior management is now focused on embracing well-vetted best practices such as those outlined in FFIEC and SOC 2, and many more. According to a recent study by PwC, 91% of all companies are following cybersecurity frameworks, like these, as they build and implement their cybersecurity programs.
All of this activity has put a strain on how companies buy and sell cybersecurity solutions. Consider that PCI-DSS alone has over 250 complex requirements that include things like endpoint protection, password management, anti-virus, border security, data recovery and awareness training.
Traditional channels for choosing the right security solutions are proving to be increasingly ineffective. This includes searching through hundreds of companies on Google, attending trade shows and conferences (not possible today with COVID), or dealing with constant cold calls and cold emails from security company sales reps.
Consider that we began this century relying on the legacy “waterfall” software development process. This method required a linear plan, moving in one direction, that culminated in a beta deliverable by a hard and fast deadline. To set this deadline required a long, often tortured planning cycle. And this invariably led to the delivery of a bug-ridden version 1.0, if not outright project failure.
By contrast, the agile approach, aka DevOps, thrives on uncertainty. DevOps expects changes as part of being responsive to end users. Agile software development is all about failing fast — discovering flaws quickly and making changes on the fly. Agile has given us Netflix, Twitter, Uber, TikTok and much more.
Of course the flip side is that all of this speed and agility has opened up endless fresh attack vectors – particularly at the web application layer of digital commerce. “The heart of any business is its applications,” says Venky Sundar, founder and chief marketing officer of Indusface. “And application-level attacks have come to represent the easiest target available to hackers.”
Based in Bengalura, India, Indusface helps its customers defend their applications with a portfolio of services that work in concert with its flagship web application firewall (WAF,) a technology that has been around for about 15 years. WAFs have become a table stakes; any company with a public-facing website should by now have a WAF. Fundamentally, WAFs monitor all of the HTTP traffic hitting a company’s web servers and block known malicious traffic, such as the threats listed in the OWASP Top 10 application level attacks
A few of the big-name vendors in the WAF space include Imperva, Cloudflare, Akamai and Barracuda and even Amazon Web Services offers a WAF. Indusface has differentiated itself by … more
Ransomware is undoubtedly one of the most unnerving phenomena in the cyber threat landscape. Numerous strains of this destructive code have been the front-page news in global computer security chronicles for almost a decade now, with jaw-dropping ups and dramatic downs accompanying its progress.
Ransomware came into existence in 1989 as a primitive program dubbed the AIDS Trojan that was spreading via 5.25-inch diskettes. This debut was followed by the emergence of several marginal blackmail threats in the mid-2000s that never gained significant traction among online criminals. The epidemic went truly mainstream with the release of CryptoLocker back in 2013, and it has since transformed into a major dark web economy spawning the likes of Sodinokibi, Ryuk, and Maze lineages that are targeting the enterprise on a huge scale in 2020.
Although most people think of ransomware as a dodgy application that encrypts data and holds it for ransom, the concept is much more heterogeneous than that. It additionally spans mild-impact screen lockers, data wipers disguised as something else, infections that overwrite the master boot record (MBR), and most recently, nasties that enhance the attack logic with data theft.
The above-mentioned AIDS Trojan hailing from the distant pre-Internet era was the progenitor of the trend, but its real-world impact was close to zero. The Archiveus Trojan from 2006 was the first one to use RSA cipher, but it was reminiscent of a proof of concept and used a static 30-digit decryption password that was shortly cracked. None of these early threats went pro. In this timeline, I will instead focus on the strains that became the driving force of the ransomware evolution.
FBI spoofs
2012 – 2013. During this period, the ransomware ecosystem was dominated by Trojans that locked the screen or web browser with fake alerts impersonating law enforcement agencies. These warnings would state that the victim committed a … more
APIs made possible the astounding cloud, mobile and IoT services we have today. This happened, at a fundamental level, by freeing up software developers to innovate on the fly. APIs have exploded in enterprise use over the past several years.
However, API deployments have scaled so high and so fast that many companies don’t know how many APIs they have, which types they’re using and how susceptible their APIs might be to being compromised.
Cequence Security, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based application security vendor, today is launching a new solution, called API Sentinel, designed to help companies jump in and start proactively mitigating API risks, without necessarily having to slow down their innovation steam engine. I had the chance to discuss this with Matt Keil, Cequence’s director of product marketing. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are key takeaways from our conversation:
API 101
Digital transformation took off when companies discovered that instead of developing monolithic applications that were updated annually – at best – they could tap into the skill and creativity of their developers. This was possible because APIs – the conduits that enable two software applications to exchange information – are open and decentralized, exactly like the Internet.
Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a comparatively new corporate discipline. The basic notion is that in today’s complex operating environment, it is important for businesses to proactively identify operational hazards and have a plan in place to account for them.
A hazard is anything that can interfere with a company meeting its objectives; it could be something physical, such as a fire, a theft or a natural disaster; or it could be an abstract risk, such as a lawsuit or a regulatory fine.
As part of its role promoting cybersecurity best practices, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has stepped forward to make sure complex and expanding cybersecurity exposures become part and parcel of evolving ERM frameworks.
NIST has been getting positive feedback to draft guidelines it issued in late March which essentially serves as a roadmap for enterprises to account for complex cybersecurity exposures when implementing ERM strategies. The guidelines — NISTIR 8286, Integrating Cybersecurity and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) – are specifically aimed at fostering the integration of cybersecurity risk management best practices and ERM frameworks.
ISA President Larry Clinton noted how well the trade groups’ handbook meshes with NIST’s new guidelines. “The NIST filing does an excellent job linking many of the principles directors have articulated as necessary for effective cybersecurity,” he says. “The NISTIR, like the NACD-ISA handbook, urges enterprises to utilize the modern models that are being developed to help organizations appropriately balance economic growth and cyber risk.”
I had the chance to drill down on this with … more
We’ve come to rely on our smartphones to live out our digital lives, both professionally and personally.
When it comes to securing mobile computing devices, the big challenge businesses have long grappled with is how to protect company assets while at the same time respecting an individual’s privacy.
Reacting to the BYOD craze, mobile security frameworks have veered from one partially effective approach to the next over the past decade. However, I recently learned about how federal regulators in several nations are rallying around a reinvigorated approach to mobile security: containerization. Containerizing data is a methodology that could anchor mobile security, in a very robust way, for the long haul.
Interestingly, leadership for this push came from federal regulators in, of all places, the Middle East. In May 2017, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) implemented its Cyber Security Framework mandating prescriptive measures, including a requirement to containerize data in all computing formats. A few months later the United Arab Emirates stood up its National Electronic Security Authority (NESA) which proceeded to do much the same thing.
Earlier this year, US regulators essentially followed the Middle East’s lead by rolling out sweeping new rules — referred to as Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) — which require use of data containerization along much the same lines as Saudi Arabia and the UAE mandated some three years ago. The implementation of CMMC represents a big change from past U.S. federal data handling rules for contractors, for which compliance was by-and-large voluntary.
Ransomware attacks and email fraud have spiked to record levels across the U.S. in each of the past three years, and a disproportionate number of the hardest hit organizations were local public agencies.
Lucy Security, a security training company based in Zug, Switzerland that works with many smaller public entities, has been in the thick of this onslaught. The company’s software is used to run public servants and corporate employees through mock cyberattack training sessions. There’s an obvious reason smaller public entities have become a favorite target of cybercriminals: most are run on shoestring budgets and corners tend to get cut in IT security, along with everything else operationally.
I had a chance to discuss this with Lucy Security Inc. CEO Colin Bastable at RSA 2020. Another factor I never thought about, until meeting with Bastable, is that public servants typically possess a can-do work ethic. This can make them particularly susceptible to social engineering trickery, the trigger for online extortion and fraud campaigns, Bastable told me.
For a drill down on my full interview with Bastable, give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are the key takeaways:
Simple, lucrative fraud
What happened in the state of Texas earlier last January is a microcosm of intensifying pressure all local agencies face from motivated hackers and scammers.
Fraudsters did enough online intelligence gathering on the Manor Independent School District, in Manor, Texas, to figure out which vendors were in line to receive large bank transfers as part of the school district spending the proceeds of a large school bond. They also studied the employees who handled the transactions.
We live in a time where technology is advancing rapidly, and digital acceleration is propelling development teams to create web applications at an increasingly faster rhythm. The DevOps workflow has been accompanying the market shift and becoming more efficient every day – but despite those efforts, there was still something being overlooked: application security.
The awareness that the typical approach to DevOps was downplaying the role of security led to an evolution of this workflow, which today has come to be known as DevSecOps. This new mindset puts application security at the foundation of DevOps, rather than it being an afterthought.
In the ideal DevSecOps implementation, security controls are fully integrated into the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines and development teams possess the necessary skills to handle and automate several security processes.
Plain sight gaps
As companies grew into the concept of DevSecOps, they typically focused on technologies like SAST or DAST to provide an extra layer of security at the earlier development stages. These technologies help check the source code for vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers in a production environment. However, finding and fixing those vulnerabilities is still not enough to guarantee end-to-end protection of the source code – there is still one key missing piece.
The start of 2021 brings forth a cyber security crossroads. Many people are in the process of shifting back into office operations while balancing the potential risks and benefits of remote work.
For some malicious hackers and IT experts, this could represent an opening. From the known compromise vectors to the most recent threats, hackers are constantly on the lookout for new strategies to bypass IT notice, out maneuver defense setups, and take advantage of new weaknesses.
Targeting remote workers
One of the most concerning cybersecurity trends this year is closely connected to 2020. Many IT experts are warning that it won’t be long before hackers compromise several unprotected home networks simultaneously to manufacture a forceful and large-scale breach of vital services and systems.
Many employees don’t have a wide range of security protections. They’ll most likely use broadband connections for their work and for personal reasons. This increases the corporate attack surface to dangerous levels.
To minimize the chances of attack, enterprises need to double down on IAM with devices that can effectively monitor user activities, corporate connective behaviors, and resource requests in a bid to streamline sign-in. Additional authentication is also needed in case potential complications are indicated.
Ransomware and fileless malware breaches will rapidly continue to destabilize businesses in 2021. These kinds of attacks are configured to evade most detection control measures and compromise critical systems by taking advantage of the approved software and platform tools found within the corporate network.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic turned many office workers into work-from-home (WFH) experts, the trend toward working without having to commute was clear.
As internet bandwidth has become more available, with homes having access to gigabit download speeds, a whole new world of career paths has opened for those who want to control their work hours and conditions. Maybe you want better pay, to be home near your kids or you just like the idea of avoiding the daily drive to an office. Whatever the reason, you can likely find work online.
One of the hottest fields right now on the WFH radar is the information technology (IT) sector. But you’ll first need to learn the specifics to get to work. Fortunately, there are online classes you can take to get that knowledge – and best of all, you can take them for free. Let’s look at what’s available and how you might jumpstart a new career.
Most IT jobs require you to have some sort of experience before you can start charging enough to make them viable as full-time employment. And some are more like a side hustle or temp job.
Having said that, here are some examples of IT careers you can learn online through free courses:
Security specialist
The more we do online, the more criminals want to take advantage of us. That makes fighting cybercrime a definite growth industry. A wide range of companies, in just about every field, are adding computer security specialists. In fact, these jobs are expected toincrease a whopping 31% by 2029. This job involves planning and implementing security measures for large and small companies that rely on computer networks. You will need to develop the ability to anticipate techniques used in future cyberattacks so they can be prevented.
•Think granularly. The first mistake a lot of organizations make when planning their identity management strategy is not considering every identity on their network. Sure, a lot think about their users and what types of credentials they’ll need for their various systems. But what about the numerous machines on a company’s network, like mobile devices, servers, applications, and IoT devices?
