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GUEST ESSAY: Taking proactive steps to heal the planet — by reducing the impact of video streaming

By Philippe Wetze

Most folks don’t realize that the Internet contributes more than 3.7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Related: Big data can foster improved healthcare

Within that, video represents over 80 percent of the traffic that flows through this global network which is growing rapidly at about 25 percent per year. A similar dynamic is taking place over enterprise networks, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A tremendous amount of video traffic is being managed by IT departments. This is why tracking the impact of digital video consumption across the business ecosystem is becoming increasingly important.

Meanwhile, the number of screens consumers use — at home and work — is also multiplying at an astonishing rate. With all these devices, there is an increase in video and encoders to handle the exploding demand for video content, driven by the growth of video-heavy social applications — TikTok and WhatsApp, to name but a few. These factors drive high demand for encoders and decoders.

It is in this context that it is important to focus on the details of video technology. Encoders, for instance, consume significantly more energy than decoders – sometimes as much as 5 to 10 times as much energy, in comparison.

In the past, there was an asynchronous relationship between these two categories of technology. Most video content was created — and encoded — by a much smaller percentage of the population compared to those who consumed

News alert: Hunters’ Team Axon discloses severe privilege escalation flaw in Google Workspace

Boston, Mass. and Tel Aviv, Israel, Nov. 28, 2023 –A severe design flaw in Google Workspace’s domain-wide delegation feature discovered by threat hunting experts from Hunters’ Team Axon, can allow attackers to misuse existing delegations, enabling privilege escalation and unauthorized access to Workspace APIs without Super Admin privileges.

Such exploitation could result in theft of emails from Gmail, data exfiltration from Google Drive, or other unauthorized actions within Google Workspace APIs on all of the identities in the target domain. Hunters has responsibly disclosed this to Google and worked closely with them prior to publishing this research.

Domain-wide delegation permits a comprehensive delegation between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) identity objects and Google Workspace applications. In other words, it enables GCP identities to execute tasks on Google SaaS applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and more, on behalf of

GUEST ESSAY: Steps to leveraging ‘Robotic Process Automation’ (RPA) in cybersecurity

By Zac Amos

In cybersecurity, keeping digital threats at bay is a top priority. A new ally in this battle is robotic process automation (RPA.) This technology promises to simplify tasks, boost accuracy and quicken responses.

Related: Gen-AI’s impact on DevSecOps

Robotic process automation is about getting repetitive, rule-based tasks done with the help of software robots, often called “bots.” These bots mimic human actions, handling tasks like data entry, retrieval and processing.

Automation matters in cybersecurity. RPA can be a lifesaver, freeing experts to focus on more complex security challenges.

Nine out of 10 employees want a single solution for their tasks. This emphasizes why automation is essential because it’s a way to make things more efficient and use human resources wisely. Here are some reasons why the role of automation is crucial in cybersecurity:

•Speed and accuracy: Cyber threats happen instantly and automation reacts quickly

News alert: Qualys unveils ‘Enterprise TruRisk Platform’ to help businesses eliminate cyber risks

Foster City, Calif., Nov. 21, 2023 — Qualys, a cloud-based IT, security and compliance solutions leader, unveiled its forward-looking vision of the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform on Nov. 8.

The announcement was made by president and CEO, Sumedh Thakar at the company’s annual Qualys Security Conference in Orlando, Florida. The Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform centers around helping customers holistically measure, effectively communicate, and proactively eliminate cyber risk, with a hyper focus on the impact of cyber risk on business risk.

The ground-breaking platform is the maturation of a concept that Qualys began working on 18-months ago through a commitment to deliver powerful security solutions for attack surface management, vulnerability management, and remediation, in addition to providing a higher level of orchestration between these solutions that allow security leaders to better identify, prioritize, and action cyber risk remediation to maximize

GUEST ESSAY: How the ‘Scattered Spiders’ youthful ring defeated MFA to plunder Vegas

By John Funk

A hacking gang known as Scattered Spiders soundly defeated the cybersecurity defenses of MGM and Caesars casinos.

Related: Russia puts the squeeze on US supply chain

This cost the Las Vegas gambling meccas more than $100 million while damaging their reputations. As the companies face nine federal lawsuits for failing to protect customer data, it’s abundantly clear hackers have checkmated multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Using a technique known as MFA fatigue, Scattered Spiders put MGM in manual mode and forced Caesars to pay a reported $13 million ransom. For the moment, hackers appear to have the upper hand in the global chess match between cybersecurity professionals and digital criminals.

That’s largely because the splashy headlines and online buzz created by bringing down the pair of casinos will only motivate more mid-level cybercriminals to follow Scattered Spiders’ model, putting wide-reaching businesses at risk of ransomware attacks due to the rise of ransomware-as-a-service models.

Scattered spiders

In early September, Scattered Spiders infiltrated MGM and Caesars using a variety of relatively common hacking techniques. But the coup de gras was how easily they brushed aside the multi-factor authentication protections.

The criminals’ ages are said to range between 17 and 25 years old, and their kung fu was nothing to boast about until

MY TAKE: Sophos X-Ops advances internal, external threat intelligence sharing to the next level

By Byron V. Acohido

Threat intelligence sharing has come a long way since Valentine’s Day 2015.

Related: How ‘Internet Access Brokers’ fuel ransomware

I happened to be in the audience at Stanford University when President Obama took to the stage to issue an executive order challenging the corporate sector and federal government to start collaborating as true allies.

Obama’s clarion call led to the passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, the creation of Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs) and the jump-starting of several private-sector sharing consortiums.

Material progress in threat intel sharing, indeed, has been made. Yet, there remains much leeway for improvements. I had the chance to discuss this with Christopher Budd, director of Sophos X-Ops, the company’s cross-operational task force of security defenders.

Budd explained how Sophos X-Ops is designed to dismantle security silos internally, while also facilitating

GUEST ESSAY: An assessment of how ‘Gen-AI’ has begun to transform DevSecOps

By Priyank Kapadia

Combining DevSecOps with Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) holds the potential to transform both software development and cybersecurity protocols.

Related: The primacy of DevSecOps

Through harnessing the power of Generative AI, enterprises can usher in a new era of DevSecOps, elevating development velocity, security, and robustness to unprecedented levels.

DevSecOps teams can test and debug code 70 percent faster with generative AI, which in turn saves businesses money and employee hours.

Generative AI can also help DevSecOps professionals to identify areas that are ripe for automation, enhance real-time monitoring and analytics, and even predict and address security problems before they happen.

Accelerating automation

DevSecOps and cybersecurity teams often encounter repetitive, time-consuming tasks that can lead to inefficiencies and errors when they handle these tasks manually. AI can play a pivotal role in automating these processes.

Tasks like code review, test case generation, systematically generating, storing, and managing configuration files, and infrastructure provisioning are prime candidates for automation. Leveraging generative AI in these areas can significantly speed up