Home Podcasts Videos Guest Posts Q&A My Take Bio Contact ☰
 

Top Stories

 

GUEST ESSAY: A roadmap for wisely tightening cybersecurity in the modern workplace

By Eric Sugar

Hackers can hurt your business or organization in many ways. First and foremost, cyberattacks can lead to data breaches in which sensitive information is stolen. If a cyber-criminal uses you as a way to get at your customers, suppliers, or employees, these vital business relationships can turn sour.

Related: Tapping hidden pools of security talent

Sometimes hackers can encrypt your systems, holding them hostage and asking you to pay money to regain access to them. This problem, called ransomware, explains why keeping backups is so important. Hijackers’ demands lose power when you can just recover your operations from backups.

Cyberattacks can also lead to a loss of productivity. When your team can’t do their work because they don’t have access to the systems or these are unavailable, everything gets delayed and projects fall behind.

Finally, don’t forget the bad press that results for businesses when they are hacked. This isn’t the kind of exposure you want for your brand.

Compliance

If your organization is privy to confidential data, then you’re in charge of protecting it, and the law will hold you accountable for doing so.

The penalties for failing to protect this data can be steep. Depending on the type of information businesses lost and how they tried to protect it, they can be fined up to five percent of their revenue.

Comment | Read | May 24th, 2023 | For consumers | For technologists | Guest Blog Post | Steps forward | Top Stories

RSAC Fireside Chat: The need to stop mobile apps from exposing API keys, user credentials in runtime

By Byron V. Acohido

As digital transformation accelerates, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have become integral to software development – especially when it comes to adding cool new functionalities to our go-to mobile apps.

Related: Collateral damage of T-Mobile hack

Yet, APIs have also exponentially increased the attack vectors available to malicious hackers – and the software community has not focused on slowing the widening of this security gap.

Mobile apps work by hooking into dozens of different APIs, and each connection presents a vector for bad actors to get their hands on “API secrets,” i.e. backend data to encryption keys, digital certificates and user credentials that enable them to gain unauthorized control.

I learned this from Ted Miracco, CEO of Approov, in a discussion we had at RSA Conference 2023. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

Guest expert: Ted Miracco, CEO, Approov

He also explains how hackers are carrying out “man in the middle” attacks during a mobile app’s runtime in ways that enable them to manipulate the communication channel between the app and the backend API.

Hackers know just how vulnerable companies are at this moment. Approov recently did a deep dive study of 650 financial services mobile apps of financial institutions across Europe and the US. The results were startling: the researchers could access API secrets in 95 percent of the apps, including “high value” secrets” in 25 percent of them.

Until API security generally gains a lot more ground, and next gen solutions achieve critical mass, the risk level will remain high. So be careful out there. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

 

Comment | Read | May 23rd, 2023 | For technologists | Podcasts | RSA Podcasts | Top Stories

RSAC Fireside Chat: Counteracting Putin’s weaponizing of ransomware — with containment

By Byron V. Acohido

The ransomware plague endures — and has arisen as a potent weapon in geopolitical conflicts.

Related: The Golden Age of cyber espionage

Cyber extortion remains a material threat to organizations of all sizes across all industries. Ransomware purveyors have demonstrated their capability to endlessly take advantage of a vastly expanded network attack surface – one that will only continue to expand as the shift to massively interconnected digital services accelerates.

Meanwhile, Russia has turned to weaponing ransomware in its attempt to conquer Ukraine, redoubling this threat. Now that RSA Conference 2023 has wrapped, these things seem clear: ransomware is here to stay; it is not, at this moment, being adequately mitigated; and a new approach is needed to slow, and effectively put a stop to, ransomware.

I had the chance to visit with Steve Hahn, EVP Americas, at Bullwall, which is in the vanguard of security vendors advancing ways to instantly contain threat actors who manage to slip inside an organization’s network.

Guest expert: Steve Hahn, EVP Americas, Bullwall

Bullwall has a bird’s eye view of Russia’s ongoing deployment of ransomware attacks against Ukraine, and its allies, especially the U.S.

Weaponized ransomware doubly benefits Russia: it’s lucrative, generating  billions in revenue and thus adding to Putin’s war chest; and at the same time it also weakens a wide breadth of infrastructure of Putin’s adversaries across Europe and North America.

Containment is a logical tactic that could make a big difference in stopping ransomware and other types of attacks. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

 

 

Comment | Read | May 20th, 2023 | Best Practices | For technologists | Podcasts | Privacy | RSA Podcasts | Top Stories

RSAC Fireside Chat: Deploying Hollywood-tested content protection to improve mobile app security

By Byron V. Acohido

Your go-to mobile apps aren’t nearly has hackproof as you might like to believe.

Related: Fallout of T-Mobile hack

Hackers of modest skill routinely bypass legacy security measures, even two-factor authentication, with techniques such as overlay attacks. And hard data shows instances of such breaches on the rise.

I had an evocative conversation about this at RSA Conference 2023 with Asaf Ashkenazi, CEO of Verimatrix, a cybersecurity company headquartered in southern France. We discussed how the Dark Web teems with hackers offering targeted mobile app attacks on major companies.

Many corporations outsource their mobile app development, and these apps often exhibit poor security practices, making them easy targets for cybercriminals, he says.

Verimatrix is coming at this problem with a fresh approach that has proven its efficacy in Hollywood where the company has long helped lock down content such as premium movies and live streamed sporting events.

Guest expert: Asaf Ashkenazi, CEO, Verimatrix

Its technology revolves around application-level protection and monitoring, which allows Verimatrix to collect data on app behavior without invading user privacy.

Coding embedded in the app provide a granular level of insight into what’s happening — when the app is actually running — and a degree of control that’s simply not doable with legacy mobile app security solutions, he told me.

For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a close listen. Ashkenazi argues that we need better security solutions in general to mitigate the AI-generated threats running on our most cherished devices.

He observes that threat actors already use generative AI tools like  ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft Edge to innovate malware; to keep pace, companies are going to have to get much better at not just identifying, but predicting attacks, especially on mobile apps. Agreed. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make … more

Comment | Read | May 18th, 2023 | For technologists | Podcasts | Privacy | RSA Podcasts | Top Stories

RSAC Fireside Chat: Achieving ‘outcome-based security’ by blending cybersecurity, business goals

By Byron Acohido

Could cybersecurity someday soon be implemented as a business enabler, instead of continuing to be viewed as an onerous business expense?

Related: Security sea-change wrought by ‘CMMC’

This would fit nicely with the ‘stronger together’ theme heralded at RSA Conference 2023.

WithSecure is one cybersecurity vendor that is certainly on this path. I had a lively conversation at Moscone Center with CEO Juhani Hintikka and CTO Tim Orchard all about something they’re championing as “outcome-based security.” In sum, this refers to the notion of correlating the mix of security tools and services a company has at hand much more directly with precisely defined business targets.

“We actually need to integrate cybersecurity with the business goals of the enterprise,” Hintikka observes.

WithSecure isn’t a startup; it’s the rebranding of Helsinki-based F-Secure, which has been around since 1988 and is well-established as a leading supplier of endpoint security and threat intelligence.

Guest experts: Tim Orchard, CTO, and Juhani Hintikka, CEO, WithSecure

Hintikka and Orchard argue for a more collaborative style of security services; for a drill down on our conversation please give the accompanying podcast a close listen.

The efficacy of this approach, they told me, is proving out in the success WithSecure is having with its customers, especially mid-sized companies. “In Germany, which is famous for mid-market companies, we seamlessly integrate our MDR service on top of our customers’ legacy systems, working alongside their teams,” Hintikka told me. “It’s truly a joint effort.”

The maturation of managed security services continues. There should be plenty more to come. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

Comment | Read | May 17th, 2023 | For technologists | Podcasts | RSA Podcasts | Steps forward | Top Stories

RSAC Fireside Chat: How a well-placed ‘NGWAF’ can staunch the flow of web, mobile app attacks

By Byron V. Acohido

Attack surface expansion translates into innumerable wide-open vectors of potential unauthorized access into company networks.

Related: The role of legacy security tools

Yet the heaviest volume of routine, daily cyber attacks continue to target a very familiar vector: web and mobile apps.

At RSA Conference 2023, I had the chance to meet with Paul Nicholson, senior director of product marketing and analyst relations at A10 Networks.

A10 has a birds eye view of the flow of maliciousness directed at web and mobile apps — via deployments of its Thunder Application Delivery Controller (ADC.)

We discussed why filtering web and mobile app traffic remains as critical as ever, even as cloud migration intensifies; for a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

Companies today face a huge challenge, Nicholson says. They must make ongoing assessments about IT infrastructure increasingly spread far and wide across on-premises and public cloud computing resources.

Guest expert: Paul Nicholson, senior director, product marketing & analyst relations, A10 Networks

The logical place to check first for incoming known-bad traffic remains at the gateways where application traffic arrives.

At RSAC 2023, A10 announced the addition of a next-generation web application firewall (NGWAF,) powered by Fastly, to its core Thunder ADC service. This upgrade, he told me, is expressly aimed at helping companies optimize secure performance of their hybrid cloud environments.

This is another encouraging example of stronger together advancement. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we co

 

Comment | Read | May 16th, 2023 | Best Practices | For technologists | Podcasts | RSA Podcasts | Top Stories

SHARED INTEL: From airbags to malware: vehicle cyber safety arises in the age of connected cars

By Kolawole Samuel Adebayo

In an increasingly interconnected world, the evolution of the automotive industry presents an exciting yet daunting prospect.

Related: Privacy rules for vehicles

As vehicles continue to offer modern features such as app-to-car connectivity, remote control access, and driver assistance software, a huge risk lurks in the shadows.

The physical safety of things like airbags, rearview mirrors, and brakes is well accounted for; yet cybersecurity auto safety concerns are rising to the fore.

What used to be a focus on physical safety has now shifted to cybersecurity due to the widened attack surface that connected cars present. The rapid advancements in electric vehicles (EVs) has only served to heighten these concerns.

Funso Richard, Information Security Officer at Ensemble, highlighted the gravity of these threats. He told Last Watchdog that apart from conventional attacks, such as data theft and vehicle theft, much more worrisome types of attacks are emerging. These include ransomware targeting backend servers, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, destructive malware, and even weaponizing charging stations to deploy malware.

Comment | Read | May 15th, 2023 | For consumers | For technologists | Imminent threats | New Tech | Privacy | Top Stories

« Newer Articles
Older Articles »