The insurance industry has been consistently targeted for cyber attacks as of late, for good reason: sensitive data is at the heart of every process—from handling health insurance claims to archiving medical histories. And because medical records are worth ten times more than credit card information on the black market, firms handling said data are required to take extra precautions in bolstering information security.
One of the challenges of building and running information technology systems is solving novel problems. That's where frameworks like scrum and agile come in– getting from the unknown to the known with a minimum of frustration and waste. Another challenge is performing known tasks correctly every single time. Here runbooks, checklists, and documentation are your friend.
Despite spending billions on cybersecurity solutions, private industry, government and enterprises alike are faced with the continued challenge of preventing data breaches. The reason cybersecurity solutions have not mitigated this problem is that the overwhelming majority of data exposure incidents are due to misconfigurations, typically by way of third-party vendors, not cutting-edge cyber attacks.
It's not pleasant to think about, but the fact is that when we go to work we are expected to do things. But what are the things that need doing? If we can answer that question without hours of meetings or dozens of emails we can finish our work and do...other things. UpGuard's new Tasks feature provides a lightweight project management system designed especially to maintain quality in a rapidly changing environment.
It's been a busy month for the CyberRisk product team! We're proud of this release, and can't wait to share the details with you. All these new features are immediately available to CyberRisk customers.
If you’re involved in IT risk or security, you’ve probably encountered BitSight. It is one of a wave of promised solutions to a growing problem: how to manage the risks posed by your IT vendors in the cloud. The legacy approach to solving this problem is a combination of spreadsheet-based vendor assessments, sporadic penetration tests and vulnerability scans. If you combine this with subjective measurement and scoring of risk, you are probably taking on a lot more risk than you should.
The specialized nature of cyber risk requires the translation of technical details into business terms. Security ratings and cyber risk assessments serve this purpose, much like a credit score does for assessing the risk of a loan. But the methodologies employed by solutions in this space vary greatly, as do their results.
Microsoft’s enterprise software powers the majority of large environments. Though often hybridized with open source solutions and third party offerings, the core components of Windows Server, Exchange, and SQL Server form the foundation of many organizations’ data centers. Despite their prevalence in the enterprise, Microsoft systems have also carried a perhaps unfair reputation for insecurity, compared to Linux and other enterprise options.
When we began building a Cyber Risk Research team at UpGuard, we knew there were unavoidable risks. We would be finding and publishing reports on sensitive, exposed data in order to stanch the flow of such private information onto the public internet. It seemed likely the entities involved would not always be pleased, particularly as the majority of the exposures we discovered would be attributable to human error and/or internal process failures.
The European Union’s GDPR regulations go into effect in May of this year. In essence, GDPR is a strict data privacy code that holds companies responsible for securing the data they store and process. Although GDPR was approved in April 2016, companies affected by the regulations are still struggling to reach compliance by the May 2018 deadline.
