As 2024 continues forward, Australia and New Zealand’s critical infrastructure sectors face significant cybersecurity challenges. Critical infrastructure (CI) sectors–encompassing energy, healthcare, transportation, water, and communication–are at a pivotal moment in their evolution. The rapid digitisation of these sectors brings not only unprecedented efficiency and connectivity but also a significantly expanded attack surface.

Trust and transparency are key to winning customers today. Customers and prospects of all sizes need to know how you’ll protect their data before they can do business with you — which often leads to lengthy questionnaires, long security reviews, and stretched sales cycles as they work to understand your security posture.

Why have forty-four percent of enterprises been fined by regulators due to API security incidents? Regulators are beginning to see what attackers already know: exposed or misconfigured APIs are prevalent, easy to compromise, and often unprotected. Every time a customer, partner, or vendor engages with your business digitally, there’s an API behind the scenes facilitating a rapid exchange of data, often sensitive.

On May 8, 2024, Ascension Healthcare notified business partners of suspicious activity detected within their systems. They have launched investigations and are actively working on remediation efforts. Consequently, some systems will experience interruptions during this process, such as clinical operations. Ascension is currently working with Mandiant to investigate the compromise and whether sensitive data was affected, if at all.

On May 6, 2024, Bishop Fox publicly disclosed a vulnerability along with a proof of concept (PoC) exploit in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway, identified as an unauthenticated out-of-bounds memory read issue in the components used for Authentication, Authorization, and Auditing (AAA).

As the full scope of the Change Healthcare cyber attack and ransomware story unfolds, a new leading gang has emerged known as ‘RansomHub’. This ‘new’ group has been claiming more victims since the massive February ransomware and data breach attack. On April 8, Forescout Research – Vedere Labs obtained samples used by RansomHub affiliates in a separate incident.

When thinking about which industries get targeted most often in ransomware attacks, many people think that large healthcare and financial institutions would be at the top of the list. Most people don’t associate cyber attacks with K-12 schools. However, a recent cybersecurity report noted that lower education, or K-12 schools, is the single most targeted industry for ransomware attacks, with 80% of schools reporting a ransomware attack in 2023.

As we navigate through an era increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, the theme of RSAC 2024, “The Art of the Possible,” couldn’t be more apt. This year, Zenity, a trailblazer in securing and governing business productivity tools like Copilot for M365, Power Platform, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, highlighted the vast possibilities—and the associated risks—of democratized technology and software development.

Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a formal program to manage cyber risk that allows organizations to enhance and optimize their overall cybersecurity posture. As outlined by Gartner, CTEM offers a cyclical approach to finding and mitigating threat exposure—which is the accessibility and exploitability of digital and physical assets—in an ongoing, proactive, and prioritized way.

In a move to harness the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) while mitigating associated risks, the Executive Office of the President has issued a landmark memorandum directing federal agencies to advance AI governance, innovation, and risk management. Spearheaded by Shalanda D. Young, the memorandum underscores the importance of responsible AI development in safeguarding the rights and safety of the public.