In Part 1 of this series, we looked at some of the metrics that an executive team would want to see to identify how the business risk is trending. It is very important to keep in mind that if the business does not see the information security program as effective and efficient, they will not continue to invest in information security projects. In this part, we will look at the operational level reports that can assist in focusing efforts to reduce the risk to the business.

Veriato, the leader in the user activity monitoring and analysis market, today reported that their inaugural Police User Group was a resounding success seeing Police staff attend from all over the UK. The event hosted in London demonstrated Veriato's ongoing commitment in providing an essential active monitoring solution used by Professional Standards and Anti-Corruption units across 75% of UK Police forces.

Nothing gets the AppSec / InfoSec community abuzz quite like a good old 0-day vulnerability. I mean, what’s not to love here? These vulnerabilities involve the thrill of adversaries knowing something we don’t, giving them a path to sail through our defenses to break into that sweet data inside. They are the James Bond of the security space — suave, sexy, and deadly.

As data breach threats increase, governments and industry standards organizations seek to force organizations into maintaining better data security controls. Thus, creating an effective compliance program has become a business operations imperative rather than a series of “best practices.”

When you hear about a data breach in the news, it’s usually related to a major company or social media network that has been targeted. The erroneous conclusion would be that the hackers only focus on exploiting security flaws in large organizations, but the opposite is true.

Like many things in life, hackers are victims (and I use the word loosely) of stereotyping. You won’t find much stock imagery depicting hackers that doesn’t involve a hoodie, a dimly-lit room and several monitors full of scrolling binary text. And whilst that’s definitely sometimes true, it also makes several assumptions about hackers in general, which is at best misleading and at worst leaves you wide open to attack.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Some big news items this week, namely further details on the ransomware campaign claiming Norsk last week spreading to other targets. One bit of good news is that there appears to be a flaw in the code and a simple Windows Shortcut can stop it from working.

One of the main issues I find across the information security industry is that we constantly need to justify our existence. Organizations have slowly realized they need to spend on IT to enable their businesses. Information security, on the other hand, is the team that is constantly preventing the business from freely doing as they please. IT is seen as a driver of success, and security can be, too. The security team just needs to learn how to enable the business.

Since Active Directory is the foundation of all Windows networks, monitoring Active Directory needs to be part of any comprehensive security strategy. Up to version 3.5, EventSentry utilized Windows auditing and the security event log to provide reports on: User Account Changes, Group Changes and Computer Account Changes.

Last year, as in years prior, was a year full of cyber-attacks. But what was interesting was the trend of small and medium businesses being targeted more often. Generally, those types of businesses have either rested in the false impression that they’re not a big enough target or didn’t have plentiful valuable information hackers are seeking. The reality is the opposite and the stakes couldn’t be higher.