There are parts of every business considered to be critical to its ability to function. Email, accounting, and customer service are a few. Indeed, if email went down, accounts receivable stopped, or customers couldn’t talk to anyone, the business would suffer. There is another critical function of business that isn’t widely viewed as such: security monitoring.
Photo by BENCE BOROS on Unsplash Welcome to the world of Internet of Things (IoT) and a glimpse into the future. The IoT is where the physical world merges with the digital world. Soon, we expect the world IoT population to outnumber the human population tenfold—perhaps as many as 80 billion connected devices by 2025.
As of today, no laws or regulations, even the latest version of PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and HITECH, do not make network segmentation or micro-segmentation compulsory to comply with the rule. By making network segmentation discretionary -- even when transmitting, processing, or storing regulated data, the number of breaches will continue to rise as companies err on the side of doing less with more.
Image Source: Unsplash Finding a new health-related app that tracks symptoms, increases self-care behaviors, or offers disease-specific education can be exciting for consumers. However, many apps share information with a host of other companies for marketing purposes. Often, these companies have nothing to do with healthcare and are not even a business the individual uses.
It’s less expensive to prevent cyber attacks than it is to repair the damage when they happen. Companies and institutions across industries lose money from cyber attacks all the time. There are the more obvious ways like piracy, data breaches, and litigation. There are also ways that accountants can’t quite put a dollar figure on, such as reputational damage that makes customers and clientele less likely to want to buy a company’s products and services in the future.
Cybercrime is global, but the response isn’t. Governments in the west are slowly waking up to the importance of cybersecurity, and are (equally slowly) helping businesses to safeguard data and home users to protect their homes from cyberattack. Look outside Europe and the US, though, and the picture is radically different. African countries, in particular, are underprepared for the impact of cyberattacks, and lack the governmental expertise to deal with them.
These days it seems that every time you open your favorite news source there is another data breach related headline. Victimized companies of all sizes, cities, counties, and even government agencies have all been the subject of the “headline of shame” over the past several months or years.
This spring, as the product and security operations teams at AT&T Cybersecurity prepared for the launch of our Managed Threat Detection and Response service, it became obvious to us that the market has many different understandings of what “response” could (and should) mean when evaluating an MDR solution. Customers typically want to know: What incident response capabilities does the underlying technology platform enable?
This past June, I attended the 2019 Bitcoin Conference in San Francisco, CA. With the various discussions on Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, and with the chance to hang out with my favorite Crypto personalities, it was easy to lose myself in all the festivities. While taking a break, I found a seat and decided to charge my iPhone. The station by where I was seated was a wooden cube with two standard wall sockets and two USB ports.
As technological developments have helped turn the world into a global village, they have also made it easier to steal, extract, and communicate confidential information – leading to an increased frequency of corporate espionage. Take Apple for example; despite deploying leading security measures and monitoring activities, the tech giant has had two espionage attempts in one year, foiled just as the convicts were departing the country.
Britain should be prepared for a Category 1 cyber security emergency, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). This means that national security, the economy, and even the nation’s lives will be at risk. However, despite this harsh warning, UK businesses still aren’t taking proactive and potentially preventative action to stop these attacks from happening. So just where are UK businesses going wrong and can they turn things around before it’s too late?
Every year we survey visitors to our booth at Black Hat about trending topics. This year, we asked about ransomware and the ever-increasing complexity of our cybersecurity environment. The results are very interesting - things may be getting much better, or we may all be collectively in denial. Let's break it down.
