CIFS (Common Internet File System) is a network protocol that allows clients to communicate with servers and access file sharing and print services as if they were stored locally. The CIFS protocol is a particular implementation -- or dialect-- of the file-sharing protocol SMB (Server Message Block). The Server Message Block protocol was released by IBM in 1983 that has since undergone several modifications to its functionality by Microsoft.

CIFS and SMB are both Windows file-sharing protocols used in storage systems, such as network-attached systems (NAS). The key difference between CIFS and SMB is that CIFS is a dialect of SMB – a particular implementation of the SMB protocol. The CIFS protocol is now considered an outdated SMB dialect, with the newer SMB 2.0 and SMB 3.0 addressing many of the inefficiencies of CIFS.

As cybersecurity regulations continue to tighten their grip on vendor security, a greater weight of responsibility is expected to fall on Third-Party Risk Management Programs. So if you're currently struggling to keep up with your vendor security due diligence, your workflow congestion will only worsen if a scalable and streamline vendor risk management program isn't achieved.

It's easy for cybersecurity teams to think they're doing everything to stay ahead of data breaches and cyberattacks in this post-pandemic era. For instance, you've probably rallied qualified experts to augment your IT ecosystem and supplied them with state-of-the-art threat detection and mitigation technologies that offer real-time insight into your infrastructure security.

A security questionnaire is a set of questions designed to help an organization identify potential cybersecurity weaknesses among its third-party and fourth-party vendors, business partners, and service providers. Organizations use security questionnaires to deliver informed vendor risk assessments. They allow organizations to vet potential vendors and other third parties by ensuring their information security practices and security policies meet both internal and external requirements.

The open ports in your hardware could be critical points of vulnerability if the services exposed to them are misconfigured or unpatched. Unfortunately, many organizations are currently exposing their sensitive resources through such malicious connections, heightening the risk of ransomware attacks, supply chain attacks, and data breaches.

A reverse Proxy server processes all traffic between end-users and a web server. To achieve this, this type of proxy server is situated at a network's edge as an additional endpoint where it receives all initial HTTP connection requests before they're sent to the origin server (where all website data is stored). Reverse proxies can be regarded as the security guard of your network, ensuring all connection requests are legitimate and securely established.

The threat landscape is expanding and security professionals are barely keeping up. On a daily basis, CISOs and cybersecurity staff need to contend with new malware variants, data breach attempts, ransomware attacks, zero-day exploits - all while ensuring uninterrupted dedication to vendor risk mitigation efforts. With so many cyber threats testing your cyber resilience at once, where should you focus your cybersecurity efforts?

Companies are increasingly moving their IT operations to IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) solutions. Gartner estimates that by 2022, about 60% of business entities will be leveraging cloud-managed offerings, doubling the recorded use in 2018. Cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are generally secure. But since IaaS uses a shared security model, there's a great chance of data security issues, including cybersecurity and workload concerns.

Both proxy servers and VPNs hide your IP address, allowing you to access websites anonymously, but only VPNs direct all network traffic through an encrypted tunnel. Another key difference is that VPNs address all network data while proxy servers only operate on an application level. The differences between the two solutions can be summarized as follows: Before diving into their technical differences, its important to first solidify your understanding of proxy servers and VPNs.

Compliance management is the process of ensuring all workflow, internal policies and IT initiatives align with specific industry cybersecurity regulations. This effort is ongoing since the digital attack surface is always expanding.