Organizations are under tremendous pressure to deliver innovative products and stick to tight release timelines. To keep up with the rapid release schedule, engineering teams are adopting the DevOps model for its increased efficiency and agility. It has changed the way that development teams think. As a result, continuously improving performance and delivering releases faster have become standard.
Cybercrime is one of the most significant threats facing companies today. With the average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of $4.24 million , the business case for cybersecurity has never been stronger. Still, some businesses seem to misunderstand the urgency of meeting current cybersecurity standards. It may help to consider the legal consequences of poor cybersecurity.
Since 2008, the CIS Controls have been through many iterations of refinement and improvement, leading up to what we are presented with today in CIS Controls version 8. CIS Controls reflect the combined knowledge of experts from every part of the ecosystem (companies, governments, and individuals). The controls reflect consideration by people in many different roles such as threat analysts, incident responders, solution providers, policy-makers, and more.
The FBI has published a warning about a ransomware gang called the OnePercent Group, which has been attacking U.S. companies since November 2020.
Information security is an exciting and rapidly growing field for individuals who are interested in protecting users and their data. In an effort to map out the industry as a possible career choice, we recently conducted research into the top 10 infosec jobs based on overall pay grade. We now continue with the second part of our two-part series.
Ransomware is having a bit of a moment. Check Point revealed that ransomware attacks increased 102% globally in H1 2021 compared to the start of the previous year, with the number of corporate ransomware victims having doubled over that same period. Average ransom payments also grew 171% from $115,123 in 2019 to $312,493 a year later. But those weren’t the amounts originally demanded by attackers. Indeed, ransomware actors wanted an average of $847,344 from their victims in 2020.
Threat modeling is increasing in importance as a way to plan security in advance. Instead of merely reacting to threats and incidents, an organization can identify and evaluate its security posture, relevant threats, and gaps in defenses that may allow attacks to succeed. Threat modeling has a two-way relationship with incident response.
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021 analyzed 537 real breaches and conducted nearly 3,500 interviews to uncover the true cost of a data breach in 2020. The publication covers initial attack vectors, how long it took organizations to discover and contain braces, as well as the effects that incident response efforts and artificial intelligence have on mitigating breach costs.
During a recent client engagement, the DGC penetration testing team identified a previously unknown vulnerability affecting the Autodesk Licensing Service, a software component bundled with nearly all licensed Autodesk products. The vulnerability exists in a software component common to most Autodesk products and impacts nearly all organizations using licensed Autodesk software in any capacity.
No discussion on ICS attacks could be complete without talking about what some would call, ‘the elephant in the room.’ Critical infrastructure has always been a target for warfare, and modern ICS are no exception. Several high-profile ICS disruptions have in fact been attributed to malicious hackers working at the behest of a military or intelligence agency.
Want a job in cybersecurity? There are plenty to go around. Cybersecurity Ventures estimated that there will be 3.5 million job openings in the industry by the end of the year. That makes sense. According to Gartner , global spending on information security and risk management technology is expected to exceed$150 billion in 2021. Organizations are going to need someone to help them manage those new solutions. The issue is that information security is an expansive industry.
For a while, privacy in Q2 was looking like it would follow the season’s idiomatic rule: in like a lion, out like a lamb. But it came roaring back in June with a new U.S. state law, EU adequacy decisions, a new EU data transfer mechanism, and more. As we look back over the second quarter of 2021, several important developments are worth noting.
Today’s enterprise operations involve the coordination of several different digital ecosystems but none quite so inflamed as the cybersecurity ecosystem. Technology has been evolving at a rapid pace, and attackers are armed with advanced tactics to steal data and expose secure information. In response, cybersecurity teams deploy numerous tools and solutions to prevent and mitigate these attacks.
Back in June, I wrote about the Transportation Security Agency’s (TSA) new security directive concerning pipeline owners and operators. The order mandated those entities to disclose security incidents such as the ransomware attack that affected the Colonial Pipeline Company back in May to the TSA and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
OT networks often rely on Windows systems for various ICS applications including HMIs, historians, and data gateways. Beyond that, they also commonly rely on Windows systems to run associated IT-networks.
As businesses emerge from the pandemic, many are making strategic decisions about their long-term work arrangements. While there is a substantial debate about remaining remote or bringing people back to the office, many companies are choosing to meet in the middle, embracing a hybrid work arrangement that allows people to work both on-site and remotely.
Most discussions around cybersecurity understandably focus on information technology (IT). Assets like cloud services and data centers are typically what companies spend the most time and effort securing. Recently, though, operational technology (OT) has come under increasing scrutiny from leading security experts in both the private and public sectors. In June, for instance, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a fact sheet about ransomware attacks on OT.
Are you an organization that operates a Bulk Power System (BPS) in the United States? If so, you understand the need to comply with the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) standards. Developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), CIP is a set of requirements through which in-scope entities can protect themselves against digital attacks, thereby strengthening the reliability of the U.S. electric grid overall.
In its Interagency Report 7695, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defined an application as “a system for collecting, saving, processing, and presenting data by means of a computer.” This broad term covers enterprise applications, consumer applications, and even phone apps. Security is important in all these types of applications, but the focus is not always the same. Let’s explore how below.
We’re going to talk about state versus change. For the purposes of our discussion, you need to know that Tripwire Enterprise offers something called TE Commander. Many enterprise applications lack a native command line interface. This can be a challenge if you want to automate and integrate basic operations, which is a necessary function in most enterprise IT environments.
Social media platforms are excellent hunting grounds for scammers. This is where we connect with our friends or people who we have something in common with. This is precisely what scammers exploit—our connections and the trust that is afforded between friends or acquaintances. From an early age, we are taught to be kind and compassionate as well as to help others, especially people we know such as friends and family. In turn, they will help us if we ever need it.
Determining the security posture for an increasing quantity of cloud accounts and services used by many organizations can feel overwhelming, but Tripwire Configuration Manager can help you find, fix, and even enforce settings for common security problems in cloud services. In this blog, we will show how the simple steps required to have Tripwire Configuration Manager automatically fix common configuration issues.
Often, the most critical threats come from within an organization itself. This is true for all sectors, but it is especially true for industrial control systems (ICS). Technicians in these environments already have access to plant controls and may have the deep knowledge of industrial processes needed to achieve specific goals. The damage caused by an insider may range from mild disruption to major disaster depending on what is attacked.
The events of 2020 accelerated many organizations’ efforts to converge their information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) environments. Now that they’re immersed in this journey, some organizations are finding that it’s not quite as smooth as they were expecting. They’re learning that they need to overcome several challenges if they hope to leverage the IT-OT convergence as part of their ongoing digital transformations. That raises some important questions.
Attacks targeting critical infrastructure have been on the rise in recent years. Back in 2019, for instance, 56% of utility professionals responsible for overseeing risk in their organizations’ operational technology (OT) assets told Siemens and the Ponemon Institute that they experience at least one shutdown or operational data loss event a year.
People make up an important part of an organization’s security posture. That’s because some employees have the rights necessary for accessing sensitive data as well as the privileges for viewing and/or editing critical systems. If those individuals have the right focus and training, they can play a crucial part in keeping those assets safe against digital attackers. But if they aren’t paying attention, they could do something that puts their employer at risk.
More and more companies understand the benefits of cloud computing, which is making their migration to the cloud more rapid. Per IDG’s 2020 Cloud Computing Study, 81% of organizations said that they’ve migrated either one application or a portion of their infrastructure to the cloud. The reasons why a company would shift its services towards the cloud depend on its business priorities, of course.
