The world of cybersecurity is a never-ending battle, with malicious actors constantly devising new ways to exploit vulnerabilities and infiltrate networks. One such threat, causing headaches for security teams for over a decade, is the Qakbot Trojan, also known as Qbot. Qakbot has been used in malicious campaigns since 2007, and despite many attempts to stamp it out, continues to evolve and adapt in an attempt to evade detection.
A new critical vulnerability impacting Microsoft Outlook (CVE-2023-23397) was recently published by Microsoft. The CVE is particularly concerning as no user involvement is required by the exploit. Once a user receives a malicious calendar invite, the attacker can gain a user’s Active Directory credentials. Microsoft has released a security update that can be found here. Cato Research strongly encourages updating all relevant systems as proof-of-concept exploits have already appeared online.
Many enterprises today are exploring the benefits of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). SASE is a modern networking and security solution for enterprises that converges SD-WAN and network security solutions like NGFW, IPS, and NGAM. SASE provides a single, unified and cloud-native network and security service that is adapted to current and future technology and business needs.
Corporate IT infrastructure has become crucial to the success of the modern business. Disruption in the availability of corporate applications and services will impact employee productivity and business profitability. Companies are responsible for the resiliency of their own IT systems and this includes ensuring the constant availability of critical business applications for employees, customers, and partners.
SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) is a new architecture that converges networking and security into cloud-native, globally available service offerings. Security inspection and policy enforcement is performed at the cloud edge, instead of backhauling all traffic to a centralized data center for inspection. This enables organizations to strengthen their security posture while ensuring high performance, scalability and a good user experience.
We recently issued the Cato Networks SASE Threat Research Report, which highlights cyber threats and trends based on more than 1.3 trillion flows that passed through the Cato SASE Cloud network during the second half of 2022. The report highlights the most popular vulnerabilities that threat actors attempted to exploit, and the growing use of consumer applications that may present a risk to the enterprise.
Unsolved Remote Access Challenges Continue to Propel SASE in 2023, Finds New Cato Survey By all accounts, 2023 is expected to see strong growth in the SASE market. Gartner has already predicted in The Top 5 Trends in Enterprise Networking and Why They Matter: A Gartner Trend Insight Report (subscription required) that by 2025, 50% of SD-WAN purchases will be part of a single vendor SASE offering, up from less than 10% in 2021.
Industry 4.0 is revolutionizing the manufacturing industry as we are witnessing numerous innovative technologies such as AI, IoT, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) helping manufacturers enhance their supply chain, logistics and production lines. While we see these operations evolving into smart factories, the industry still faces challenges that could adversely impact its ability to realize the full potential of Industry 4.0.
