Observability has recently become quite the buzzword, populating headlines in DevOps and IT publications. Industry experts like Charity Majors, CTO and co-founder of Honeycomb, and Cindy Sridharan, to name a few, have been spreading the word about the importance of observability, making it clear that it’s more than just a passing trend, it’s an approach that DevOps organizations need to adopt.

Vulnerability Manager Plus is ManageEngine’s enterprise security program that empowers system administrators with an essential set of tools for managing and mitigating threats and vulnerabilities across systems in IT infrastructure. This security solution features specialized tools that help enterprises improve their overall security posture. Some of its unique tools include its integrated patch management module, security configuration management, and prioritization of vulnerabilities.

Note: This is Bearer's monthly newsletter. Subscribe below to get it in your inbox. I hope you are doing well with this never-seen-before-worldwide-lockdown. The whole Bearer team is locked down as well, but still improving your beloved product! We have a lot of updates and awesome new features for you to explore today. Here is a short overview to get you started!

When organizations shift to a work-from-home environment, identity and access management (IAM) takes center stage. Organizations with remote workforces must fortify their IAM policies and tools for a better user experience to ensure productivity, while also handling all the security challenges remote work presents to ensure data and system security. One of the biggest risks an organization faces when its workforce goes remote is unnecessary and unauthorized access to organizational data.

The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) scam onslaught continues. Per Threatpost, digital attackers ramped up their activity over Q1 2020 to the extent that they were sending approximately 1.5 million coronavirus-themed attack emails by the middle of April. How can we then be surprised by ZDNet’s reporting that the number of digital crime reports received by the FBI had quadrupled in number, with many of these disclosed attacks featuring COVID-19 as a theme?

On April 7, 2020, the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) released a notice confirming that two of its websites, SFOConnect.com and SFOConstruction.com, were targets of a cyberattack in March 2020. The attack has been attributed to a hacker group that was attempting to steal the Windows logins of the airport’s employees. When we hear news about cyberattacks, a few typical, yet crucial questions spring to mind: How did the attackers perform the cyberattack?

Six months ago we celebrated the joining of forces between Endgame and Elastic under the banner of Elastic Security and announced the elimination of per endpoint pricing. Simultaneously, while the newest members of Elastic Security were getting acquainted with the Elastic SIEM team, a few of our analysts were locked away in an office at MITRE HQ for round 2 of MITRE’s APT emulation.

Over the past several years, telecommuting, or remote work, has gained significant traction across a wide variety of industries. According to a recent survey conducted by OWL Labs, 48 percent of employees worked from home at least once a week in 2019, and 34 percent were even willing to take a pay cut in order to work remotely.

Building an effective and resilient organization on a budget isn’t a small task. When it comes to cybersecurity budgets, there are many different aspects that need to be considered. Thankfully, alignment with industry best practice and recognized security frameworks adds a small amount of clarity to this challenge.

Anyone who has had any experience on the offensive side of security has had fun with privilege escalation. There’s something exciting about exploiting a system to the point of getting root-level access. Since I have spent most of my time on the defensive side of the fence, the magic of escalating privileges rested in Exploiting for Privilege Escalation or stealing an administrator’s credentials.

We’ve heard a lot about the drastic measures that organizations in North America and Western Europe are taking to protect their employees against the coronavirus. But as we all know, COVID-19 is a global pandemic. Organizations all over the world now find themselves in a position where they need to take action on their policies and procedures. Take the Middle East, for instance.

On March 27, 2020, President Trump signed an unprecedented $2 trillion stimulus package into law. The legislation received support from both chambers of the U.S. Congress for its goal to minimize the economic effects of the global coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, reported CNN. A key component of that package was the direction to provide economic relief to Americans in the form of stimulus checks of varying amounts depending upon their income.

Digital attacks continue to weigh on the minds of industrial cybersecurity (ICS) professionals. In a 2019 survey, 88% of ICS experts told Tripwire they were worried about what a digital attack could mean for their industrial organization. The rate was even higher for those working in the manufacturing and oil & gas sectors at 89% and 97%, respectively. Such widely held concern suggests a need for industrial organizations to make greater investments in their digital security posture.

Acknowledging recent reports of ransomware targeting educational institutions, it is no wonder that there have also been articles that attempt to lure in readers with “free” tools. What is disappointing is that these “free” tools are little more than marketing pieces that direct you to click on readily available documentation from Microsoft or Google.

Over the past 12 months, INETCO’s flagship product, INETCO Insight 7, has gained recognition as the go-to solution for acquiring a level of detail within payment transaction data sets that is unprecedented, and extremely useful. Recently, INETCO caught the attention of Bank Director, an information resource to the financial community with a focus on the strategic issues most fundamental to a bank’s CEO, senior leadership team, chairman and independent directors.

The cybersecurity threat landscape is quickly changing. Administrators have become more cautious when it comes to security and governing access, end users have become tech-savvy and security-aware, and attackers have also raised their game. Living-off-the-land attacks, or LOTL, is one clear trend today, with attackers exploiting preinstalled features and default tools built into system.

USB devices are undeniably valuable, but they can be dangerous. On one hand, they are useful in transporting enterprise-critical data, but on the other, they can wreak havoc if misplaced, corrupted due to a human or hardware-related error, or stolen. It’s no wonder some companies forbid the use of USB devices altogether.

We all know there are a number of different security devices that need to be continually monitored because they represent attack vectors. That’s why understanding configuration management is critical to security hygiene. As practitioners, we need to adhere to CIS controls as they provide a critical baseline for maintaining our security framework and keeping up our integrity monitoring processes.

In Ruby, like in most languages, an exception is a way to convey that something went wrong. While some languages only use exceptions for truly exceptional circumstances, like run-time errors, Ruby uses exceptions for a wide variety of errors and unexpected results.

Digital fraudsters have seized upon coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) as a lure for their new scams and attack campaigns. Together, these malicious operations constitute nothing short of a deluge. Barracuda revealed that it spotted 9,116 coronavirus-themed spear-phishing emails between March 1 and March 23, 2020—a 667% increase over the 1,188 attacks detected a month earlier. By comparison, the security firm spotted just 137 coronavirus-themed email campaigns in January.

Why leveraging live environment simulations and putting ICS tools to the test is the best way to evaluate their fitness. Track and field was one of my favorite sports growing up. I didn’t begin competitively participating until I was a teenager, but I was instantly hooked once I started. Why? Because the clock didn’t lie. The tape measure didn’t lie. The fastest time always won, and the longest throw always won. I like to think of ICS security tools in a similar way.

Coronavirus has disrupted daily life for so many around the world in a shockingly short span of time. Lifestyles have shifted. A new normal, albeit a panic-stricken one, has set in. One-third of the global population is under lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus. Many organizations have adopted temporary work-from-home measures to keep themselves up and running.

Whether you're making API calls from Node.js or in the browser, connection failures are going to happen eventually. Some request errors are valid. Maybe the endpoint was wrong or the client sent the wrong data. Other times you can be sure that the error is the result of a problem with the connection to the server or one of the many hops in-between. While API and web service monitoring can inform you about the problem, a more active solution can take care of it for you.

Welcome to the new world, my friends. Now that working from home is our new reality, we've found that many of our customers are taking a much closer look at the technology that binds us all together and allows us to access corporate resources: the humble VPN. In the spirit of enablement, I’ve put together a quick list of dashboards that can help add that extra bit of visibility for our faithful Splunk Enterprise Security customers.