Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. In this edition, we explore one of the evolving privacy-enhancing techniques called differential privacy and how it’s being leveraged by organizations to safeguard sensitive data from being exposed. Cutting-edge technologies based on artificial intelligence and machine learning have been gaining traction in recent years.

Social engineering is a type of cyber attack that targets people to gain access to buildings, systems, or data. Social engineering attacks exploit human vulnerabilities to get inside a company’s IT system, for instance, and access its valuable information. Social engineering is one of the most common— and successful— forms of cyber attack. Social engineering attacks are constantly evolving, but they generally follow five main approaches.

Indicators of compromise are the red flags of the information security world. These helpful warnings allow trained professionals to recognize when a system may be under attack or if the attack has already taken place, providing a way to respond to protect information from extraction. There are many indicators of compromise, depending on the type of threat.

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.

Recently, Facebook announced a new initiative aimed at protecting how its users’ data is managed across its platforms: the Data Protection Assessment. The assessment consists of a questionnaire for apps that access advanced permissions and specifically focuses on how developers protect, share and use platform data.