One of the benefits of a secure access service edge (SASE) framework is that organizations can dramatically simplify the implementation of security services without having to go through constant network redesigns and appliance operating system updates.
Lampion is a banking trojan with a particular predisposition to targeting Portuguese-speaking users (and exploiting cloud services). First documented in December 2019, the malware has gone through multiple releases, characterized by a number of different mechanisms to deliver the initial VBS (Visual Basic Script Loader). All the different variants have an element in common, the malware is distributed abusing legitimate cloud services throughout different stages of the attack chain.
If 2022 is teaching us anything, it’s that no organisation is an island. A better analogy, if I can be a little poetic, is perhaps that we are ships, buffeted by winds, riding rising and receding tides and trying to chart a course to calmer waters. We can build strong ships, but the ocean is out of our control. This lesson has been served to us in the form of global disruption on a scale that is so far out of our control that it can leave us feeling powerless.
As a security analyst in a growing company, it is often easy to get into the “set it and forget it” mentality. You create one alert after another. Then another. And another. With each alert comes a certain amount of work for an analyst. Analyst time costs money, and some alerts consume more time than others. If most of the alerts result in false positives, a large amount of resources are being spent unnecessarily.
As a direct result of COVID-19 burnout, the ongoing Great Resignation trend might be impacting healthcare more than any other industry. Research shows that healthcare has already lost an estimated 20% of its workforce over the past two years. This turnover is happening top-to-bottom throughout organizations. Doctors are switching between hospitals, administrative staff are leaving the industry, and technology teams are being lured away by higher paying jobs in other sectors.
If you’ve been following my suggestions in this series, then your SaaS sharing configuration now protects sensitive information and your IaaS/PaaS access controls accurately follow the principle of least privilege. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re done! We must now tame the giant of all file-sharing beasts: email. An email is probably the worst way to share files because there’s no way to limit who sees the file after it is sent.
The term “zero trust” is the lack of implicit trust. When we started with “zero trust,” we no longer trusted users because they weren’t on our network domain. As our staff went remote, we had to input stronger authentication to move from zero trust to some level of implicit trust. The problem is that trust is all or nothing.
Now that we’ve explored the familiar form of SaaS file sharing, let’s compare it to the very different ways that storage objects in IaaS/PaaS clouds are shared (e.g., Amazon S3 buckets, Azure blobs, Google Cloud storage). All of these objects begin with a much more controlled default. Only the owner of the object has access—the opposite of the starting point for SaaS.
According to a recent survey from the Cloud Security Alliance, cloud issues and misconfigurations remain the leading causes of breaches and outages—and 58% of respondents report concerns about security in the cloud. Their worries are well-founded. Nearly every day, we see examples of a company’s sensitive data spilling out of leaky clouds.
At Netskope, our primary focus in the marketplace is to help customers protect their data. More and more data exists outside the traditional enterprise perimeter and is growing at an ever-rapid pace. More than 80% of users are using personal apps and instances from managed devices, and of those applications being accessed, roughly half would be given a “Poor” risk rating by the Netskope Cloud Confidence Index.
