Recall from Part One that we identified three different places in a SASE product where TLS 1.3 support is relevant. In descending order of importance, those places are: proxy, tunnel, and management interface.

Malicious Microsoft Office documents are a popular vehicle for malware distribution. Malware families such as Emotet, IcedID, and Dridex use Office documents as their primary distribution mechanism. Several recent Emotet attacks used a novel approach to sending email baits and hosted the malicious documents in cloud apps to increase their success.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.“ In the recent Equinix breach in September 2020, 74 RDP servers were exposed to the Internet. Any publicly exposed ports are a risk but remote access protocols such as RDP have had their share of critical vulnerabilities (e.g., BlueKeep in 2019).

At this point in the pandemic, you’re probably tired of everyone referring to remote working as “the new normal.” Large companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have already announced that they will be working from home until the end of 2020 at the earliest, or as far out as August 2021. So, if these companies are any indication, we will all still be working from home for the foreseeable future.

The global pandemic caused an abrupt shift to remote work among enterprise knowledge workers, which in turn resulted in an increase in risky behavior. Attackers immediately tried to capitalize on the pandemic, with COVID-19-themed phishing emails, scams, and Trojans. At the same time, techniques used in more sophisticated cyberattacks continued to evolve.

Did you know that the default link sharing option in Google Photos allows anyone with the link to view the files and all images shared in Google Hangouts that are publicly accessible? In this edition of our leaky app series, we will cover how image link sharing in Google Hangouts and Google Photos can lead to the accidental public exposure of sensitive data. We will also look at the threat detection capabilities of Google Photos and Google Hangouts.

TLS is the most important protocol for secure communication with web sites and cloud services. Any vendor with ambitions in the SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) market has to be able to proxy TLS at scale. That requires considerable sophistication in terms of designing the computing and networking infrastructure for a SASE “security cloud,” but it also requires attention to the details of TLS itself.

For most companies, security and IT systems are growing in complexity, breadth of scope, and coverage, which consumes budget and staff time. The rapid breakdown of the traditional perimeter in this “new normal” world increases the challenges IT teams and remote users face on a daily basis.

Emotet is one of the world’s prolific modular botnets that has several evasive and technical variations up its sleeve. After a brief intermission, Emotet has recently re-emerged using massive malspam campaigns.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an abrupt change — a sudden and lasting shift to remote work for the majority of knowledge workers. The number of people working remotely more than doubled in the span of a few weeks. Among the many challenges that security organizations faced during this transition was a change in user behavior.