In the digital age, organizations and the missions and business processes they support rely on information technology and information systems to achieve their mission and business objectives. Not only is technology used to efficiently enable businesses to carry out operational activities, but it is also the backbone for the United States’ critical infrastructure.
Most security breaches are the result of one thing: sloppy password practices. Too many people make the mistake of choosing weak passwords, or reusing passwords that they have used elsewhere on the internet – making life too easy for malicious hackers trying to gain unauthorised access.
As we say goodbye to 2020 and spend time reflecting on the industry changes, reassess our workflows and procedures in order to identify where 2021 will bring us, it’s a brilliant time to also address our security practices and ways we can bring improvement to those, as well. After considering the top challenges I saw with development teams and security teams within development environments, I came up with a list of ways to focus our security improvements for 2021.
‘Business’ is a verb that practically means the movement of data. If you aren’t sharing data – keeping the books, sharing ideas and stats about sales, getting the correct information regarding the customer or data to the customer – then you aren’t doing much business. But organizations need to protect their data along the way. Infosec has so many ways of protecting those sources of data, so much so that users of the data often complain.
A few years ago, I worked alongside some oil commodity traders. Environmental concerns aside, I never realized how many parts were required to get the oil out of the ground, not to mention everything else that finally resulted in the production of refined products that surround our lives. As a cybersecurity professional, I was more interested in how all the pipelines were intertwined and, of course, protected.
The U.S Government released on January 5, 2021, a cybersecurity plan to secure the nation’s maritime sector against cybersecurity threats that could endanger national security.
Almost exactly a year ago, cybersecurity professionals were locked in a heated debate about insurance. While some were keen to point out that the future of the industry would need to include some form of insurance market, others argued that cyber insurance would never be worth the premiums, especially given the inherently volatile nature of cybersecurity. The pandemic has changed all of that.
The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a warning to companies to better protect their cloud-based accounts after several recent successful attacks. According to an advisory published by CISA, an increasing number of attacks have succeeded as more employees have begun to work remotely with a variety of corporate laptops and personal devices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On February 11, 2020, Offensive Security introduced a major overhaul and update to their already fantastic course: Penetration Testing with Kali Linux. Those changes included updates to their lab environment. The study materials were substantially updated, with additional material including entire new sections on Bash Scripting, Active Directory Attacks, and PowerShell Empire.
In their attempt to extort as much money as quickly as possible out of companies, ransomware gangs know some effective techniques to get the full attention of a firm’s management team. And one of them is to specifically target the sensitive information stored on the computers used by a company’s top executives, in the hope of finding valuable data that can best pressure bosses into approving the payment of a sizeable ransom.
