An Internet Protocol (IP) address is the digital equivalent of your home address. Your home has a unique identification number that gives information about your physical geographic location, like road, city, state, and country. An IP address provides similar information about the people and devices connected to a network.

Back in the early days of the internet, people looked forward to hearing that deep, robotic voice announcing “you’ve got mail!” Today, whether you like it or not, email is fundamental to personal and business communications. In 2022, people sent and received an estimated 333 billion emails daily, with the number expected to increase to 392.5 billion by 2026. Experiencing a security incident on your email server can interrupt business operations leading to lost revenue.

Managing vulnerabilities can feel like the end of the first act of Les Misérables as you sing to yourself, “one day more, another day another vulnerability.” Like Jean Valjean, you attempt to put up barricades to protect your environment from attackers exploiting these security weaknesses. Keeping pace with the number of vulnerabilities and threat actor activities becomes overwhelming, leaving you to feel outnumbered and outmanned.

Imagine that you have a snack you want to eat while watching a movie on a Friday night. You look in your kitchen, only to find the snack missing. Whether a roommate hid the snack or ate it, you no longer have access to it, disrupting your evening plans. This destructive behavior interrupts your weekend objectives, but it’s pretty low stakes overall.

Responding rapidly to cyber threats is a make-or-break capability in today’s high-stakes security environment. A missed alert can quickly escalate a minor incident into a major crisis, jeopardizing your organization’s critical assets and hard-earned reputation. A recent IBM study revealed that companies took an average of 237 days to identify a data breach in 2021 — an inexcusable delay that could invite catastrophic consequences. (Source: IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022)

Security incidents and data breaches are the cybersecurity version of the definition of squares and rectangles in geometry. While all data breaches are security incidents, not all security incidents are data breaches. Before investigating an incident, many security teams know whether the alert will relate to a minor incident or a large-scale breach.

For Star Trek fans, space may be the final frontier, but in security, discovering Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) could be the technology equivalent. In the iconic episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” the legendary starship Enterprise discovers a space station that becomes overwhelmed by little fluffy, purring, rapidly reproducing creatures called “tribbles.” In a modern IT department, APIs can be viewed as the digital tribble overwhelming security teams.

The 2020 EU Cybersecurity Strategy, published by the European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, aimed to establish safeguards against security risks arising from increased digital connectivity. As part of the strategy, the strategy included updates to Directive (EU) 2022/2555 on measures for a high common level of cybersecurity across the Union (NIS2).

Being a security analyst tracking down threats can feel like being the Wile E. Coyote to an attacker’s Road Runner. You’re fast, but they’re faster. You set up alerts, but they still manage to get past your defenses. You’re monitoring systems, but they’re still able to hide their criminal activities.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow your applications to talk to one another, like an application-to-application iMessage or Signal. If you’ve ever texted a message to the wrong group chat, you’ve created a situation that mimics what broken function level authentication does between users and applications.