Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

As businesses emerge from a pandemic year, cybersecurity concerns are necessarily top of mind . Companies face expansive cybersecurity threats on many fronts, prompting 75 percent of business leaders to view cybersecurity as integral to their organization’s COVID-19 recovery. They undoubtedly face an uphill battle. Surging ransomware attacks and increasingly deceptive phishing scams are attracting national attention, while more than 500,000 cybersecurity jobs remain unfilled in the US alone.

Picture this: It’s a normal day of working from home as usual since the COVID-19 outbreak. After that satisfying cup of coffee, you log in. But something is wrong. No matter how many times you click, your files don’t open. Your screen is frozen and refuses to budge. And then, you see one of the worst nightmares any IT admin can imagine: “Oops, your files have been encrypted. But don’t worry, we haven’t deleted them yet.

Everyone tracks progress. Whether it’s academics, health, or job skills, people need visibility into where they started and how well they’re advancing toward a goal. From a business perspective, tracking progress gives insight into whether the organization is prioritizing activities for long-term initiatives or whether it needs to take corrective action. Sometimes, the progress reports remain internal. Other times, organizations share them with customers and business partners.

The CISO of a large state agency shared with me the automated tools he used to mine intelligence about his IT suppliers, and their sub-suppliers and interconnections by way of vetting for security posture. He truly recognized the threat of third parties long before the SolarWinds hack. His due diligence sparked inspiration for this blog. Can a business assume that third party security controls are strong enough to protect their digital supply chains? What about cloud-based assets?

I have some fantastic news to share. Today we’re announcing a new investment round in 1Password. Our current investor Accel led this round and a number of incredible folks including Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and top executives from Shopify, Slack, Squarespace, Google, Eventbrite, MessageBird and Atlassian also came on board.

The following is an excerpt from Netskope’s recent white paper How to Design a Cloud Data Protection Strategy written by James Christiansen and David Fairman.

Organizations can take various steps to protect their operational technology (OT) environments against digital threats. But some stand out more than others. In particular, network segmentation is described as “the first answer to insufficient ICS (Industrial Control System) cybersecurity.” Experts advocate zoning ICS assets to coordinate informational technology (IT) and OT environments effectively. That doesn’t always happen, however.

Data is the most valuable asset for any business. No matter what industry you are in, it’s critical to take care of your data, whether it is financial reports, healthcare records or a start-up business plan. Despite increased data protection regulation, data breach risks are growing. According to Capita, 80% of data breaches involve personally identifiable information at a cost of $150 per record.

The 2010 Stuxnet malicious software attack on a uranium enrichment plant in Iran had all the twists and turns of a spy thriller. The plant was air gapped (not connected to the internet) so it couldn’t be targeted directly by an outsider. Instead, the attackers infected five of the plant’s partner organizations, hoping that an engineer from one of them would unknowingly introduce the malware to the network via a thumb drive.