Already a significant concern before 2021, this year has revitalized cybersecurity as a top priority for every organization. Highly consequential cybersecurity incidents at companies like Colonial Pipeline, Kaseya, and T-Mobile brought front-page coverage to the issue, while cybersecurity attacks on small and medium-sized businesses soared, spreading the reach of threat actors.

Here at AT&T Cybersecurity, we believe cyber protection should include multiple layers and cover as much ground as possible. Having full visibility into threats on the network and being able to automate actions against them not only reduces an organization’s risk but also frees up time for security teams to focus on other high-value security tasks.

September confirmed some things we already knew about the current state of cybercrime: While undersecured corporate targets remain tempting targets for hackers, the situation is increasingly worse for data-rich organizations such as governments, schools, and healthcare facilities. All of those sectors had cause for concern as the month drew to a close.

Financial services have developed at a breakneck pace, resulting in fierce competition among financial technologies. These services in the digital age must be characterized by three words: rapid, efficient, and intuitive. It is no longer necessary to wait in queues to speak with a bank teller. Consumers today want to manage their accounts using their smartphones, and banks want to earn their loyalty. What is the common ground? Using modern technologies to find new methods of doing things.

This is the age-old question faced by so many tech teams: do we build or buy a system we need? TL:DR, Buying can save your engineer time for building the core stack and for the fun experiments needed to determine when to shake up the core stack.

With the rise in popularity of technologies such as HashiCorp Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes, developers are writing and maintaining more and more configurations in addition to building the application itself. The growing use of infrastructure as code presents security complexity and the potential for risk that developers often struggle with as their workloads increase and more advanced skills are required.

When it comes to cybersecurity, vulnerability management is one of the older technologies that still play a critical role in securing our assets. It is often overlooked, disregarded, or considered only for checkbox compliance needs, but a proper vulnerability management program can play a critical role in avoiding a series data breach. CIS Control 07 provides the minimum requirements, table stakes if you will, for establishing a successful vulnerability management program.