Cybercriminals choose their targets based on two conditions - maximum impact and maximum profit. Financial institutions perfectly meet these conditions because they store highly valuable data, and their digital transformation efforts are creating greater opportunities for cyber attackers to access that data. This is why the financial sector is disproportionately targeted by cybercriminals, behind healthcare.
The most relevant cybersecurity threat to most businesses may be human, not technical. A sudden wave of cybercrime paired with longstanding tech labor challenges has created a cybersecurity skills gap, leaving companies without the expertise they need. Some companies lack dedicated security staff entirely, while others have a small, overworked department trying to manage massive workloads. Companies that hope to stay safe need to address this talent shortage.
The popularity of cloud services has increased exponentially in recent years. The prospects of saving on capital and operational expenditures have been significant driving forces in influencing companies to adopt cloud services. Scalability and elasticity are also key drivers that encourage companies to move to the cloud. However, moving to the cloud comes with a lot of challenges. Security is a big concern for organizations that want to migrate to the cloud.
Understanding the threat landscape and how threats behave is the first step CrowdStrike researchers take toward strengthening customer protection. They based the following threat landscape analysis on internal and open source data, which revealed that in 2021 the most commonly encountered macOS malware types were ransomware (43%), backdoors (35%) and trojans (17%). Each category is powered by a different motive: ransomware by money, backdoors by remote access and trojans by data theft. Figure 1.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) aims to protect consumer financial privacy with three provisions: the Financial Privacy Rule, the Safeguards Rule, and the Pretexting Provisions. In our previous post, we covered the GLBA Financial Privacy Rule and what financial institutions, as defined by the GLBA, need to know to be compliant.
Tech decision makers surveyed by Pulse admitted last year that nearly 3 out of 4 companies (71%) experienced a ransomware incident and at least 12% of these incidents involved payments. This shows that ransomware attacks are proving to be a lucrative business for malicious cyber actors as they constantly put organizations’ cybersecurity measures to the test in a host of different sectors where different IT architectures are used.
Professionals working in cyber threat intelligence (CTI) overwhelmingly enjoy their jobs; over 66%, according to a limited survey of CTI professionals. They enjoy playing detective, investigator, researcher, analyzer, and communicator. What do they not love about the job? Chasing down bits and pieces of information manually through tons of different interfaces. Wrangling a time-intensive monstrosity of various files, web pages, and inconsistent formats, then merging them (ungracefully).
