Across every major news outlet the topic of cyber security threats and data privacy are impossible to miss. From multinational companies being relieved of millions of credit card numbers, to foreign hacking, to the selling of user data via social media, digital security is clearly more important than ever. Threats are being realized by vulnerable organizations large and small.
A Security Operation Center (SOC) can be either a team who works 24/7 in shifts or a facility dedicated and well-organized to detect, prevent, assess, and respond to cyber-threats and incidents and helps to achieve compliance requirements.
Gone are the times when endpoint protection was limited to installing an anti-virus and expecting a reasonable level of protection. With the introduction of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and increasing number of IoT devices, there are more endpoints than ever and so are the security threats associated with them.
A mature DevOps practice involves applying multiple tools at different steps of the delivery pipeline, and a new study from IntSights focuses on these tools that may be open to attack on the Internet. Each new tool added to your process can expand your attack surface area – and, in many cases, new development and delivery tools are being used without oversight from a security team.
Best practices for securing your data when terminating an employee actually start with the initial onboarding process. Every established organization looking to scale should consult legal counsel after first having drafted an employee handbook. Once created, every employee should be provided an employee handbook outlining the acceptable use policy related to any and all corporate IT resources.
The specialized nature of cyber risk requires the translation of technical details into business terms. Security ratings and cyber risk assessments serve this purpose, much like a credit score does for assessing the risk of a loan. But the methodologies employed by solutions in this space vary greatly, as do their results.
Microsoft’s enterprise software powers the majority of large environments. Though often hybridized with open source solutions and third party offerings, the core components of Windows Server, Exchange, and SQL Server form the foundation of many organizations’ data centers. Despite their prevalence in the enterprise, Microsoft systems have also carried a perhaps unfair reputation for insecurity, compared to Linux and other enterprise options.
In a previous article, I noted that organizations are witnessing a surge in integrity-based attacks targeting their networks. Enterprises can defend themselves against these types of threats by turning to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework. They can then pair the risk-based approach with NIST SP 800-53 and other security control catalogs that enable integrity management.
When we began building a Cyber Risk Research team at UpGuard, we knew there were unavoidable risks. We would be finding and publishing reports on sensitive, exposed data in order to stanch the flow of such private information onto the public internet. It seemed likely the entities involved would not always be pleased, particularly as the majority of the exposures we discovered would be attributable to human error and/or internal process failures.
The European Union’s GDPR regulations go into effect in May of this year. In essence, GDPR is a strict data privacy code that holds companies responsible for securing the data they store and process. Although GDPR was approved in April 2016, companies affected by the regulations are still struggling to reach compliance by the May 2018 deadline.
