The network is rapidly changing – What was once known as the ‘perimeter’ that comprised of a crunchy solid exterior with a soft chewy center consisting of endpoints has eroded into a mush of mobile devices, BYOD, IOT and hybrid cloud.
The modern-day organization is under constant pressure to remain operational and profitable. Both of these pressures are put to the test by cybercriminals daily, who attempt to infiltrate, compromise, navigate, and ultimately act in a threatening manner that can have negative repercussions to productivity, ability to transact, customer privacy, brand reputation and bottom-line revenue.
I live in Toronto, so I always try my best to get to SecTor, Canada’s most important cybersecurity event, every October. Most years, SecTor has taken place in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. But because of the unusual circumstances affecting the world in 2020, this year the event took place online exclusively. SecTor organizers hope that conditions improve by October 2021 so they can resume hosting the event in-person.
SMS phishing, or “Smishing,” is a mobile phishing attack that targets victims via the SMS messaging channel rather than through email. A natural evolution of the phishing phenomenon, smishing attacks attempt to dupe mobile users with phony text messages containing links to legitimate looking, but fraudulent, sites. These smishing sites try to steal credentials, propagate mobile malware, or perpetrate fraud.
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a compliance program established by the US government that sets a baseline for cloud products and services regarding their approach to authorization, security assessment, and continuous monitoring.
It’s no secret: the number of security vulnerabilities organizations must contend with is overwhelming. According to a 2019 Risk Based Security report, there were 22,316 newly-discovered vulnerabilities last year. One Patch Tuesday disclosed a record number of 327 vulnerabilities in a single day. Just keeping up is becoming a monumental task. But knowing where and how your organization may be vulnerable is critical to maintaining a healthy security posture.
As recent global health events have changed the world, the cybersecurity landscape has changed along with it. Almost all organizations — large or small — have seen their attack surface grow. For those unfamiliar with the term, an attack surface represents the sum total of all the ways in which a bad actor can exploit an endpoint or network to retrieve data. Every endpoint that connects to or communicates with the network is part of the network attack surface.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently announced that activity in LokiBot, a form of aggressive malware, has increased dramatically over the last two months. The activity increase was discovered by an automated intrusion detection system referred to as EINSTEIN, which the Department of Homeland Security uses for collecting and analyzing security information across numerous government agencies.
The rise of social media has no doubt been one of the major revolutions of the 21st century. It’s brought about a whole new way for people to connect and share information with others, regardless of their geographical locations. But along with these more noble intentions of social media, there will always be abuse of these platforms – and one of the big ones is the spread of disinformation.
With recent global health events resulting in a surprise shift to an either completely remote or hybrid remote workforce for many organizations, the need to leverage mobile devices as work endpoints has grown significantly. This has created challenges for IT in maintaining both the ability to manage a wide range of devices, as well as securing them in a way that achieves corporate security objectives and governance.
