In this episode of Trust Issues, Jan Vanhaecht, the Global Digital Identity Leader at Deloitte, Belgium, delves into the intricate realms of digital trust and risk management with host David Puner. The discussion covers topics ranging from the impact of regulations on cybersecurity practices to the pivotal role of identity in building a robust security culture.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations confront a formidable array of cyber threats, with attacks and data breaches becoming increasingly prevalent. As businesses embrace transformative technologies such as AI, automation, cloud-native architectures, microservices and containerization, the proliferation of machine identities has surged, often surpassing human identities.

A popular topic of conversation in my day-to-day work is how to secure privileged access to cloud management consoles and workloads. And that’s no surprise, considering more and more applications and workloads are migrating to the cloud. Up until recently, the answer has typically been clear when it comes to identity security and privileged access management (PAM). It’s simple: first, you manage credentials by securing them in a vault. The next step is to rotate them.

Just like a snagged strand can ruin your garment, overlooking the security of machine identities can tear the very fabric of Zero Trust that protects your organization from bad actors. As a quick refresher, Zero Trust operates on the principle that no entity inside or outside the network perimeter is trusted by default. As we usher in an era where the traditional network perimeter has dissolved due to cloud services, remote work and mobile access, the necessity for Zero Trust becomes even more pronounced.

With new identities, environments and attack methods dominating today’s threat landscape, cybersecurity leaders are hyper-focused on securing identities to safeguard enterprises. However, a glaring, high-touch security gap exists that threat actors actively exploit to steal confidential data. And unsuspecting as it seems, that gap lies in the most used enterprise application of all time – the web browser.

Welcome, fellow travelers of the Cosmos! While we may not be traversing the stars on a spaceship, we are all interconnected through the powerful network of blockchains. Unfortunately, just like any technology, vulnerabilities can be discovered and exploited. In this post, we’ll present a critical vulnerability in a Cosmos-SDK blockchain that is explicitly related to the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC).