Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Cyber attacks, like the pandemic that has spurred the rise in incidents, have been relentless. Over the past eight months, there has been a significant escalation as the sophistication of these attacks has risen. Hackers are going after key vendors, allowing them to target wide swaths of valuable victims like we have seen in the attacks on SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, Colonial Pipeline, and more recently, MSP software provider Kaseya.

“What happened?” If you’ve never uttered those words, this blog isn’t for you. For those of us in cybersecurity, this pint-sized phrase triggers memories of unforeseen security incidents and long email threads with the CISO. What happened to those security patches? Why didn’t we prevent that intrusion? Organizations tend to lean towards protecting their borders and less towards understanding the importance of overall security hygiene.

This article is the first in our series on the Science Behind Cyber Security. Cyber security is often seen as a bit like the wild west, where it’s difficult to differentiate genuine solutions from snake oil. You can counter this by applying a scientific approach to scrutinise your planned cyber investments. As a buyer, you can find reassurance in the science and logic of a solution.

5G is already transforming and enhancing mobile connectivity. With its high speeds and low latency, almost all businesses and industries are now in the position to digitize applications and services they couldn’t dream of not long ago. With 5G networks, billions of devices and IoT (the internet of things) are interconnectible — leading to use cases like smart cities, AR/VR on mobile networks, remote medicine and much more. The potential is practically unlimited.

Modern organizations rely heavily on software and systems. Secure coding standards are significant, as they give some assurance that software installed on the organization’s system is protected from security flaws. These security standards, when used correctly, can avoid, identify, and remove loopholes that might jeopardize software integrity. Furthermore, whether developing software for portable gadgets, desktop systems, or servers, secure coding is critical for modern software development.

It’s been a great year so far for the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project and community. OPA achieved graduated status in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in February and is quickly nearing 100 million downloads! With all this growth, we were excited to see the results of the second annual Open Policy Agent user survey. As I mentioned in my post on the Open Policy Agent blog, we survey the community to help better steer the project's long-term roadmap in the right direction.