As organizations increasingly adopt continuous delivery practices and deploy code as often as every few seconds, the number of vulnerabilities in your code and the potential for them to go undetected increases. Not knowing which vulnerabilities to focus on can be extremely costly—both in terms of the resources needed to address them as well as the risk they pose for your system.
With the SEC's adoption of new rules on cybersecurity risk management, strategy, governance, and incident disclosure by public companies, one thing is clear: better definitions are required.
Michigan State University is a large school located in East Lansing, Michigan. This public university has more than 49,000 students per semester and is set over a location spread across 5,300 acres. The university caters to hundreds of thousands of students over time, many of whom may have been exposed due to a recent data breach. The breach wasn't on the university itself, but it likely impacted many of the students attending Michigan State.
When you rely on a tool to support you in an intense situation, you probably want reassurance that it got tested for extreme conditions. For example, if you’re about to go skydiving, you'd want to know that the parachute strapped to your back underwent rigorous testing and will perform it's needed most. The same is true with the systems supporting our security initiatives. What happens when those systems are under high pressure in an emergency?
Let’s say you’ve built a PHP application, but you want to separate it from supporting infrastructure in a way that keeps things lightweight, portable, and still quite secure. You’d like other developers to be able to work on it without having to recreate whole environments. In short, what you want to do with your application is containerize it — package it and its dependencies into containers that can be easily shared across environments.
Over the last decade, many vulnerabilities were initially perceived as critical or high but later deemed less important due to different factors. One of the famous examples was the “Bash Shellshock” vulnerability discovered in 2014. Initially, it was considered a critical vulnerability due to its widespread impact and the potential for remote code execution.
How can you take a proactive approach to your organization’s cybersecurity strategy? Scoping the threat landscape and having a solid incident response plan is a good start. But you also need to continuously seek out vulnerabilities and weaknesses to remediate or mitigate. These vulnerabilities and weaknesses aren’t just limited to systems and processes – the human factor plays a prominent part in many cybersecurity breaches.
