As the pandemic wears on, and return to work plans continue to shift and morph, there’s really never been a better time to re-evaluate how your organization is handling remote access. Your hastily put-together VPN setup may have gotten the job done in the early days of lockdown, but is it really ready to protect a hybrid workforce that’s now used to flexibility and choice? Here are five signs that it might be time to reconsider your remote access VPN.

Even though cloud computing isn’t all that new anymore, learning how to use it effectively can be overwhelming. It’s unfortunately very easy to make mistakes.

BazarLoader (sometimes referred to as BazaLoader) is a popular downloader among criminals, used to distribute multiple malicious payloads including Ryuk and Conti ransomware. According to a recent report by Phishlabs, during Q3 2021 this malware accounted for 24.7% of all attacks, earning the unwelcome accolade of being the most common payload.

67% of the malware downloads Netskope blocks come from popular cloud applications being abused by attackers. One of the services commonly abused by threat actors is Discord, which is abused to host malware such as TroubleGrabber using public attachment URLs. In this blog post, we will analyze a recent DBatLoader (a.k.a. ModiLoader) sample that uses this technique on Discord to deliver a malware known as Warzone (a.k.a. Ave Maria), a Remote Access Trojan created in 2018.

Over the last 18 months, cloud application use has skyrocketed, with the average organisation with 500-2,000 employees now using 805 different cloud applications. This is a staggering level of new risk for CISOs to get their heads around. At the same time that cloud use has grown, so too have the efforts of malicious actors to target cloud applications which are all too often poorly secured and present a constant opportunity of unsecured data to compromise.

A new day, a new wave of S3 leaks… Cloud misconfigurations continue to be a major concern for organizations and a constant source of data leaks. A recent report by IBM has revealed that misconfigurations are behind two-thirds of cloud security incidents.

I am often asked what has changed and what will need to change most about cybersecurity in the next few years, especially as we come out the other side of a global pandemic that upended all kinds of plans. But let’s start by level-setting: the grand strategy for security—protect data—hasn’t changed. It’s the tactics that have changed, and more importantly, must continue to change.

Who said that cloud services are only exploited by opportunistic cybercriminals? Researchers from Cybereason have recently discovered a new highly targeted campaign, dubbed Operation GhostShell targeting the Aerospace and Telecommunications industries mainly in the Middle East, with additional victims in the U.S., Russia, and Europe.

When the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the U.S., companies took a no-holds-barred approach to maintain their operations. Employees up and down organizational structures were told to work from home, and IT teams were tasked with making that happen. The timeline was short, and approval processes moved quickly, which meant changes to network access and security were made more quickly, and in some cases more haphazardly, than in a “normal” situation.

On Monday, October 4, 2021, Facebook suffered a prolonged outage when, during routine maintenance, all connections to their global backbone network were mistakenly taken down. More details on the cause and response to the outage are available on the Facebook blog. At Netskope, we help secure the cloud and web traffic of millions of users worldwide. In this blog post, we provide a glimpse into what the Facebook outage looked like from our perspective.

In September of 2021, a new malware family named SquirrelWaffle joined the threat landscape. It spread through infected Microsoft Office documents attached in spam emails. The infection flow starts with a ZIP file that contains the infected Office document. When the file is opened by the victim, the malicious VBA macros download SquirrelWaffle DLL, which eventually leads to deploying another threat, such as CobaltStrike or QakBot.

In 2019, when the term Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, was first coined, it was to define a useful way of setting up the network and security infrastructure to satisfy a cloud-first future with services at the edge. Since then, SASE has been long on hype and discussion, but short on actual, practical advice. What does SASE mean for your digital transformation strategy?

The global pandemic further accelerated a trend toward remote work that was already underway, even in federal, state, and local agencies that previously resisted it. But as agencies continue to offer telework options to employees, they must also rethink their security stack to better mitigate the cybersecurity risks that remote work catalyzes. Traditional, perimeter-based approaches to security will no longer work in a cloud-first environment where data can, and is, accessed from just about anywhere.