Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

May 2023

The Future of Sustainability Requires Protecting Important Data Everywhere

While it might seem initially abstract, sustainability and data security are symbiotic. Allow me to explain. Regardless of the action or industry, critical data touches everything. Whether data is being used in pharmaceutical research, financial records, or intellectual property, securing it is the common imperative. This is especially true as it moves through various access points, the cloud, applications, the web, and various other transactions.

Think Beyond SD-WAN to a Zero Trust, Context-Aware SD-WAN

The enterprise business is now borderless, where users, devices, sites, and clouds are all creating any-to-any connections with new access control requirements. Digital innovation has led to the proliferation of apps and IoT devices where the cloud and web have become an encyclopedia of applications.

The Power of Using Risk Scores to Automate Continuous Conditional Access

Co-authored by David Willis and Gary Jenkins As we wrote in an earlier blog, the concept of cybersecurity risk continues to be codified, qualified, and, finally, quantified. With the rise of RESTful API endpoint support and near-real time telemetry sharing, companies can seize the opportunity to automate the IT/security stack’s response to risky users (in addition to devices, data, and applications—to be covered in future blogs).

Cloud Threats Memo: More Details on Long-Lasting Campaigns Targeting Eastern Europe

In a previous memo, I mentioned the discovery, made by researchers at Kaspersky, of an active campaign carried out by an advanced threat actor since 2021, targeting multiple organizations in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea. One of the noteworthy aspects of this campaign was undoubtedly the usage of a new backdoor, called PowerMagic, characterized by the exploitation of the popular cloud storage services, Dropbox and OneDrive, as the command and control infrastructure.

InterPlanetary File System: A Decentralized Place to Host Phishing Content

Netskope Threat Labs is tracking phishing campaigns abusing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to deliver their payloads. From March 1 to April 30, Netskope Threat Labs has seen a 7x increase in traffic to IPFS phishing pages. The attacks have been targeting victims mainly in North America and Asia Pacific across different segments, led by the financial services, banking, and technology sectors. IPFS was first launched in 2014 and has been steadily increasing in popularity since.

Together, We Can Foster Positive Mental Health in Cybersecurity

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I want to take this time to reflect on something we don’t often talk openly about in the security community: mental health. Nearly half of CISOs turn over every two years. Almost 100% of CISOs report feeling stressed at work, with about two-thirds saying stress issues are compromising their ability to protect their organization, and 100% saying they felt they needed more resources to adequately cope with current IT and security challenges.

Insider Threats Packing Their Bags With Corporate Data

The insider story, whether it is a disgruntled or negligent employee, is one that is familiar to many organizations. The 2020 Securonix Insider Threat Report found that 60% of the insider threat cases they dealt with involved a “flight risk” employee, or an individual that is getting ready to leave their employment.

Netskope Demo - Safely Enable ChatGPT

Organizations are grappling with the decision to allow or block ChatGPT given the risk of leaking sensitive data. In this video, Bob Gilbert, VP of Security Cloud GTM Strategy and Chief Evangelist, demos how Netskope solutions can help your organization enable safe usage of tools like ChatGPT with active user coaching and data protection.

Modern Data Protection Safeguards for ChatGPT and Other Generative AI Applications

Co-authored by Carmine Clementelli and Jason Clark In recent times, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the way more and more corporate users interact with their daily work. Generative AI-based SaaS applications like ChatGPT have offered countless opportunities to organizations and their employees to improve business productivity, ease numerous tasks, enhance services, and assist in streamlining operations.

A Modern DLP Solution Has These Non-Negotiable Characteristics

Security professionals were once confident that the valuable data they protected was safely tucked away inside heavily fortified data centers. But as businesses of all sizes undergo digital transformation, moving their data to the cloud and across numerous distributed locations, the demands placed on legacy data protection systems have changed drastically.

Introducing Netskope SSPM's Next Generation Capabilities

The market for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, or apps, was valued at $186B in 2022, and expected to grow to $700B by 2030, a CAGR of 18%. As organizations adopt more SaaS apps for business-critical operations, they expose sensitive data across an ever larger and more diversified variety of egress points in the cloud. And as attackers tend to follow the data, they are targeting SaaS apps like never before.

Severing the Link Between Network Costs and Application Performance

Over the past two decades we have seen a major shift in working patterns and models at organisations around the world. Intertwined—driven by those workforce changes as well as enabling them—we have also seen a complete rearchitecting of the IT systems that underpin our corporations. Both of these change agents have driven spiralling network costs in the name of maintaining and improving the performance of the essential applications for hybrid workforces.

Consolidation, Flexibility, ChatGPT, & Other Key Takeaways from Netskopers at RSA Conference 2023

At RSA Conference 2023, a number of Netskopers from across the organization who attended the event in San Francisco shared commentary on the trends, topics, and takeaways from this year’s conference.

Cloud Threats Memo: North-Korean State-Sponsored Threat Actors Continue to Exploit Legitimate Cloud Services

Be the first to receive the Cloud Threats Memo directly in your inbox by subscribing here. While the most common cloud apps are also the most exploited for delivering malicious content, opportunistic and state-sponsored threat actors are constantly looking for additional cloud services to leverage throughout multiple stages of the attack chain.

Answering Key Questions About Embracing AI in Cybersecurity

As we witness a growing number of cyber-attacks and data breaches, the demand for advanced cybersecurity solutions is becoming critical. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful contender to help solve pressing cybersecurity problems. Let’s explore the benefits, challenges, and potential risks of AI in cybersecurity using a Q&A composed of questions I hear often.

Netskope Threat Coverage: CrossLock Ransomware

CrossLock is a ransomware group that emerged in April 2023, targeting a large digital certifier company in Brazil. This ransomware was written in Go, which has also been adopted by other ransomware groups, including Hive, due to the cross-platform capabilities offered by the language. CrossLock operates in the double-extortion scheme, by threatening to leak stolen data on a website hosted on the deep web if the ransom isn’t paid by the victim.

Quality of Experience vs Quality of Service: Which are You Getting?

Quality of Service (QoS) is a standard metric for any infrastructure, networking, or operations team contracting with a tech vendor The average network SLA, for example, is crawling with QoS metrics covering a range of things, including packet loss, jitter, latency, bandwidth allocation, response time, and uptime.