Happy New Year! As we usher in a year with some pleasant mathematical properties, I wanted to take a brief look back at one of the stories that was most interesting to me as a security data nerd from last year: our dependency on the National Institute of Standards and Technologies’s (NIST) National Vulnerability Database(NVD), and what the degradation in service has meant to the flow of information about new CVEs. TL:DR.

As security and risk leaders look to the year ahead, they face a rapidly evolving and dynamic set of challenges. The implementation of more stringent cybersecurity standards—such as the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rules and the EU’s Network and Information Security Directive 2 (NIS2)—has placed boardroom scrutiny at an unprecedented level.

With technology supply chain risks at an all-time high, many governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams conduct formal risk assessments as part of their new vendor selection and onboarding processes. Audit-based reporting frameworks like SOC 2 are invaluable to these efforts, as they provide a consistent way to benchmark prospective vendors’ customer data management practices.

The effectiveness of external attack surface management (EASM) and third-party risk management (TPRM) capabilities hinges on the depth, breadth, and timeliness of the underlying data they are based on. For this reason, Bitsight makes a significant ongoing investment in: The introduction of Bitsight’s next-generation data engine enabled many improvements to our capabilities across all of these areas throughout 2024.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a pivotal framework that governs data protection and privacy for individuals within the European Union (EU). Its implications are far-reaching, affecting organizations worldwide that handle EU citizens' data. Understanding and achieving GDPR compliance is essential to avoid substantial penalties and to maintain trust with customers.

With all of that background from parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series out of the way, let's turn to some practical considerations for real-world web applications. The inherent security restrictions for resources, including cookies and JavaScript, assume that each website contains all of its functionality in one neat, isolated package. But websites often contain content and functionality from multiple websites that trust each other.

At the beginning of June 2024, Bitsight TRACE started analyzing a new CISA KEV vulnerability that had just come out, with the goal of creating a detection capability that could be implemented on an Internet-wide scale.