In the midst of a growing global cyberthreat landscape, the Australian and US governments this week announced plans to increase spend to bolster federal cybersecurity. The Australian federal government’s newly released 2022-23 federal Budget has dedicated AU$9.9 billion to support cybersecurity and intelligence capabilities under a program called Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber and Enablers (REDSPICE).

Encryption has come a long, long way over the last few years. Something once reserved only for militaries and governments, encryption has been made super accessible and has become standard practice in the tech industry. Whether it’s texts, photos, or word docs - it can, and should, be encrypted. Put simply, encryption scrambles any file sent or stored online into unreadable nonsense that can only be translated (or decrypted) by a user with a key.

At Nightfall, our mission is to discover and secure sensitive data in every cloud application through a cloud-native, accurate, and performant platform. Since 2019, Nightfall has partnered with some of the world’s most innovative organizations to proactively eliminate data security risks across a fleet of SaaS applications via our native integrations for Slack, Atlassian Jira, Confluence, Google Drive, and GitHub.

Everyday business documents continue to be one of the biggest sources of data leakage. The Facebook leaks and WikiLeaks are prime examples of the damage such breaches can wreak. Even with the best security tools in place users seem to always be able to find a way to circumvent security. Or, as in most cases, accidentally share data with the wrong audience creating a security issue.

We’re excited to announce that Nightfall is partnering with Virtru, a renowned leader in email and SaaS encryption, to provide customers with an encryption solution for securing PHI in Gmail and Google Drive. Combined with our existing Google Drive data loss prevention (DLP) integration, this new solution will provide fully integrated compliance and security coverage for Google Workspace.

Data bias: the insidious threat lurking in your data unless you’ve taken active steps to mitigate it. It causes the potential to harm, skew or invalidate your data completely – or sometimes all three at once.

HIPAA requires covered entities and business associates to secure protected health information (PHI). Failing to do so can result in steep fines and penalties. Some PHI breaches, however, are out of the organization’s control. Determined hackers can expose PHI, and employees can make mistakes — they’re only human, Despite training, rigorous security protocols, and constant monitoring, data breaches can happen.

Considering the forensic-level attention to data residency that was paid in the early days of cloud, it’s interesting how little regard is now given to the matter. Explaining the many pitfalls of certain data residency challenges to fellow CISOs (and key stakeholders) and why real-time visualisations of data flow matter, is often an interesting exercise.

Microsoft 365 provides a powerful document management and collaboration platform. However, with so many applications available in the platform to store and share information internally and with external parties, such as partners, contractors and vendors, ensuring proper access and data security can be a challenge. In this blog we examine how to ensure secure file sharing in Microsoft 365 and Teams.

In part one of this two-part blog series, we analyzed the UK National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) guidance relating to backups and data protection. Now in this post, we will examine NCSC’s guidance around mitigating malware and ransomware attacks. Recall that NCSC, at present, provides information and practical guidance in various articles on its website rather than formal requirements or regulations.

Over the last few years, the rise in data breaches involving personally identifiable information (PII) has resulted in the loss of millions of records.

HIPAA compliance requires covered entities and business associates to secure protected health information. Social Security numbers, medical record numbers, health plan beneficiary numbers, account numbers, and names of patients, relatives, or employers all must be secured from unauthorized access. The penalties and fines for HIPAA violations can be steep — in some instances reaching millions of dollars. And, HIPAA isn’t prescriptive about what it takes to be in compliance.

Those who work in the healthcare industry know: HIPAA compliance is often fiercely enforced by the Department of Health and Human Services, and penalties can be steep. “Each covered entity is required to implement safeguards to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of PHI. These safeguards will vary depending on the size of the covered entity and the nature of healthcare it provides, but the penalties for failing to safeguard the integrity of PHI can be extremely high.

HIPAA’s regulations refer to two parties: a covered entity and a business associate. These groups are required to achieve PHI compliance. Specifically, this means these groups are liable for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of personal health information.

The Nightfall blog is a knowledgebase for cybersecurity professionals with news and insights from the world of cloud security. Each week, we’re publishing new content to help you stay up-to-date on cybersecurity topics and to prepare you for the issues and threats that occur every day on the job.

In honor of International Women’s Day we once again asked the amazingly talented women of archTIS to share their insights as women in tech. This year our Finance and HR leads share their important roles in the company, experiences, and offer advice to young women considering a career in cybersecurity.

A dynamic, data-centric approach is key to securing sensitive information and achieving compliance in our modern world of hybrid IT solutions, but what are the differences between RBAC vs ABAC the two common access controls approaches? Over the last two years, companies have seen an expedited shift away from using traditional methods to access their data. With more employees working remotely, we find the security controls we have spent years refining are no longer adequate.

Sensitive data often makes its way into logs. Though most of the time unintentional, these incidents have the potential to do a lot of damage, as they usually involve exposure of API keys, passwords, and customer data that can give attackers access to critical business data or put companies at compliance risk. This is why it’s important for organizations to be proactive about securing their logs.

We’re pleased to announce that Nightfall is partnering with Hanzo, a best-in-class enterprise e-discovery and investigations platform. Hanzo’s offerings, now powered by Nightfall DLP, include Nightfall’s machine learning detectors as part of Hanzo’s core functionality.

The current wave of digital transformation that has brought more and more businesses online has also introduced an unwelcome side effect: the surface area for attacks has ballooned. As individuals and businesses migrated their sensitive transactions into cloud applications, cloud service providers became responsible for providing high-fidelity data security.