Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) enable companies to add products and services to their portfolios, giving them a way to scale their business. To gain true visibility into a company’s long-term impact on your organization’s bottom line, you need to understand all assets and liabilities, including digital ones.

One of the worst things about ransomware attacks isn’t just the mayhem they cause as your data is encrypted by criminals and your business is put on hold — it’s not knowing when they’ll happen. But what if you had some advance notice about the next cyberattack before it hit? What if you could find out if your data was up for bid on the dark web?

A quality management system (QMS) is a system that documents the policies, business processes, and procedures necessary for an organization to create and deliver its products or services to its customers, and therefore increase customer satisfaction through high product quality. In short, a QMS helps a company meet its regulatory requirements and customer requirements, and make continuous improvements to its operations.

Audit procedures are the processes and methods auditors use to obtain sufficient, appropriate audit evidence to give their professional judgment about the effectiveness of an organization’s internal controls. Internal controls are the mechanisms and standards that businesses use to protect their sensitive data and IT systems; or as a means of providing accountability on financial statements and accounting records.

ZenGRC Platform Designated ‘Leader’ and ‘High Performer’ by Users SAN FRANCISCO – June 29, 2021 – Reciprocity, a leader in information security risk and compliance, today announced its ZenGRC® platform was recognized as a Leader in G2’s Summer 2021 Grid for GRC Platforms, and as a High Performer in the Third Party & Supplier Risk Management category.

Last year was a tough one for schools, local, and state governments. Not simply because of COVID-19, which forced every local government and school to navigate a pandemic, but also because the pandemic brought with it a different set of dangers. While local governments and schools were trying to figure out remote learning, remote work, and how to run public meetings safely and effectively online, cybercriminals took advantage of the fact that the remote world is new to most small governments.

Regardless of your industry, regulatory compliance is an important component of ongoing success. Staying on top of your compliance obligations can be challenging, and a strong compliance management program will require a compliance management system.

One of the most common misconceptions about cybersecurity is that the responsibility and ownership sits solely on the shoulders of the CISO and the security team. Common assumptions are anything related to cybersecurity, a security issue or security initiative resides with the security team and the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Phishing attacks? That’s a problem for the security department. Vetting vendors and third parties? That belongs to the vendor management team.

Digital transformation changes the perimeter. When organizations had all their applications on-premises, the network firewall kept the right users inside the gate and malicious actors outside. However, the move to the cloud changed all that. In today’s hyper-connected ecosystem, understanding the components and types of access control can help you strengthen security.

Insurance companies know how to protect their clients’ homes, cars, and businesses— but protecting the personal information of those customers is a bit harder to assure. While the insurance industry focuses on risk-based analyses for its own underwriting programs, firms also need to apply those same risk management processes to securing customer information.

A SOC 2 system description outlines the boundaries of a SOC report. It contains pertinent details regarding the people, processes, and technology that support your product, software, or service. As a reminder, the SOC framework stands for System and Organization Controls. It is a broad architecture that organizations can use to audit the internal controls of vendors and business partners before entering a relationship with those firms, to assess whether those firms have a robust security posture.

Many businesses are shifting workloads to the cloud in an effort to increase efficiency and streamline workloads. In fact, according to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, roughly 90% of enterprises anticipate cloud usage will expand even further as a result of COVID-19. While cloud computing can offer organizations a competitive advantage, it is important not to rush into cloud adoptions without understanding the risks involved as well.

Good data governance can go a long way toward reducing business risk. If your content and your data are secure, you’ve eliminated danger to your customers’ information and secured your proprietary information. From a digital perspective, you’re ahead of the game. But data governance shouldn’t be your only concern.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation applies to any organization that operates in the EU or that collects or processes the personal data of EU citizens. So if a business in the United States (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter) does handle such data — yes, the GDPR can apply to you. That said, the exact compliance requirements will vary depending on the size of your company and how you process and store the applicable data.

Third-party risk management (TPRM), also known as “vendor risk management” is the process of managing risks introduced to your business by your organization’s vendors, suppliers, contractors, and service providers. Any outside party that plays a significant part in your company’s ecosystem or supply chain is considered a third-party vendor.

SecurityScorecard’s Investigations & Analysis team conducted an investigation into the details surrounding the USAID.gov attack. As has been previously reported, the attack has been potentially attributed to the organization commonly known as Cozy Bear, but our investigation found that the campaign is likely much larger, and began much earlier than has been reported.

The data privacy regimes in Russia, China, and the United States are very different from the regimes elsewhere. The financial lure of selling to, or processing data on, EU residents is strong, which has led other countries to adopt the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or something like it. Russia, China, and the United States are large enough for other forces to dominate, including the desire to have their citizens’ data stored locally, as we’ll see.

Corporate cybersecurity professionals must be on constant alert to avoid the wide range of cyberattacks that can be thrown at them today: malware, ransomware, trojan horses, social engineering, and spear-phishing attacks, to name just a few. Among the most serious of attacks is the advanced persistent threat (APT). An APT is an attack that uses sophisticated methods to gain access to information systems and sensitive information.

One of the key reasons SecurityScorecard commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study was to help the market move on from using spreadsheets as a Vendor Risk Management (VRM) tool. The primary reason for IT teams to look at SecurityScorecard or any other VRM automation platform is simple. IT (Information Technology) will help IT teams get better leverage on their two rarest commodities in the security world, time and talent.

It’s the stuff of IT managers’ nightmares and it is coming to a server near you: ransomware attacks, phishing schemes, privacy breaches, and other yet-to-be imagined cyber threats aiming to pilfer the sensitive data stored on your IT systems. Cybercriminals target large companies like Microsoft, Equifax, Expedia, and Barnes & Noble just to mention a few big victims from 2020.

Businesses sit on massive, ever-growing piles of data. According to Dave Reinsel, senior vice president, IDC's Global DataSphere, 64.2 zettabytes (ZB) of data was created or replicated in 2020. And the amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the advent of digital storage. But data isn’t just growing, it is spreading to more applications, more users, and more devices than ever.

Cybersecurity is more than “just” technology these days. With legislative bodies increasingly writing more laws, technology and legal terminologies have become more intertwined than ever before. As organizations build cyber risk strategies, they need to understand risk mitigation’s underlying goal. This is why understanding the difference between due care and due diligence is important to how you set your risk mitigation strategies.

Penetration testing, also known as “pen testing,” is an intentional, simulated cyberattack against your IT systems to find vulnerabilities and test the efficacy of cybersecurity controls. For example, penetration testers can use this tactic to improve web application security mechanisms such as firewalls. Pen testing might involve an attempt to breach access controls to gain access to a private network.

The old saying “it takes a village” applies to many things in life, including securing your organization. Security is a team sport that requires a variety of solutions and providers — such as a firewall, endpoint protection, security information and event management (SIEM), threat intelligence provider, IT service management (ITSM), governance, risk, and compliance solution (GRC), and cloud access security broker (CASB) — to name a few.

As you go about the work of managing your IT environment, it’s likely that you already apply the Principle of Least Privilege (POLP, also known as “least privilege access”) — probably without giving this important concept a second thought. After all, not every employee in your company has admin rights on your website, or access to your financial accounts.

Cybersecurity can seem intimidating, especially when you’re not already familiar with security and IT. There are so many threats and a lot of terms you need to know in order to understand the countermeasures that can help keep your data safe from attackers. What is an attack surface, after all? And what’s a rootkit? Non-technical employees and decision-makers might find their eyes glazing over when cybersecurity terms start getting thrown around.

Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) means exactly that: compliance officers and IT security teams are trained to not trust any network activity, anywhere, at any given time — not even on the inside of their own computer network. Don’t panic; ZTA is not as difficult to work with as it sounds. It’s simply a different way of approaching cybersecurity. So let’s take a look at how it works.

SecurityScorecard also found that 1 in 5 of the world’s food processing, production, and distribution companies rated have a known vulnerability in their exposed Internet assets

The term “cloud infrastructure” refers to both the hardware systems and software applications that support a cloud computing environment. This might include cloud storage, virtualization applications, IT management tools, API connectivity, and relevant cloud service providers. In a cloud computing environment, all of the aforementioned IT infrastructure components would be hosted offsite by a service provider and delivered through an internet network.

When safeguarding your business against cyberattacks and data breaches, CISOs and compliance officers can choose from all sorts of information security controls — everything from firewalls to malware detection applications, and much more. Thankfully you don’t have to start from scratch when implementing cybersecurity controls. Many standards and frameworks exist that can help you secure your IT systems properly.

You don’t have to spend a long time in the cybersecurity and information technology world before someone brings up NIST compliance. Since the agency’s inception in 1901 — yes, it’s that old — the National Institute of Standards and Technology has been trusted as the guardian of all proper measurements and standards, including cybersecurity standards meant to increase data security. NIST, which these days is part of the U.S.

The Risk Management Framework (RMF) is most commonly associated with the NIST SP 800-37 guide for “Applying the Risk Management Framework to Federal Information Systems: A Security Life Cycle Approach,” which has been available for FISMA compliance since 2004. It was updated in December 2018 to revision 2. This was the result of a Joint Task Force Transformation Initiative Interagency Working Group; it’s something that every agency of the U.S.