COVID-19 made moving agency employees and services off-premises essential. This move, however, has also sparked one of the biggest waves of cybercrime the internet has ever seen. Ransomware attacks have been particularly effective against government agencies and critical infrastructure.

CVE-2021-44228 (Log4Shell or LogJam) is a recently discovered zero-day vulnerability in the ubiquitous Apache Log4j Java-based logging library. It was reported by the Alibaba Cloud Security team as an unauthenticated RCE vulnerability in Log4j 2.0-beta9 up to 2.14.1 and could allow a complete system takeover on vulnerable systems. The bug has received the maximum CVSS score of 10, reflecting its importance and ease of exploitation.

Cybersecurity is such a broad subject that many times, an organization can become stifled when trying to develop a full cybersecurity program. Some organizations that have already put a cybersecurity program in place can also unpleasantly discover gaps in their efforts, making the entire venture seem moot. One way to effectively get started, as well as to prevent gaps, is to build a good foundation upon which a cybersecurity program can grow and mature.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has recently released new CMMC 2.0 audit and assessment scoping guides. The awaited CMMC 2.0 Level 1 and Level 2 scoping guides provide insight into how a certified CMMC third-party assessor organization (C3PAO) may scope the CMMC audit and how businesses can potentially scope their own environments. These scoping guides are critical for the CMMC audit and boundary diagrams developed as part of your business’s System Security Plan (SSP).

Aaron McCray, Ignyte’s Chief Operating Officer, is giving a brief overview of the changes to CMMC 2.0, and more specifically its Practice levels vs Maturity levels in the video below. Aaron is a commercial risk management leader by trade and a Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves.

Today we are going to discuss controls in the context of any variation of the NIST 800-53 and NIST 800-171 requirements. NIST SP 800-53 provides us with a fundamental understanding of how government and many commercial organizations structure control language.

Risk is inescapable. However careful your company might be, it cannot experience growth without accepting a certain amount of risk. The key to a successful risk management program is to prepare for risk as thoroughly and efficiently as possible. This includes regular risk assessments to understand which risks should be prioritized and how best to prevent any potential losses.

With every passing day, businesses become more entwined in an ecosystem of partners, vendors, and suppliers in global markets. A local natural disaster, for example, can have far-reaching consequences throughout a global supply chain; so controlling, recognizing, and mitigating risks is critical to a company’s business continuity and financial stability.

E-commerce is a huge commercial realm, with some 2.14 billion digital buyers worldwide by the end of 2021. At the heart of e-commerce is the ability to keep payment card data secure during online transactions, and at the heart of payment card security is PCI compliance. Technically PCI compliance is not required by law, but it has been considered mandatory in court rulings, and credit card companies require it for merchants to process online transactions.

Last Thursday, a researcher from the Alibaba Cloud Security Team dropped a zero-day remote code execution exploit on Twitter, targeting the extremely popular log4j logging framework for Java (specifically, the 2.x branch called Log4j2). The vulnerability was originally discovered and reported to Apache by the Alibaba cloud security team on November 24th. MITRE assigned CVE-2021-44228 to this vulnerability, which has since been dubbed Log4Shell by security researchers.