A Third-Party risk assessment is a critical component of a Third-Party Risk Management program. Without understanding how to properly execute these assessments, the efficiency of your TPRM program will remain limited. This post provides a detailed six-step guide for performing third-party risk assessments in cybersecurity.

Protecting credentials has become increasingly critical in recent years, with everyday employees using more passwords, devices, and systems than ever before. Remote work has significantly increased the risk of identity attacks. 55% of remote workers say they receive more phishing emails than they used to while working in the office and attempted password attacks are up tenfold. In 2023, Microsoft detected 156,000 business email compromise (BEC) attacks every day over twelve months.

Group Policies are part of every Active Directory. Group Policy (GP) is designed to be able to change every system's configurations, from the least to the most privileged layer. Since it is so fundamental in the network management process, it is also very powerful for attackers to use as an attack vector. Therefore, GPO hardening is necessary to ensure that these policies are secure and not easily exploited by attackers, protecting the integrity and security of the entire network.

As modern digital landscapes house the most dynamic and growing networks, effective IP address management is crucial for maintaining a well-functioning network. However, many network administrators still rely on spreadsheets to track and manage their growing IP address footprint. This approach is not only time-consuming but also prone to misconfigurations, errors, and inefficiencies. This is where IP address management (IPAM) becomes crucial, offering a more robust and reliable solution.

MITRE ATT&CK is an invaluable resource for IT security teams, who can leverage the framework to enhance their cyber threat intelligence, improve threat detection capabilities, plan penetration testing scenarios, and assess cyber threat defenses for gaps in coverage.

Some best practices for securely onboarding employees include conducting comprehensive background checks, providing security training for new hires, ensuring employees have least privilege access, equipping employees with a password manager and continuously monitoring employee activity for unusual behavior. The more secure an onboarding process is, the easier and more secure it’ll be to offboard employees.

For those feeling code-conscious about shady dependencies lurking in their apps, Software Composition Analysis is the software security wellness check you need!

Organizations of all sizes need to be proactive in identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in their networks. To help organizations better understand the value and process of a vulnerability scan, Trustwave’s Philip Pieterse, Managing Consultant for the Americas division of SpiderLabs and Dhervesh Singh, senior Security Consultant with SpiderLabs conducted a webinar exploring key offensive security testing methodologies: vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and purple teaming.

Fluctuations in consecutive quarterly reports demonstrates that organizations should be worried that their cyber defenses may not be strong enough to stop phishing attacks. I wrote an article back in April of last year about how 1 in 8 emails make it to a user’s Inbox. That number has remained relatively consistent — so much that even the Threat Insights Report for Q1 2024 from HP Wolf Security shows that stat is still accurate. But then there’s the Threat Insights Report for Q4 2023.

UAT4356 is a state-sponsored threat actor that targets perimeter network devices in government networks globally with a clear focus on espionage. Their first activity can be traced back to November 2023, although researchers found evidence that the group was testing its capabilities as early as July 2023. So far, the initial attack vector used by the group has not been able to be determined.