In January 2023, the European Commission (EC) released an updated version of the European Union (EU) Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) to strengthen cybersecurity risk management across Europe’s essential services. NIS2 updates the original NIS directive and focuses more on regulations for cloud infrastructure, internet exchanges, domain service providers, and digital service providers.

One of the best things you can teach yourself, your family, and your organization is how to recognize the common signs of phishing and how to mitigate and appropriately report it. Phishing messages can have many different looks, traits and narratives. What worked yesterday for the attackers eventually becomes blocked, recognized, and less profitable, and they move on to different tactics.

On April 24, 2024, Cisco Talos and several government security agencies published details on a sophisticated threat campaign focused on espionage and gaining unauthorized access to sensitive information from targeted government entities and organizations in critical infrastructure. As part of that publication, Cisco disclosed CVE-2024-20353 and CVE-2024-20359, affecting Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) devices, which were actively exploited in the documented campaign.

This is Part 9 in my ongoing project to cover 30 cybersecurity topics in 30 weekly blog posts. The full series can be found here. In the movie The Matrix, The Key Maker controlled access to many locations and resources with the goal of preventing malicious code from destroying sensitive information. In a rare life-imitates-art situation, organizations today face the same challenge as they work to protect operational processes and corporate information.

The Critical Entities Resilience (CER) Directive is a new initiative in the EU that aims to ensure that critical entities providing essential services are effectively managing their network and information security. The CER Directive is part of the EU’s latest effort to build stronger cyber resilience across Europe, alongside NIS2 and the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

As we've covered before, SIEMs are an expensive tool. The average enterprise-level SIEM deployment costs over £15 million a year, and operating a small, 100 to 1000-seat SIEM will still run up bills of over £10k monthly. SIEMs create spiralling costs that eat security budgets. Without a skilled team operating them, they can also make organisations less secure despite receiving more information about their digital estates. But where do these SIEM costs come from?

Staff time, log processing, and legacy issues can turn free, open-source or low-cost SIEMs into one of your organisation's most expensive investments. You're not alone if you're baulking at the idea of paying upwards of tens of thousands of pounds for a new or renewed SIEM licence. Many security decision-makers feel the same way. One survey showed that almost half (40%) of existing SIEM users feel like they are overpaying for their SIEM.

Are most network detection and response tools missing something? We think so. Network detection and response (NDR) is an incredible technology. With it, you can analyse network packets for malicious behaviour, spot insider threats, and even find connected devices you don’t own. However, if you want to implement NDR in your environment, you typically need to install proprietary hardware or run your NDR on a dedicated server.

In today’s interconnected world, the Internet of Things (IoT) plays a crucial role in various sectors, from healthcare and transportation to energy and critical infrastructure. However, with the increasing reliance on IoT devices comes the heightened risk of cybersecurity threats. To address these challenges and enhance cybersecurity measures across the European Union (EU), the NIS 2 Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) was introduced.