In a world full of security breaches and litigation, every organization needs a solid strategy to identify and reduce risks relating to the use of third parties, e.g., vendors, suppliers, partners, contractors, or other service providers.

Everyone is at risk of a data breach or cyber attack, no matter how small or large a company is. Hackers and cybercriminals come up with new ways every day to steal sensitive information or personal data that they can potentially sell or ransom for money. According to a report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a record number of 1862 data breaches occurred in 2021 in the US.

The first few months of 2022 have brought with them plenty of breaches and vulnerabilities for threat experts to sink their teeth into; in March alone, Microsoft has patched 71 CVEs, two of which, CVE-2022-22006 and CVE-2022-24501, were deemed critical–but more on those later. Meanwhile, cloud-based software company Okta has suffered a cyber-attack, believed to be at the hands of threat actor “Lapsus$”, which has put thousands of its 15,000 customers on high alert.

On April 28 and April 30, respectively, WhiteSource Diffend identified, blocked, and reported two packages we deemed were malicious versions of original Amazon Web Services (AWS) packages. Whitesource security experts have reached out to contacts at Amazon to notify them of our findings. This discovery may point to a new takeover method that targets packages of well-known origins, in this case, AWS.

In the past, I’ve written about digital privacy and how much data we leak through our day to day interactions. I think this is an important topic to consider and really focus on and it is an element of cybersecurity at both the enterprise and personal level that isn’t discussed enough.

Application innovation, design, development, quality assurance, and security testing have changed dramatically over the past decade. Engineering teams are leveraging agile development processes, modern cloud platforms, reusable microservices, and extensible APIs, enabling them to shift to more frequent deployments more easily.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss state-of-the-art technologies to support security operations with industry analysts. I asked questions and confirmed that the current view of SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) and SIEM (security information and event management) goes well beyond the security operation center (SOC).

The attack surface is inevitably going to grow. That’s why we believe it’s crucial for customers to not only know what assets they are exposing online but knowing to what extent assets are exposed. Users can now toggle the view of their attack surface by active and inactive assets. When toggled on, users will see all active assets present on their attack surface in the last 14 calendar days making it easier to discern what may no longer be on the attack surface.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. I’ve heard a few friends over the years mention things discussed at home suddenly appearing in ads when on the Internet. Yes, some of that might be due to doing web searches, but what if…

Our other blogs and articles are primarily security-focused – this is non-technical yet relevant, one of the issues that I felt and intended to explore personally. It’s pretty hard to admit when you are in privilege, and it’s even harder to change the status quo when you are comfortable. This is a write-up on how I see diversity and inclusion currently in the cybersecurity industry, mainly a beginner’s understanding of the subject.