For the next installment in our series of interviews asking leading security and compliance specialists about their achievements in their field, we’ve welcomed Rhia Dancel, Lead Auditor and CMMC Registered Practitioner with the NSF. Rhia Dancel is an ISO/IEC 27001 and 9001 Lead Auditor for NSF-ISR as well as a CMMC Registered Practitioner and has previously held several auditing and technical positions in information security and pharma quality sectors.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) controls are a relatively short list of high-priority, highly effective defensive actions that provide a “must-do, do-first” starting point for every enterprise seeking to improve its cyber defense. Initially developed by the SANS Institute and known as the SANS Critical Controls, these best practices are indispensable to organizations both large and small. By adopting these sets of controls, organizations can prevent the majority of cyberattacks.

Findings from our recent report, Fighting phishing: the IT leader's view, reveal that 98% of the companies surveyed conducted some form of cybersecurity training over the past 12 months. Yet, despite these efforts, employees keep falling for phishing attacks. Our research shows that 84% of the organizations we surveyed last year were phishing victims – a 15% increase from our 2021 report, The real and rising risk of phishing.

Recently, ThreatQuotient hosted an interactive discussion regarding security orchestration and cyber security automation adoption – what it is, what it’s meant to do, and why it can present a challenge for security teams to set up and maintain. What we heard from attendees was that the most common issues preventing them from integrating some form of security automation into their internal processes are the necessary time and resources.

The OWASP API Security Top 10 list highlights the most critical API security risks to web applications. Shifting security left means that API security can’t be left only to security teams. Developers need to be on top of potential vulnerabilities and remediate them as they develop. Building security into DevOps means we need to be thinking about how to deliver secure, high-quality code at velocity. Having some basic API security info under your belt will help.

You might think that your metrics are harmless from a security point of view. Well, that’s not true, and in this talk at KubeCon Valencia 2022, we share the risk of exposed Prometheus server and how attackers use this information to successfully access a Kubernetes cluster. The slides are available here, and we also collected some mentions in social media and blogs and the feedback was very positive: It was our first time as speakers at KubeCon and expectations were really high.

Digital-first businesses are striving for service assurance, which has become the lifeblood for their businesses processes. But they are increasingly getting complex across legacy and cloud-native applications, multi-cloud distributed services, with the rise of edge and when leveraged with Kubernetes and microservices architectures. Service assurance needs full-stack observability; however, customers need an approach to tame the data deluge while enabling actionable insights.

Typically, when a web app needs something from an external server, the client sends a request to that server, the server responds, and the connection is subsequently closed. Consider a web app that shows stock prices. The client must repeatedly request updated prices from the server to provide the latest prices.

Today, WatchGuard announced that Vector Capital, a leading private equity firm specializing in transformational investments in established technology businesses, closed the deal to acquire interests previously owned by other co-investors, and become the company’s majority shareholder.

There have been many articles about the cost of a security breach. With the emergence of privacy regulations that assign penalties based on a business’ profit, or those that calculate a value for each compromised record, it is possible to calculate the cost of a breach based on those metrics. However, it would seem that these hard numbers are not detailed enough to placate many security professionals.