At this year’s AWS re:Invent, Mic McCully, Field CTO at Snyk, spoke with Jacob Salassi, Director of Product Security at Snowflake. They discussed what it looked like for Snowflake to overcome various security challenges with the right combination of processes, company culture shifts, and tool partners (including Snyk!). Read on to learn about the practices Jacob and his team established to create a successful application security program.

Financial services institutions (FSIs) have become an increasingly common target for malicious actors. According to Boston Consulting Group, FSIs are 300 times more likely to face cyber attacks than other sectors, and the 2022 VansonBourne report noted that 94% of the FSIs it surveyed experienced a cyber attack in the last 12 months.

IT environments have become increasingly complex in recent years. This can be attributed to factors such as distributed work environments applying hybrid work models, the increase in the number of devices, and the growing number of systems to be managed. This complexity makes it increasingly difficult to provide a good service to your customers effectively.

Customers of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX are already receiving phishing emails following a breach of personal data held by several crypto companies, CoinDesk reports. The customer data was leaked after a T-Mobile employee fell for a SIM swapping attack and granted a threat actor access to an account belonging to an employee of financial advisory firm Kroll.

A recent survey by Lookout, Inc. warns for a specific attack vector as Labor Day approaches. The study shows that 85% of enterprise employees capable of remote work plan to do so on Friday, September 1, primarily using mobile devices. This creates an ideal environment for hackers to launch targeted phishing attacks. The risk is exacerbated by the fact that 80% of respondents admit to being more relaxed and distracted when working remotely on Fridays during the summer.

Technology companies are often seen as revolving doors of constantly shifting personnel. Whether they are seeking a better work environment or chasing a higher paycheck, these staff changes can hurt an organization’s progress. Worse yet, the customers are often negatively impacted by these changes in the continuity of established relationships.

‍Security is at the heart of what we do at Vanta—helping our customers improve their security and compliance posture starts with our own. Our team’s mission is to ensure that Vanta is a trusted and trustworthy steward of customer data. ‍ At Vanta, we believe that nurturing and scaling our security culture is one of the most powerful ways to achieve our mission. We define security culture as the norms, behaviors, and attitudes around security.

The cloud has become the new battleground for adversary activity: CrowdStrike observed a 95% increase in cloud exploitation from 2021 to 2022 and a 288% jump in cases involving threat actors directly targeting the cloud. Defending your cloud environment requires understanding how threat actors operate: how they’re breaking in and moving laterally, which resources they target and how they evade detection.

On Tuesday, August 29, 2023, VMware disclosed a critical authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2023-34039) in VMware Aria Operations for Networks–formerly known as vRealize Network Insight–that could result in a threat actor gaining access to the Aria Operations for Networks CLI by bypassing SSH authentication. The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed to VMware and has not been actively exploited in campaigns.

Arctic Wolf has been tracking multiple intrusions where Cisco VPN account credentials were harnessed by Akira ransomware for initial access. In a recent Cisco PSIRT advisory, Cisco stated they were aware of reports that Akira ransomware threat actors have been targeting Cisco VPNs that are not configured for multi-factor authentication to infiltrate organizations. Our case data supports the observation that affected accounts did not have MFA enabled.