SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems have a reputation for being expensive. And that’s generally correct – they can cost hundreds of thousands per year or have huge upfront costs. But why is that? There are several main reasons: All of this is changing. According to Gartner, SIEMs are going to the mid-market and these things don’t hold true there.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Once again the impact of this COVID pandemic claims another. Cast your minds back to earlier in the yearn (or was it last year now – feels like it) with the sudden burst in use of Zoom and House Party causing all sorts of issues.

Netskope Threat Labs is warning users to be careful of spam messages being shared via Google Docs. The spam messages come in the form of a comment on a document or presentations and are sent by [email protected]. Both the comment and the document link the user to a spam or scam website. Because the messages are sent by Google Docs, it is likely that your spam filters do not detect and block these messages. In fact, docs.google.com may be explicitly allowed by your spam filters.

Fintech companies – those that offer technology to support the banking and personal finance industry – are increasingly at risk of cyberattack. After healthcare, fintech is the second most frequently attacked industry, according to Alissa Abdullah, senior vice president of cybersecurity technology at Mastercard. Fintech News found that 27% of attacks target banks or healthcare.

Halloween is tomorrow, and do you know what that means? For starters, it means you can dance under the rare blue moon. A full moon visible for all time zones on Earth hasn’t happened since 1944, and won’t happen again until 2039. It also means you can don a costume and be anything you like. Kind of like a fraudster, that assumes a new persona every time there is a payment fraud attack.

Bad bots are disrupting your website performance, reducing performance and speed. Bot activity, both good and bad, affects all industries including retail, online gambling and gaming and streaming. In our blog we discuss the detrimental impact of bots to your website performance and subsequently, the customer experience, with advice for detecting and mitigating bad bot activity.

APIs served as part of web and mobile applications are vital to enabling customers to interact with your business. However, it’s important to understand the impact on your business when these APIs are used in new, non-standard and potentially unintended ways. While APIs are usually written and intended for use with certain frontends (i.e. web application or mobile app), they are served publicly on the internet and are open to inspection by any interested party.

While all cybersecurity professionals agree that log management is integral for robust proactive and reactive security, managing the enormous amount of data logs can be a challenge. While you might be tempted to collect all logs generated from your systems, software, network devices, and users, this “fear of missing out” on an important notification ultimately leads to so much noise that your security analysts and threat hunters cannot find the most important information.

From credential theft to network vulnerability exploitation and ransomware incidents on highly secure organizations, the year 2020 has been surprisingly rough on IT security. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the world are reporting more cyberattacks than ever before, and although the techniques used or the method of attack may be new, the vectors of attack over the years remain unchanged.

It’s no secret: the number of security vulnerabilities organizations must contend with is overwhelming. According to a 2019 Risk Based Security report, there were 22,316 newly-discovered vulnerabilities last year. One Patch Tuesday disclosed a record number of 327 vulnerabilities in a single day. Just keeping up is becoming a monumental task. But knowing where and how your organization may be vulnerable is critical to maintaining a healthy security posture.