AWS Fargate is a technology that you can use with Amazon ECS to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing. In short, users offload the virtual machines management to AWS while focusing on task management.

Those who are familiar with ionCube and ionCube24 will know we are big on security with our focus being on robust PHP code protection tools and website malware protection. But what about the daily cyber security risks which affect all of us? Cyber crime is a huge deal in the age of technology and not everyone will be as aware of tools we can use to protect ourselves or the tips we can consider every day to keep ourselves safe.

In the summer of 2020, there was a big, short-lived spike in malicious Office documents. The Emotet crew had been quiet in the spring and began leveraging their botnet to send extremely convincing phishing emails to their victims, often with a link to download an invoice or other document from a popular cloud service. Those documents contained malicious code that installed backdoors, ransomware, bankers, and other malware on unsuspecting victims’ computers.

A typical organization’s environment consists of a myriad of applications and services, each with its own unique set of ongoing vulnerabilities and flaws that could ultimately lead to a data breach. This can make IT security and operations’ job difficult, as different departments and groups within a company may utilize specific software offerings to accomplish their job functions.

Cybercriminals are surprisingly lazy. Hackers are continuously cultivating their methods to achieve maximum impact with minimal effort. The adoption of a Ransomware-as-a-Service model is one example of such an achievement. But perhaps the apical point of cyberattack efficiency was achieved with the invention of the supply chain attack. A supply chain attack is a type of cyberattack where an organization is breached though vulnerabilities in its supply chain.

On January 6, 2021. Hafnium, a Chinese state-sponsored group known for notoriously targeting the United States, started exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities on Microsoft Exchange Servers. The criminals launched a deluge of cyberattacks for almost 2 months without detection. On March 2, 2021, Microsoft finally became aware of the exploits and issued necessary security patches. By that point, it was too late.

Did you hear about the change window that went exactly as planned? No? That’s because the odds of winning the PowerBall without buying a ticket are better than the odds of executing a change window on a global network without a glitch. What about the story of the tier one network engineer that diagnosed and resolved an ACL in seconds? That one also seems as mythical as staying friends with your ex—but it’s not.

Today, more than ever before, development organizations are focusing their efforts on reducing the amount of time it takes to develop and deliver software applications. While this increase in velocity provides significant benefits for the end users and the business, it does complicate the process for testing and verifying the function and security of a release.

Another year, another new set of cybersecurity threats to overcome, outwit and mitigate against. At the beginning of 2021, the cybersecurity world was informed by CISA (the USA Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) of a spate of attacks targeting cloud environment configurations, supposedly occurring as a result of the increase in remote working.

The objective of an organization when implementing cybersecurity controls is to eliminate risk, but this oftentimes involves settling for managing risk at an acceptable level. Each organization defines what that acceptable level is depending on several factors including the environment, the criticality of function, the asset type, etc. There are many methods and techniques that an organization can then use to manage this risk. One of the most commonly used methods is patching.