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.

‍With more than a decade long history of businesses adopting cloud computing, less than one-third of the enterprises have a documented cloud strategy as per Gartner's estimation. Despite the increased migration to cloud security, we discussed the top cloud security risks that security experts are afraid of today.

It’s estimated that over 50% of employees use their personal devices for some work activities. As more people use their personal smartphones or laptops to do their jobs, the security risks at an organization increase dramatically. BYOD — whether instituted as a formal policy or as an adaptation to the pandemic — opens a company’s systems and platforms up to hacking, data loss, and insider threat.

At Elastic Security, we approach the challenge of threat detection with various methods. Traditionally, we have focused on machine learning models and behaviors. These two methods are powerful because they can detect never-before-seen malware. Historically, we’ve felt that signatures are too easily evaded, but we also recognize that ease of evasion is only one of many factors to consider.

No matter where you are in your AppSec program, IAST tools can grow and scale with your organization’s needs. DevOps principles and practices are continuing to be adopted by a wide variety of companies, and here at Synopsys we’re working with our customers to help them in this journey. When it comes to DevSecOps, we have a comprehensive portfolio of products and services to help build security into every DevOps environment.