It’s a busy season for card issuers, card networks and payment service providers. Transaction and purchase volumes are rising across mobile and online channels — with Black Friday and Cyber Monday e-commerce sales up 15% from last year. Despite this holiday season’s resilient e-commerce sales, organizations must continue to find ways to maximize transactions and card profitability in the face of reduced in-store purchase volumes, interest margins, fees and interchange revenues.

On December 8, 2020, cybersecurity company FireEye announced in a blog post that it had been attacked by what CEO Kevin Mandia described as a “highly sophisticated threat actor” that “targeted and accessed certain Red Team assessment tools that we use to test our customers’ security. These tools mimic the behavior of many cyber threat actors and enable FireEye to provide essential diagnostic security services to our customers.”

The burden of software security often falls solely on security teams, but to be successful, organizations need to make security a team effort. Remember group projects in school? Teachers love them because they have less grading to do; in a class of 25 students, they might only need to look at 5 projects. For team members, team projects can be difficult, usually when individual motivation levels don’t match up.

The FireEye breach on Dec 8, 2020, was executed by a “nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.” These hackers got a hold of FireEye’s own toolkit, which they can use to mount new attacks globally. What does this mean for you? Mandiant is a leading Red Team/Penetration Testing company with a highly sophisticated toolkit, called the "Red Team tools." These are digital tools that replicate some of the best hacking tools in the world.

One of the lasting changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic is that it forced organizations to rethink the concept of a workspace. As remote work became inevitable, IT teams had to enable the secure transition to remote work almost overnight. Opening up offices, on the contrary, will likely be executed in planned phases. A United States Department of State advisory recommends that workforces return to an office in three phases, with the employees most at risk coming in at a later stage.

Your business is growing at a steady rate, and you have big plans for the future. Then, your organization gets hit by a cyberattack, causing a massive data breach. Suddenly, your company’s focus is shifted to sending out letters to angry customers informing them of the incident - which is required by law in most states - and devising strategies to deal with the backlash.

With recent legal developments taking into account data privacy, it shows the importance of protection of individuals personal information for businesses. The UK left the EU on 31st January 2020. The current transition period ends on 31st December 2020, DPA 2018 takes centre stage with all matters of data privacy. Let’s dive into the beef first and then related GDPR, DPA information including the basics and gdpr vs dpa.

This week the US government as well as many enterprises were hit by a cyber attack, dubbed Solorigate, via the SUNBURST backdoor. Fireeye (also a victim of the attack) has done a great analysis of how the attack works, and we recommend reading it. But we’ll focus on a couple of takeaways instead of the precise details of how it worked. What we can learn from it in order to improve our cybersecurity posture.

Whether you’re a developer or an IT professional (or a bit of both!), enforcing and managing authorization policies for the new containerized world is a whole different ball game than it was before. There’s the complex nature of modern applications — composed of multiple microservices, housed in containers — and then there’s the dynamic nature of platforms like Kubernetes, running those applications.

On Dec 8, 2020, the cybersecurity company FireEye reported that there had been a cyber attack on their systems. As part of this attack, their inventory of Red Team tools was stolen. These tools could potentially be used by a threat actor against unsuspecting victims. On Dec 13, 2020, after further investigation of this attack, FireEye reported that the initial vector came through SolarWinds, an upstream vendor, as a malicious trojanized update of SolarWinds’ Orion IT platform.