You’ve seen the high-level stats on the cybersecurity skills gap, but I’ll remind you of some of the main ones from the (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study: As the gap persists, Tripwire continues to keep a pulse on how the skills gap issue is actually being felt by the security experts who are responsible for defending their organizations from cyber attacks every day.

What is cyber resilience? If you search the definition within the Oxford Dictionary, resilience alone is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” If you narrow the definition down to cyber resilience, it shifts to maintaining vs recovery. As noted on Wikipedia, it becomes “the ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation.”

Cybersecurity threats are evolving and the IT industry is on high alert. Modern cyber threats are more sophisticated and fast such as malware, phishing, cryptojacking, and IoT threats. The major cyber-attacks in 2019 witnessed that cybersecurity defenses were inefficient to prevent cyber threats altogether. The situation will even prevail in 2020. However, mitigation strategies can help to minimize the chances of data breaches.

Companies are facing increased and complex cybersecurity challenges in today’s interconnected digital economy. The cyber threats have become more sophisticated and may harm a company via innovative new forms of malware, through the compromise of global supply chains or by criminal and hostile state actors. The hard truth is that it is difficult to counter the ever-expanding cyber-criminal economy.

A few years ago, I myself was vished, or ‘phished,’ over the phone. The caller was someone, likely offshore in a call center, who had done a little bit of research online to find my name, my phone number, my wireless phone carrier and a few other details that they used to build rapport with me on the phone. Spoofing the customer service phone number of my wireless service provider, they called me and claimed that a credit was being added to my bill.

We often hear from our customers that to adopt a container and Kubernetes security tool in any mid sized or large organization, separation of duties and least privilege access via RBAC is a must. Admin roles cannot be granted unnecessarily to all teams. If users or groups are routinely granted these elevated privileges, account compromises or mistakes can result in security and compliance violations.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24 I do love it when an artist decides to do some random thing which just shows up the tech nightmares we try to ignore. For example, last year we had the laptop with all the viruses on. Remember that? Well, here is a fun one which I’m sure will be replicated just to annoy people.

Over the past couple of years, cyber-attacks have been increasing both in frequency and sophistication. 2019 also witnessed a surge in cyber-attacks and many companies were suffering a huge financial and reputational loss. According to CISCO, DNS hijacking and targeted malware were the serious cyber threats of 2019, along with various others. Cyber pests were using various tools to capture data and evade detection, from Remote Access Trojans (RATs) to hide threats in encrypted traffic.

The threats from data theft and fraud will continue to be a significant concern for all corporate entities in 2020. eCommerce sales, for example, are expected to reach almost one trillion dollars in the next three years, creating a growing opportunity for attackers to capitalize on fraud. A Juniper Research Report regarding online payment fraud trends estimated that digital card, not present fraud (CNP), one of several fraud categories, will reach $130 billion by 2023.

In so many ways, speed is a security analyst’s best friend. From threat detection to containment to response – the faster you are, the more secure your business will be. It’s exactly why metrics like dwell time, MTTD (mean time to detect) and MTTR (mean time to respond) exist. It’s a barometer for the strength of your organization’s security, and a gauge of success for any good security team.