Ransomware is having a bit of a moment. Check Point revealed that ransomware attacks increased 102% globally in H1 2021 compared to the start of the previous year, with the number of corporate ransomware victims having doubled over that same period. Average ransom payments also grew 171% from $115,123 in 2019 to $312,493 a year later. But those weren’t the amounts originally demanded by attackers. Indeed, ransomware actors wanted an average of $847,344 from their victims in 2020.

Since its inception, Elastic Security has had a clear mission: to protect the world's data and systems from attack. We started with SIEM, built on top of the Elastic Stack, applying its fast and scalable search capabilities to detect security vulnerabilities across all threat vectors. Next, we joined forces with Endgame to integrate endpoint security into Elastic Security, and allow customers to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks from a single, unified platform.

According to Research and Markets, the worldwide digital forensics market will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 13% through 2026. The rise of cybercrime is most certainly driving its growth — especially since digital forensics plays a critical role in mitigating cyberthreats in the modern security operations center (SOC).

Learn how Synopsys AppSec tools and services can help your organization deliver a holistic security approach to address rising cyber threats. Not only has the number of cyber attacks increased dramatically in 2020, but the ingenuity and scale of the attacks has also jumped way off the charts. The SolarWinds attack was “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen” with the number of software engineers working on these attacks estimated to be over 1,000.

In enterprise networks, endpoint devices refer to end-user devices such as laptops, servers, desktops, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and mobile devices. Such devices enable users to access the corporate network, and are therefore indispensable for day-to-day operations. Endpoints also, however, expand a company’s attack surface, since each one can be exploited by malicious threat actors to launch cyberattacks via ransomware, phishing emails, social engineering, and so forth.

Traditional and typical cyber security techniques usually fail to meet the security requirements of today’s corporate industries and businesses. As the digital world has revolutionized, so are cyber security threats and risks. It has become more difficult to rely on a single security solution or a single line of defence.

Privilege escalation is the exploitation of a programming error, vulnerability, design flaw, configuration oversight or access control in an operating system or application to gain unauthorized access to resources that are usually restricted from the application or user. This results in the application or user having more privileges than intended by the developer or system administrator, allowing attackers to gain access to sensitive data, install malware and launch other cyber attacks.

Threat modeling is increasing in importance as a way to plan security in advance. Instead of merely reacting to threats and incidents, an organization can identify and evaluate its security posture, relevant threats, and gaps in defenses that may allow attacks to succeed. Threat modeling has a two-way relationship with incident response.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. In this edition, we explore one of the evolving privacy-enhancing techniques called differential privacy and how it’s being leveraged by organizations to safeguard sensitive data from being exposed. Cutting-edge technologies based on artificial intelligence and machine learning have been gaining traction in recent years.

A 2019 report by Ofcom shows that 50% of ten-year olds own mobile phones. While viewing of video-on-demand (with YouTube as firm favourite), has doubled in the last five years among children. Platforms like TikTok are rapidly growing in popularity. Sadly, more and more children are being exposed to hateful, violent and disturbing contents on these platforms.