It’s been a whirlwind year for Styra — from going fully remote as a company to raising $40 million in Series B Funding to more than doubling our workforce. We have a lot to be thankful for as a company, and before we say “goodbye” to 2021 and “hello'' to 2022, I wanted to take a moment to recap some of my favorite moments and initiatives of this past year.

Business security is often associated with larger companies where employees spend most of their time in front of computers. This stereotype can lead small business owners – especially ones outside the tech industry – to think they’ll never be targeted by hackers and don’t need to invest in security. It’s a mistake that cybercriminals are exploiting.

Malware targeting Linux-based operating systems, commonly deployed in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, have increased by 35% in 2021 compared to 2020, according to current CrowdStrike threat telemetry, with the top three malware families accounting for 22% of all Linux-based IoT malware in 2021.

Organizations across industries are increasingly concerned about their cybersecurity posture and overall ransomware preparedness – and rightfully so – with the 64% increase in attacks from 2019 to 2020 (304 million attacks worldwide in 2020). We have also seen a 2x increase in demand for ransomware preparedness assessments and exercises.

Since the return of the Qakbot Trojan in early September 2021, especially through SquirrelWaffle malicious spam campaigns, we’ve received a few Qakbot samples to analyze from our Trustwave DFIR and Global Threats Operations teams.

Managing the security of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment requires constant vigilance. Your strategy should include identifying potential threats to your environment and proactively monitoring for vulnerabilities and system weaknesses that malicious actors might exploit. In a complex environment—such as your AWS account with a multitude of services, coupled with various architectures and applications—the ideal solution should be both comprehensive and straightforward.

Security Service Edge (SSE) describes the evolving security stack crucial to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) journey, with core platform requirements that include CASB, SWG, and ZTNA capabilities. SASE is an architecture—really, a long-term journey that will change how we all think about security and networking. But SSE, as part of SASE, is a set of cloud-delivered security services you can acquire and make the most of today.

SSH bastion hosts are an indispensable security enforcement stack for secure infrastructure access. Every security compliance standard that deals with remote infrastructure access (e.g., FedRAMP AC-17 - Remote Access, HIPAA §164.312(a)(1) - Access control, SOC2 CC6.1 - Manage Points of Access) mandates preventing direct network access to the servers and APIs.

Both proxy servers and VPNs hide your IP address, allowing you to access websites anonymously, but only VPNs direct all network traffic through an encrypted tunnel. Another key difference is that VPNs address all network data while proxy servers only operate on an application level. The differences between the two solutions can be summarized as follows: Before diving into their technical differences, its important to first solidify your understanding of proxy servers and VPNs.

Compliance management is the process of ensuring all workflow, internal policies and IT initiatives align with specific industry cybersecurity regulations. This effort is ongoing since the digital attack surface is always expanding.