If you want to become a digital forensic expert, be aware that when entering the field, you will be presented with an abundance of information that you will not know. It is a wonderfully challenging career path. Some believe that having the title of a cybersecurity professional (e.g. digital forensics expert, cybersecurity analyst, incident response commander, etc.) means that this is an area where the field of knowledge is intimidating because it’s so expansive.

One thing I have noticed is that each industry comes up with their own terms and acronyms. Unfortunately, these inventions often vary depending on the person you speak to due to a lack of a governing body that decides on an exact definition. At times, acronyms can even overlap, causing further confusion. Therefore, when it comes to definitions, I always look to ask a variety of persons from across industries on how they would define certain terms.

Mainstream media coverage of hacking often perpetuates the stereotype of hoodie-wearing hackers up to no good. For this reason, some people remain sceptical about hacking, even if it is in relation to ethical hacking undertaken by cyber security professionals.

In advance of the RSA Conference 2020, we wanted to get a pulse of attendees’ perceptions on a few topics, specifically challenges facing modern SOCs (security operations centers) and the value they are getting from technologies such as analytics, automation, and their SIEM tools. To get this, we fielded a series of questions to the Twitter-verse and received nearly 17,000 votes! After going through the results, we found a few interesting things…

Workforce management, often shortened to simply WFM, is about managing staff schedules and services within companies. Workforce management software incorporates most software that focuses on managing and simplifying the process of scheduling staff work hours as well as managing their work and productivity. Managing large amounts of staff members turns into a massive task for human resources teams if they have to do everything manually.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Extortion methods have been pretty consistent the past couple of years, but a new one popped up this week which seems to be focused on the online small business owner. I wonder how this one will pan out.

As new technologies emerge, end-to-end application stacks continue to grow, and connected devices become more omnipresent in everyday lives, our society will only become more intrinsically connected across multiple touchpoints. It’s even estimated that in the US alone, there will be roughly 200 billion IoT devices by the end of 2020.

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of processes and technologies that ensure sensitive data is not lost, misused or exposed to unauthorized users by end-users or misconfiguration. Most data loss prevention solutions rely on data classification. This means that sensitive data is grouped into different buckets, e.g. regulated, confidential, financial data, intellectual property, and business-critical data.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability typically found in web applications. XSS enables attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users and may be used to bypass access control, such as the same-origin policy. The impact of XSS can range from a small nuisance to significant cybersecurity risk, depending on the sensitivity of data handled by the vulnerable website, and the nature of any mitigations implemented.

The tongue-in-cheek named malware detection tool, Yet Another Recursive Acronym (YARA) is described as “the pattern-matching Swiss Army knife for malware researchers (and everyone else)”. The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Enterprise platform is one of the first SIEM solutions to incorporate it as a built-in feature. This gives blue teamers an additional layer of detection built into the SIEM.