It’s been another fantastic year on The State of Security blog. With over 350 blogs published from all walks of the security community, we like to think of the blog as more of an industry resource that caters to not only experienced security professionals but also to those who are new to the community. To finish the year off, I wanted to look back on some of my personal favorites. I’ve tried to include a mixture of different styles, topics and authors.

When mainstream cloud computing first began to appear on the horizon, (Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud product in 2006.) many organizations were initially hesitant to entrust their most valuable data and processes to a technological innovation named after something that appears so delicate. Oh, how times have changed.

Honeypots are not a new idea. They have been part of the cybersecurity world for decades and have frequently gone in and out of “fashion” over that period. Recently, though, they have become an increasingly important part of vulnerability management. That’s for a couple of reasons. Honeypots offer real-world data on the types of threats that companies face, and they can be a powerful research tool in identifying specific threat vectors.

For a very long time, cyber security measures had defensive features that aimed to build an impenetrable wall around your assets. Threat hunting practices shift this defensive approach to an offensive one. In this article, we discussed threat hunting and its use cases in great detail.

TikTok, the popular video posting app, has come under increased scrutiny. Recently, two lawsuits filed against the platform accused TikTok of privacy violations. According to a report from Reuters, a plaintiff accused TikTok of creating an account without her knowledge or consent in one lawsuit filed in California. The lawsuit accused TikTok of creating a file on the user. This file allegedly included biometric data based on videos that the user created, but did not upload.

How much does it cost to become compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)? It is challenging to put a number or an actual figure of becoming PCI compliant. The reason exact dollar amounts become a problem to predict is it depends on the size of the organization, whether they are eligible for the PCI Self Assessment Questionnaire (PCI SAQ), and the way they handle and store customer information.

At some point in the past, I began making new year’s resolutions for doing a bit of personal privacy and security maintenance on New Year’s Day or thereabouts. I would usually have a bit of downtime to finally get around to doing the things I’d been putting off all year. It’s become a fun habit that I wanted to share.

With 2019 nearly in the books, this post reflects on a few of the biggest cybersecurity developments of the past year, and on how these trends are likely to shape the industry in the coming year.

Aiming to provide security for end-point users, end-point security is one of the most discussed components of data protection and cyber security. In this article, we will discuss what end-point security is and why it is important for your business. What is an end-point? An end-point refers to a distant device which has back and forth communication with a specific network. Such devices include desktops and laptops, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, work stations and servers.

Institutions of higher education (IHEs) are besieged by risk, especially cybersecurity and information security risk. Risk management for these institutions is critical but also extremely challenging, like trying to juggle balls and lighted torches all at once.