The first article in this series examined configuration hardening—essentially looking at ports, processes and services where security configuration management (SCM) is key. The second article looked at application and version hardening strategies. This third installment will discuss the role of automation in the coming of age of what’s called “continuous hardening.”

A series of high-profile data breaches in 2017 made it clear that it's becoming more difficult to protect your and your customer's sensitive information from nefarious agents. As businesses expand, they develop and implement security policies that help protect their sensitive information from outsiders.

The first article in this series examined configuration hardening, essentially looking at ports, processes and services as the “doors, gates and windows” into a network where security configuration management (SCM) becomes the job of determining which of these gateways should be open, closed, or locked at any given time. Now it’s time to look at application and version hardening.

Although many organizations are shifting security to the left and embracing the integration of security tools into their continuous integration / continuous delivery pipelines, there are others who have different wants and needs.

Last week, we spoke about the common issues that come up throughout a penetration test. We left out what many of our penetration testers think of as the ‘biggest issues’, however, as the finished article rivalled Dickens at his wordiest. Still, they’re definitely worth raising, as some of the most common issues that emerge from a penetration test don’t involve misconfigurations, vulnerabilities or hacking of any kind.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Development frameworks are wonderful, can’t disagree there, they do make life easier by taking away tedious process. Obviously their increased complexity in hiding this tedium from the dev means debugging can be tricky at times. So they often included some quite revealing debug modes that can help…. Only that they really are for the eyes of the dev and not the public.

It amazes me how many people confuse the importance of vulnerability scanning with penetration testing. Vulnerability scanning cannot replace the importance of penetration testing, and penetration testing on its own cannot secure the entire network. Both are important at their respective levels, needed in cyber risk analysis and are required by standards such as PCI, HIPAA and ISO 27001.

To deliver technology products and services, companies use multiple technology environments so that changes, updates, and testing can be completed in a controlled way without interrupting customer experience. This is a best practice approach that maintains high levels of system stability, uptime and security. These “non-production”, or test environments should ideally be completely disconnected from production environments to prevent security incidents and bugs.

We all know information security is complicated and multi-faceted. You have plans to defend you from countless types of attacks and threats, but the risk is still there. Spear phishing is a common threat and your organization should have a plan of how to respond in the event of this type of attack.

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