The threat actor then gained a back door into the company’s Orion network management platform – used by over 300,000 organisations worldwide. Given the seriousness of the attack, its potential to affect customers across the SolarWinds supply chain and reports of espionage by nation state attackers, this is a story that is likely to have ongoing repercussions for organisations in 2021.

For most companies, security and IT systems are growing in complexity, breadth of scope, and coverage, which consumes budget and staff time. The rapid breakdown of the traditional perimeter in this “new normal” world increases the challenges IT teams and remote users face on a daily basis.

We asked our Head of Threat Intelligence, George Glass, to share his expert view on the threats that security teams need to be aware of and to tell us what it is he loves about working in the industry.

The cybersecurity industry is increasingly producing enormous amounts of raw threat data. The sheer volume of information threat researchers must sift through makes it difficult to collect, analyze, and research that data in a timely manner. This in turn limits their ability to understand what data is valid and useful and whether threat artifacts will result in legitimate threat indicators.

Vulnerabilities are weaknesses leveraged by adversaries to compromise the confidentiality, availability or integrity of a resource. The vulnerability ecosystem has matured considerably in the last few years. A significant amount of effort has been invested to capture, curate, taxonomize and communicate the vulnerabilities in terms of severity, impact and complexity of the associated exploit or attack.