The Cloud Threats Memo is a weekly series from Paolo Passeri, digging into a recent cloud threat and highlighting how Netskope can best help mitigate it. The Anti-Phishing Working Group has recently released its Q4 Phishing Trends Report 2020, which analyzes the top phishing attacks and other identity theft techniques, as reported by the members of the group.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a universally accepted knowledge-base of tactics, techniques and procedures designed to organize and display how adversaries attack real-world assets. Blue teams use ATT&CK to better understand the multitude of new (and old) attacks and map those to their internal tools and systems.

Conducting a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) or privacy impact assessment (PIA) is a complex and challenging task. Nevertheless, it’s critical to do. Data privacy concerns have become a significant focus across all industries, and for good reason: data is at higher risk than ever before. In its 2020 Q3 Data Breach QuickView Report, Risk Based Security revealed that 36 billion records were exposed during the first three quarters of 2020.

Mapping and cataloging personal information collected from users is time-consuming. It is error-prone, and relies on hunting down information from multiple departments. For many teams, creating an accurate data flow map will be the hardest part of completing GDPR Article 35's data privacy impact assessment (DPIA) or any privacy impact assessment (PIA). Even for smaller businesses with limited departments and fewer software offerings, determining how data exists and how it moves can be a challenge.

In striving to make sure in-office and remote employees’ work is secure, organizations often rely on technology-centric approaches. Although user monitoring tools and other cybersecurity solutions do their jobs, they still can’t affect employee behavior and fully secure remote work. To engage remote employees into cybersecurity, organizations are now shifting to a human-centric approach.

First identified in 2014, Emotet evolved from a niche banking Trojan into what was classified this year by Europol as one of the most prevalent strains of malware in the world. The sheer scale of Emotet’s impact on organisations means that its disruption by authorities in early 2021 ranks as one of the most significant takedowns in cyber security history.

Security is an essential part of any modern IT foundation, whether in smaller shops or at enterprise-scale. It used to be sufficient to implement rules-based software to defend against malicious actors, but those malicious actors are not standing still. Just as every aspect of IT has become more sophisticated, attackers have continued to innovate as well. Building more and more rules-based software to detect security events means you are always one step behind in an unsustainable fight.

These are anxious times for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 70% are concerned about financial hardship due to pandemic-related disruptions, and more than half are worried about having to close permanently. At the same time, SMBs are tasked with personnel management in an increasingly distributed and frequently fraught environment where employees are stressed and burned out. Collectively, it’s a sizable challenge for SMB leadership.

Demand for DevSecOps products has been growing strongly, as more companies realize the importance of integrating security into their DevOps pipelines. However, IT and DevOps pros who dive into the DevSecOps market looking for options quickly realize that the number of DevSecOps tools and frameworks is vast and confusing.