Portable Document Format (PDF), is this secure or is it something to be suspicious about upon receiving? Jens Müller gave a convincing talk at Black Hat USA 2020, Portable Document Flaws 101, that it is something to think twice about before opening. This article will provide highlights from the insightful talk about the possible PDF-based attacks and the varying security of PDF-readers (purer viewers only and not editors).

The application layer continues to be the most attacked and hardest to defend in the enterprise software stack. With the proliferation of tools aimed at preventing an attack, it’s no wonder the application security testing market is valued at US 4.48 billion. Forrester’s market taxonomy breaks up the application security testing tools market into two main categories: security scanning tools and runtime protection tools.

I’m often asked from people outside the cloud-native space how the market is progressing and if Kubernetes is taking off or not. My answer is always the same: Kubernetes is absolutely the de facto approach to managing containerized applications, and, because of that, the market is expanding exponentially. We’re almost two-thirds of the way through 2020, and in the cloud-native space, it’s so far been the year of Kubernetes.

In the pantheon of open source heavyweights, few technologies are as ubiquitous as the MySQL RDBMS. Integral to popular software packages like WordPress and server stacks like LAMP, MySQL serves as the foundational data platform for a vast majority of websites and cloud services on the internet today. Unfortunately, its popularity translates to more commonly known attack vectors and security exploits —the following are 11 ways to shore up MySQL security and protect your data more effectively.

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is widely used in the enterprise, despite a less-than-stellar reputation for security. In fact, for many “IIS security” is a contradiction of terms—though in all fairness, Microsoft's web server solution has improved significantly over the years. IIS 8.5 for server 2012 R2 and IIS 10 for 2016 have been hardened and no longer present the dangerous default configurations of older IIS iterations, but can still be further tightened.

Business partnerships require trust, but knowing whether your vendors merit that trust is difficult. With the rise of information technology, the ways in which trust can be broken, intentionally or unintentionally, have multiplied and become more complex. Vendor security assessment questionnaires are one method to verify that service providers follow appropriate information security practices so your business can weigh the risk of entrusting them with your data.

Vendor risk scoring is a practice that has emerged to address the complexity of vendor management by assigning vendors a single score– typically a number or letter grade– to facilitate comparison between vendors and portfolios. The past decades of digital transformation have provided both the need for innovative IT security hygiene assessment techniques and the technological capabilities to gather and analyze the data necessary to give those risk scores predictive power.

At Lookout, our mission has always been to make the mobile experience as secure as possible for customers. We’re proud to collaborate with AT&T to power and deliver the AT&T Mobile Security solution.