The end of November is a busy time in the United States. On Thanksgiving, friends and family gather together to give thanks for good food, good company and good fortune. Once they’ve put away the leftovers, many Americans don their coats, head to the malls and wait in line all night. For what? Black Friday, the commencement of the Christmas shopping season.
Nowadays, high-profile security breaches continue to dominate the media headlines. This trend places an increasing number of businesses at risk. They are growing in amount and complexity while malicious hackers are actively developing new and more sophisticated forms of attacks every single day.
Segregation of duties is a fundamental information security practice. In simple terms, it means you split out important tasks between two or more people. This prevents one person getting drunk on all the power they wield, and also prevents one person from making a mistake that can have undesired consequences.
The internet of things (IoT) is changing nearly every industry. Smart devices that can collect and process data, and even make decisions based on that data, though artificial intelligence promises to disrupt business as we know it for years to come.
As noted previously—and as we all know—an organization cannot be secure until the entire workforce is engaged in reducing cyber risks. Each member of the group has the power to harm or to help, since each one has access to information systems, handles sensitive data and makes decisions every day which maintain, erode or strengthen the human “attack surface” of the organization.
You’ll often find that ‘vulnerability scan’ and ‘penetration test’ are wrongly used interchangeably, creating confusion about which is the right security choice for businesses. Broadly speaking, a vulnerability scan could be thought of as a surface-level security assessment, whereas a penetration test delves that much deeper. In fact, penetration testers often make use of a vulnerability scan as part of their process.
A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Quite an interesting stream of news this week, however, my choices this week focus on threat management. The first one, and its quite alarming and not at all funny, shows an example of someone didn’t accept reasonable proof of account ownership for a password reset – something many of us face with public websites.
Recently, an AlienVault customer reached out to ask how AlienVault handles the detection of zero-day attacks, which are exploits against previously unknown vulnerabilities. In this blog, I shed light on how we approach this.
