Cybercrime is one of the most significant threats facing companies today. With the average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of $4.24 million , the business case for cybersecurity has never been stronger. Still, some businesses seem to misunderstand the urgency of meeting current cybersecurity standards. It may help to consider the legal consequences of poor cybersecurity.
Since 2008, the CIS Controls have been through many iterations of refinement and improvement, leading up to what we are presented with today in CIS Controls version 8. CIS Controls reflect the combined knowledge of experts from every part of the ecosystem (companies, governments, and individuals). The controls reflect consideration by people in many different roles such as threat analysts, incident responders, solution providers, policy-makers, and more.
The FBI has published a warning about a ransomware gang called the OnePercent Group, which has been attacking U.S. companies since November 2020.
Information security is an exciting and rapidly growing field for individuals who are interested in protecting users and their data. In an effort to map out the industry as a possible career choice, we recently conducted research into the top 10 infosec jobs based on overall pay grade. We now continue with the second part of our two-part series.
Ransomware is having a bit of a moment. Check Point revealed that ransomware attacks increased 102% globally in H1 2021 compared to the start of the previous year, with the number of corporate ransomware victims having doubled over that same period. Average ransom payments also grew 171% from $115,123 in 2019 to $312,493 a year later. But those weren’t the amounts originally demanded by attackers. Indeed, ransomware actors wanted an average of $847,344 from their victims in 2020.
Threat modeling is increasing in importance as a way to plan security in advance. Instead of merely reacting to threats and incidents, an organization can identify and evaluate its security posture, relevant threats, and gaps in defenses that may allow attacks to succeed. Threat modeling has a two-way relationship with incident response.
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021 analyzed 537 real breaches and conducted nearly 3,500 interviews to uncover the true cost of a data breach in 2020. The publication covers initial attack vectors, how long it took organizations to discover and contain braces, as well as the effects that incident response efforts and artificial intelligence have on mitigating breach costs.
During a recent client engagement, the DGC penetration testing team identified a previously unknown vulnerability affecting the Autodesk Licensing Service, a software component bundled with nearly all licensed Autodesk products. The vulnerability exists in a software component common to most Autodesk products and impacts nearly all organizations using licensed Autodesk software in any capacity.
No discussion on ICS attacks could be complete without talking about what some would call, ‘the elephant in the room.’ Critical infrastructure has always been a target for warfare, and modern ICS are no exception. Several high-profile ICS disruptions have in fact been attributed to malicious hackers working at the behest of a military or intelligence agency.
Want a job in cybersecurity? There are plenty to go around. Cybersecurity Ventures estimated that there will be 3.5 million job openings in the industry by the end of the year. That makes sense. According to Gartner , global spending on information security and risk management technology is expected to exceed$150 billion in 2021. Organizations are going to need someone to help them manage those new solutions. The issue is that information security is an expansive industry.
