The skills gap is weighing heavily on the minds of digital security team members. In a survey of 342 security professionals, Tripwire found that 83% of infosec personnel felt more overworked in 2020 than they did a year earlier. An even greater percentage (85%) stated that it had become more difficult for their organizations to hire skilled security professionals since then.

MITRE has been doing exceptional work in advancing cybersecurity as a public good, and it is an excellent resource for security professionals. Possibly best known for their ATT&CK Framework, a rich source of adversarial tactics and techniques and their mitigations, MITRE is also known for another resource: the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). The CWE is a community initiative sponsored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Arguably, the first malware extortion attack occurred in 1988 – the AIDS Trojan had the potential to be the first example of ransomware, but due to a design flaw, the victims didn’t end up actually having to pay up the 189 bucks. It’s safe to say that over the past 31 years, attackers have perfected the ransomware craft, with organizations shelling out more than $25 billion per year. We don’t expect it to end any time soon.

Together with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a series of practice guides that focuses on data integrity: the property that data has not been altered in an unauthorized manner. Tripwire is very proud to have contributed and collaborated with other technology vendors in the development of these practice guides.

With regard to BCSI (BES (Bulk Electric System) Cyber System Information) in the cloud, responsible entity sentiments at the moment may be akin to Prince Hamlet as he contemplated death and suicide, “bemoaning the pain and unfairness of life but acknowledging that the alternative might be worse.” As currently written and subject to enforcement, components of CIP-011-2 quite frankly make it near impossible to be compliant in designating a cloud-hosted BCSI repository much less actually choos

The most recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines have been updated for passwords in section 800-63B. The document no longer recommends combinations of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. Yet most companies and systems still mandate these complexity requirements for passwords. What gives?

In an ever-evolving security world, we to need to secure more with even fewer resources. While the cybersecurity skills gap increases, leaving “350,000 U.S. cybersecurity jobs unfilled yearly,” it is vital to work together to protect our environments and educate others. Creating a customer community can do just that.

If you have a familiarity with any information security frameworks and certifications, it’s more than likely you have heard of International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and possibly the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). From my experience, the most commonly referred to business-level security related certifications are ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27002.

The risk of a data breach with significant financial consequences and damage to brand equity is the fear of most large publicly traded companies. But many smaller businesses wrongly assume they are too small to be on the radar of the threat actors. The truth is that it is all about the data, and small businesses often have less well-guarded and well-defined structures for their data stores.