According to CIS, “Organizations that do not scan for vulnerabilities and proactively address discovered flaws face a significant likelihood of having their computer systems compromised.” While vulnerability management (VM) isn’t new, I’ve seen it evolve a lot over my 22 years in the industry. Here are some big trends: The idea of an asset has changed and grown over the years. Back in the ‘90s, it was a PC or a server.
Normally, when you hear about stocks dropping, it’s due to some scandal or crisis. Market watchers will tell you that a range of elements can affect the value of a publicly traded company and cause stock prices to rise or fall. Consumer confidence is a major factor that influences a company’s reputation and perceived value. What does that have to do with data breaches? A lot more than you might think.
The recent Vectra 2019 Spotlight Report on Healthcare indicates that the proliferation of healthcare internet-of-things (IoT) devices, along with a lack of network segmentation, insufficient access controls and reliance on legacy systems, has created an increasing attack surface that can be exploited by cyber criminals determined to steal personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) in addition to disrupt healthcare delivery processes.
What camp are you in? In the camp that believes in air-gaps, or the other set that says they truly do not exist? Air-gap networks are networks that are physically and logically isolated from other networks where communication between these networks is not physically or logically possible.
With more business applications moving to the cloud, the ability to assess network behavior has changed from a primarily systems administration function to a daily security operations concern. And whilst sec-ops teams are already familiar with firewall and network device log tools, these can be of limited used in a “cloud first” business where much of the good traffic that occurs is hard to distinguish from potentially risky traffic.
The purpose of this series of blogs is to guide you on your journey up the Vulnerability Management Mountain (VMM). Like climbing a mountain, there is a lot of planning and work required, but when you get to the top, the view is amazing and well worth the journey. Your progress will depend on your funding and priorities, but climbing at a quick steady pace will help secure your environment.
In a dark room lit only by the light from four computer monitors sits a hacker named Hector (not his real name). You can hear the faint pulse of an EDM track coming from his headphones as Hector taps away on his computer’s keyboard. The above description could serve as the setting for a hacker movie set in the early 2000s. But it doesn’t work in today’s context. Nowadays, Hector sits in a brightly lit room with multiple screens at his disposal.
It’s been a few weeks since Verizon released the 12th edition of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). For this publication, Verizon’s researchers studied 41,686 security incidents in which a response was necessary. These analysts found that 2,013 of those incidents were data breaches in that some sort of information was actually compromised.
YouTube, the world’s top provider of streaming multimedia content, keeps reaching new heights in terms of its popularity. Nearly two billion monthly users and five billion videos watched every single day – these impressive statistics speak for themselves, and the numbers are steadily growing year over year. Everybody loves YouTube and so do cybercriminals, only in their very own nefarious way.
