When I was younger, I played a variety of team sports and enjoyed competing against opponents with my teammates. Winning was always a matter of applying sound tactics and strategy, attacking and defending well and using a blend of skill, talent and luck. Now that I’m older, I watch more than I play, and I’m able to appreciate the many lessons team sports teach, especially at the professional level. With sports, we can tackle technical topics in a relatable way.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Distributed Control Systems (DCS) and other control system configurations such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). They are typically used in industries such as electric, water, oil and natural gas, transportation, chemical, pharmaceutical and manufacturing (e.g., automotive, aerospace). These control systems are vital to the operation of U.S.

DevOps is revolutionizing the way enterprises deliver apps to the market by blending software development and information technology operations. This convergence creates an assembly line for the cloud, as Tim Erlin wrote for The State of Security, by increasing the rate at which companies can develop apps and deliver them to users.

So, you have 2000 network devices in your environment and everyone is telling you that you have to rotate all 2000 device passwords every 30, 60 or 90 days (at a minimum) — who has time for that?! How are you going to manage this? The task seems monumental and time-consuming! If nothing is done, then your security/compliance posture will worsen due to reusing passwords that are easy to remember across assets. In addition, passwords could become stale and give adversaries more time to crack them.

The move to the cloud — in many ways — is a return to the early days of computing. When I took my first computer class in 1978, we used an IBM 360 system time share. We rented out time on a remote system — sent our jobs over a modem to a computer at a university — and got back the results of the program run. Today, we’re using the cloud, which is just a fancy version of the old time-share systems.

In May 2019, Verizon Enterprise released the 12th edition of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Researchers analyzed a total of 41,686 security incidents, of which there were 2,013 data breaches, for the publication. More than half (52 percent) of those reported breaches involved some form of hacking. The report listed the most prominent hacking variety and vector combinations, with “vulnerability exploitation” making the top three.

Although DNS rebinding attacks have been known for over a decade now, they are only recently receiving attention as a practical attack surface. In the last year, quite a few popular products have been shown to lack DNS rebinding protections, and as a result, someone could operate them remotely using a malicious web site. Manufacturers have made a habit of giving consumers connected devices that are controlled by unauthenticated HTTP requests via the local network.

The 2017 Deep Root Analytics incident that exposed the sensitive data of 198 million Americans, or almost all registered voters at the time, should remind us of the risks associated with storing information in the cloud. Perhaps the most alarming part is that this leak of 1.1 terabytes of personal data was avoidable. It was simple negligence.

With data breaches regularly marking the headlines, it is no surprise that digital threats constitute an increasingly significant concern for the C-Suite and cyber security experts. What is surprising, however, is that these two groups don’t seem to share the same view of information security. They have different opinions when it comes to the digital threat landscape in general as well as their organization’s level of preparedness in particular.