The events of 2020 helped to accelerate the convergence between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) for many organizations. As reported by Help Net Security, for instance, two-thirds of IT and OT security professionals said in a 2020 survey that their IT and OT networks had become more interconnected in the wake of the pandemic.

Tripwire Enterprise (TE) is at its heart a baselining engine. It’s been built to take information, create a baseline of it, and show when that baseline has changed. (It’s called a “version” in TE terms.) TE starts with a baseline version designated by an organization’s security teams. At some point, a change version with new information (file, registry entry, RSoP, command output, or data captured in some other way) emerges.

Most fresh installs of operating systems or applications come with pre-configured settings that are usually insecure or not properly configured with security in mind. Use the leverage provided by multiple frameworks such as CIS Benchmarks or NIST NCP to find out if your organization needs to augment or adjust any baselines to become better aligned with policies your organization is trying to adhere to.

As part of our upcoming attendance at the International Cyber Expo & International Security Expo, we were lucky enough to sponsor The Cyber Security Webinar Series with Nineteen Group and Grey Hare Media. Both Philip Ingram MBE and Emanuel Ghebreyesus, strategic account director for Tripwire, spoke about several topics including: You can read some of the highlights from their conversation below.

What are the limits of online privacy and law enforcement? Can we clearly define them, or is this a vague and blurred area of debate? The fact is that as technology advances, the real and the virtual worlds are increasingly converging. Actions (or inactions) in the cyberspace introduce risks and threats for people, especially the most vulnerable ones, i.e. children and elders.

Talk to cybersecurity experts about cybercrime on their network, and they will mention malicious activity like scans, attacks, events, and incidents. Probably at some point, they will slip into geek-speak with a vast array of confusing acronyms and jargon while explaining tactics and techniques by referencing infamous attacks, Internal protocols, and industry shorthand.

In a security advisory, Microsoft has warned that malicious hackers are exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in Windows to launch targeted attacks against organisations. The security hole, dubbed CVE-2021-40444, is a previously unknown remote code execution vulnerability in MSHTML, a core component of Windows which helps render web-based content. According to Microsoft, attacks exploiting the vulnerability have targeted companies via boobytrapped Microsoft Office documents.

For many years, there was a wide misunderstanding that encrypting some data is equivalent to protecting that data. If it’s encrypted, so the thinking goes, nobody else could access it, and it is therefore safe. While it is critical to encrypt data at rest as well as in transit, the job of protecting data goes much deeper.