At RiskOptics, our mission is to make GRC simple, and it’s been that way since the inception of ZenGRC in 2009. With an in-house team of GRC experts and a development model focused on customer and industry challenges, we pride ourselves on being collaborative, innovative, and transparent.

Universities are increasing their reliance on third-party providers for various services, such as electronic health records, telehealth platforms, insurance billing, and mental health support. While these partnerships enhance business operations and save valuable time, they also introduce significant cybersecurity risks.

UAT4356 is a state-sponsored threat actor that targets perimeter network devices in government networks globally with a clear focus on espionage. Their first activity can be traced back to November 2023, although researchers found evidence that the group was testing its capabilities as early as July 2023. So far, the initial attack vector used by the group has not been able to be determined.

Organizations of all sizes need to be proactive in identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in their networks. To help organizations better understand the value and process of a vulnerability scan, Trustwave’s Philip Pieterse, Managing Consultant for the Americas division of SpiderLabs and Dhervesh Singh, senior Security Consultant with SpiderLabs conducted a webinar exploring key offensive security testing methodologies: vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and purple teaming.

Some best practices for securely onboarding employees include conducting comprehensive background checks, providing security training for new hires, ensuring employees have least privilege access, equipping employees with a password manager and continuously monitoring employee activity for unusual behavior. The more secure an onboarding process is, the easier and more secure it’ll be to offboard employees.

Ransomware is one of the fastest-growing cyber attack vectors, making it crucial to learn how to prevent it. To prevent ransomware attacks on your devices, you should avoid clicking suspicious links and attachments, never insert random USBs into your device, keep your Operating System (OS) up to date, use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) when connecting to public WiFi and use a password manager to ensure your passwords are strong.

Picture this: a high-security vault containing your company’s sensitive data. Unfortunately, the door is wide open, allowing anyone to enter unnoticed. This is the scary truth for firms that fail to audit Active Directory (AD). Why is an unmonitored AD such a concern? Well, your Active Directory is the central hub for user access and authentication. It stores the keys to your kingdom, such as passwords, group memberships, and sensitive accounts.

Relying on technology alone, however advanced, can be a critical error. While top end security technologies can provide part of the answer, the sheer number of alerts generated demands constant attention. Without the right resources to analyse and manage these outputs, critical alerts may end up being ignored – a constant thorn in the side of many organisations.

Best practices for mitigating various attack vectors are changing depending on the environment and server functionality. CIS baselines cover most of the relevant scenarios by addressing the first stage of your Hardening Windows Server project. CIS Benchmarks -What are They and How to Use Them Microsoft has been doing some work related to default security configuration, but there is still a big gap between security best practices (i.e. common benchmarks) and the default Windows configuration.