We are excited to announce that Jonathan Freedman has joined The Cyber Helpline as our new Head of Information Security. With over two decades of experience in Information Technology, Enterprise Architecture, and Cybersecurity, Jonathan is dedicated to safeguarding the digital landscape. He currently serves as the Head of Information Security at London law firm Howard Kennedy, where he leads the Cybersecurity Team.

Unfortunately, it will often take some kind of disaster in the business world before a government takes action to prevent it from happening again. It’s only when significant data breaches happen that states implement compliance laws to avoid mishandling data; in this case, SOX compliance has a similar backstory. In the early 2000s, the collapse of corporate giants Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom exposed flaws in corporate accountability, leading to widespread fraud and massive investor losses.

Despite significant investments in cybersecurity technologies and services, many organizations remain vulnerable. One of the myriad reasons is the lack of alignment between cybersecurity strategies and specific risks each organization faces. This is where risk-aligned cybersecurity comes into play, ensuring that defenses are tailored to the unique challenges and threats an organization faces, ultimately building greater resilience.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), sometimes referred to as “pentesting in a box”, tests running code for a variety of issues that can’t easily be found by analyzing code with static scanning tools. DAST tools are platform and language agnostic—as long as you have a website or API they can connect to, they’ll get the job done, and find real vulnerabilities in the same places an attacker would.

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats, the DragonForce ransomware group has quickly become a serious menace to organizations worldwide. First discovered in August 2023, DragonForce has made headlines by leveraging two powerful ransomware variants—a fork of the infamous LockBit3.0 and a modified version of ContiV3.

After almost a decade in business, we’ve had the opportunity to watch the software development industry change dramatically. Developers work with more moving parts than ever, relying on technologies like third-party resources and AI coding assistants to release sophisticated software on tight deadlines. While we’ve been talking about the relationship between development and security for the past decade, the DevSecOps conversation has shifted quite a bit.

Mitigating risk based on the threat landscape is a complicated yet essential part of being a CISO, which is why threat reports like the 2024 Elastic Global Threat Report are a huge help for me. In addition to providing an in-depth understanding of what’s happening, threat reports also offer a quick overview of what needs to be explained or communicated to the rest of the organization.

Data privacy and security are critical concerns for businesses using Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when dealing with sensitive information like Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI). Companies typically rely on data masking tools such as Microsoft’s Presidio to safeguard this data. However, these tools often struggle in scenarios involving LLMs/AI Agents.