The cyber kill chain illustrates the structure of a successful cyber attack. It is effectively the hacker’s process from beginning to end, from scoping a target (reconnaissance) all the way to achieving their objective, whether that’s data theft or dropping and executing malware. When approaching your cyber security strategy, you should align your defences to the cyber kill chain. Like Batman becoming fear, to defeat the hacker, you must become a hacker.

Vendor risk management (VRM) deals with the management and monitoring of risks resulting from third-party vendors and suppliers of information technology (IT) products and services. VRM programs are concerned with ensuring third-party products, IT vendors and service providers do not result in business disruption or financial and reputational damage.

What if your job was to break things repeatedly in order to make them work better? Sounds like the dream of every curious six-year old, but it’s actually an emerging software engineering trend based in the transition from devops to devsecops. It’s designed to test systematic limitations with the goal of improving security and performance under any circumstances. The term is chaos engineering.

Ransomware isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s effects are starting to be felt more widely, and more deeply than ever before. Behemoths like Sony, Nissan, FedEx, Kraft Foods and Deutsche Bank have all been hit in recent years, and the list is growing. The ongoing saga of the ransomware attack in Baltimore, MD has left citizens unable to pay parking tickets or finalize property sales. American small businesses may bear the brunt of the impact of ransomware’s global spread.

With cybercrime on the rise, companies are always looking for new ways to ensure they are protected. What better way to beat the hackers than to have those same hackers work FOR you. Over the past few years, corporations have turned to Bug Bounty programs as an alternative way to discover software and configuration errors that would’ve otherwise slipped through the cracks.

Gone are the days when being a CISO (or even just ‘the security guy’) was about actual information security or IT security. Even the term IT security is outdated now, as it emphasizes a one-dimensional view of what security is really about. However, I digress…

Cloud computing has transformed the IT industry, as services can now be deployed in a fraction of the time that it used to take. Scalable computing solutions have spawned large cloud computing companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Digital transformation is creating rapidly growing volumes of data, leading to new vulnerabilities and attack vectors. At the same time, adversaries are growing increasingly more sophisticated – consider the recent Capital One breach, or the Equifax breach. This combination of factors means SOCs are struggling to fulfill their critical mission of identifying and eliminating threats.