These days, it’s not a matter if your password will be breached but when. Major websites experience massive data breaches at an alarming rate. Have I Been Pwned currently has records from 543 sites comprising 11.4 billion accounts. This includes well-known names like Wattpad, MySpace, and Facebook. This is an 84% increase in the number of sites and a 115% increase in the number of accounts from when I published the first version of this article in 2018.

Digital transformation is at the heart of every industry. There are no longer any industries that are immune to the rapid adoption of this movement. When we think of the construction industry, we may think back to an image of ironworkers sitting over a city and enjoying a lunch break on a construction beam. However, rapid digitalization has transformed the construction industry and will continue to drive change and encourage innovation.

In the beginning of May, a U.S. pipeline company suffered a ransomware attack. The company decided to respond by halting operations while it investigated the incident. This delayed tens of millions of gallons of fuel from reaching their destination all along the East Coast. Less than a week later, Bloomberg reported that the company had paid millions of dollars to a ransomware group in order to regain access to their systems. U.S.

Everything evolves. Simply stated, the gradual development of something from a simple to a more complex form is what evolution is all about. When something ceases to evolve, yet still exists, it becomes classified as a living fossil. One example is the Ginkgo Biloba tree. It took millions of years for this evolution to cease. This all happened without any help from humans.

When it comes to evaluating technology in the home, there seems to be no shortage of new devices and shiny gadgets, mainly part of the Internet of Things (IoT), to discuss. Unfortunately, there seems to be no shortage of security issues to consider regarding these same devices, either.

Most organizations have already begun their shift to the cloud. In its Cloud Computing Survey 2020, for instance, International Data Group (IDG) found that 81% of respondents had at least one workload or segment of their computing infrastructure in the cloud. That percentage could grow by the end of the year, as IDG found that 32% of total IT budgets will go to cloud computing—up from 30% in 2018.

Confidence isn’t new when it comes to cybersecurity. All the way back in 2015, for example, 86% of security professionals working in the energy sector told Tripwire that they were confident they could detect a breach in a week. Just less than half (49%) said it wouldn’t take them longer than a day to spot an attack. It was the same story a year later when Tripwire surveyed infosec professionals in the retail sector.

Data breaches are costing organizations millions of dollars on average. In its 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, IBM found that a data breach cost the average organization $3.86 million. This price tag was even greater for organizations located in the United States and operating in the healthcare industry at $8.64 million and $7.13 million, respectively. What’s behind this price tag, you ask?

Back in 2018, the State of Security spent a lot of time going over v7 of the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls (CIS Controls). We noted at the time how the Center for Internet Security shuffled the order of requirements for many of the existing controls in that version. It also cleaned up the language of the CIS Controls, simplified some working, removed duplicate requirements, and created an abstract for each of the security measures.

If you are new to the security world, it is fair to ask yourself, “Isn’t access to data and systems always conditional? Isn’t it always granted to someone who has access to the credentials (ID and password)?” True enough, but in totality, the approach to managing access encompasses a broader spectrum of privacy policies. These policies include a mix of different strategies that can be applied based on an organization’s security vulnerabilities.

The head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has warned that ransomware has become the biggest threat to British people and businesses. In a speech being given today by Lindy Cameron, chief executive of the NCSC, to the RUSI think tank, she highlights the need for ransomware problem to be taken seriously, and warns of the “cumulative effect” if society fails to properly deal with the rising threat.

On January 20, President Joseph Biden issued Executive Order (E.O.) 13990 to help protect U.S. bulk power organizations. This Order enacted a 90-day suspension of E.O. 13920 which was set by the previous administration. The new executive order empowered the Secretary of Energy (“Secretary”) to publish new criteria around pre-qualifying vendors of electric equipment, as well as to devise rules for helping U.S. entities replace electric devices at risk of sabotage.

In a world that is constantly evaluating costs, it is little wonder that there is an increasing demand for cost-effective solutions to business problems. In the real world, this means ‘free,’ and in the digital marketplace, it means ‘open source.’

Cloud-native applications that are based on new types of infrastructure such as containers and serverless platforms are being rapidly adopted by organizations worldwide. While cloud-native applications deliver compelling benefits such as elastic scalability, unmatched resilience and rapid development velocity, they also raise challenges.

The principle of least privilege in cybersecurity prescribes that no user should have access to system resources beyond what’s necessary for fulfilling a specific task. Adhering to this principle has become essential, as one of the primary ways malicious actors breach a system is by compromising (legitimate) user access.

We all have heard and read how the pandemic has disrupted our lives, how it has accelerated digital transformation to an unprecedented extent and how it challenged the existing security policies and practices. The question is how the people responsible for fortifying their organizations experienced the whole situation.

Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying that “A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock and trade.” Whether the quote is mis-attributed to Lincoln is irrelevant to the greater message, which is that attorneys are “knowledge workers.” To state it as bluntly as one attorney once explained to an executive where I worked, “My knowledge will keep you out of jail.” As a cybersecurity professional, you too are a knowledge worker.

Like technology itself, cybersecurity is ever-evolving and encompassing more areas of our lives, including transportation. Popular science fiction movies have led us to expect flying taxis and private space travel as the future of transportation. If that is going to become an eventual reality, the first steps towards that future are “smart cars” and automated vehicles. Electric vehicles are expected to account for 58% of global passenger vehicle sales by 2040.

Cybercriminals are running an online competition offering big prizes to anyone who believes they have found an unusual way to help crooks steal cryptocurrency.

The benefits of organizations moving some or all their IT workloads to the cloud are well-known and numerous. There are several challenges to successful cloud adoption, though, and one of the most important of them is compliance. Whether your cloud use case is low-cost data storage, scaling your infrastructure for critical business apps or disaster recovery, this article helps inform you about and overcome compliance issues in cloud computing.

The Risk Management Framework (RMF) is most commonly associated with the NIST SP 800-37 guide for “Applying the Risk Management Framework to Federal Information Systems: A Security Life Cycle Approach,” which has been available for FISMA compliance since 2004. It was updated in December 2018 to revision 2. This was the result of a Joint Task Force Transformation Initiative Interagency Working Group; it’s something that every agency of the U.S.

The events of 2020 didn’t prevent small- to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) from adopting the cloud. Impact Networking reported that SMBs’ overall cloud spending grew 6.3% between 2019 and 2020. Such growth is projected to lead more than a third (35%) of SMBs to annually spend between $600,000 and $1.2 million on public cloud services by the end of 2021, noted Statista.