Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Tool or Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) is a security framework and template that higher education institutions can use to measure the security risks associated with potential or existing vendors. HECVAT is excellent for higher ed institutions because many third-party organizations tend to have structures and follow practices that lend themselves to increased cybersecurity risk.

There’s usually a surge in online activities during festive periods. People place gift orders and send funds to loved ones, and organizations roll out offers that reflect the spirit of the festivity. Threat actors will usually take advantage of this activity to sneak past your defenses. By convincingly impersonating any of these legitimate offers, they can gain access to an organization's network, and wreak havoc.

This year marks the release of the first 2022 Vulnerability Management Report from Fortra. The report, which was conducted in September 2022, is based on a comprehensive survey of over 390 cybersecurity professionals with the goal of gaining insights into the latest trends, key challenges, and vulnerability management solution preferences.

When it comes to open source vulnerabilities, we seem to be in permanent growth mode. Indeed, data from Mend’s Open Source Risk Report showed 33 percent growth in the number of open source software vulnerabilities that Mend added to its vulnerability database in the first nine months of 2022 compared with the same time period in 2021. However, while some vulnerabilities pose a severe business risk — hello, log4j — others can be safely ignored.

The ISO 27001 is one of the most recognized security standards for private sector organizations across the globe and is often required by prospective enterprise customers, helping organizations unlock new business opportunities. ISO 27001 was recently updated along with its companion guidance standard ISO 27002. The updated title for this standard is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Information Security, Cybersecurity, and Privacy Protection.

After a two-year hiatus (virtual in 2020 and hybrid in 2021), AWS re:Invent was back in person this year in its full glory. Over 52,000 people attended — more than we saw at RSA (26,000) and Blackhat USA (21,000) combined this year.

As we near the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past year and share some updates with you. Firstly, we want to express our gratitude for your feedback and discussions throughout the year. Despite the challenges faced by many businesses this year, we have been fortunate to have the support from our customers and are grateful for it. One of the major milestones for our company this year has been the growing interest and adoption of Bytesafe by enterprises.

In predicting what will transpire in cybersecurity in 2023, the best method is to look at past experience. As with any security and criminal activity, threat actors tend to build upon what they have done in the past, adding new twists to keep their tactics fresh and effective. So, taking this into consideration, it is no surprise that Trustwave's security experts see much of the same type of attacks that plagued 2022 continuing.

ChatGPT has been available to the public since November 30, 2022. Since then, it has made headlines – from being temporarily banned from Stack Overflow because, “while the answers ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good, and the answers are very easy to produce,” .

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the H-ISAC fall summit here in Phoenix. As always, this conference is a great opportunity to meet back up with customers and friends from all around the Healthcare sector. This leads to illuminating conversations that really give me a higher definition picture of what is happening in the trenches and helps me better understand how the work we’re doing here at Netskope can help.