Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

2020 will go down in history as a year of surprises. The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in challenges to health, wealth, business, and cybersecurity. The early part of the year saw a rapid movement out of the office, introducing a sudden need to support home working. According to Gartner, 88% of companies sent their workforce home to work during the peak of the pandemic. This remote work environment is continuing for many organizations in 2021. In 2020, businesses were forced to adapt fast.

In many ways, 2020 was a year of reckoning for data privacy on the internet. After more than a decade of enthusiastically embracing a “freemium” model in which consumers traded copious amounts of personal data for access to digital platforms, many are adopting a rapid about-face. Now, privacy is essential, and stakeholders are taking notice. To date, it’s clear that many companies see this as an obstacle, not an opportunity.

Since 2018, Watchdog has provided automatic, machine learning-based anomaly detection to notify you of performance issues in your applications. Earlier this year, Watchdog started grouping APM anomalies across your services, allowing you to better understand the scope of the issue.

A software defined perimeter (SDP) establishes virtual boundaries around Internet-connected assets and user activity through an integrated security architecture approach. SDP works regardless of whether assets reside on-premises or in the cloud, or whether users are on-site or working remote. Rather than relying on hardware like firewalls or VPNs at the network boundary, SDP leverages software to prevent any access to or even visibility into resources within the virtual perimeter by default.

We’ve been busy at AT&T Cybersecurity during the pandemic. Turns out we could help out our network customers in so many ways. Here are some examples.

Supplementing the SolarWinds Security Bulletin released in mid-December 2020, detailing a suspected nation-state threat actor introducing a backdoor into SolarWinds Orion versions 2019.4 HF5, 2020.2 and 2020.2 HF1, this bulletin provides an update based on recent observations in late December 2020 and early January 2021.

For this year’s State of Software Security v11 (SOSS) report, we examined how both the “nature” of applications and how we “nurture” them contribute to the time it takes to close out a security flaw. We found that the “nature” of applications – like size or age – can have a negative effect on how long it takes to remediate a security flaw.

Over the last few years, the idea of patching systems to correct flaws has graduated from an annoying business disruption to a top priority. With all of the notorious vulnerabilities that can wreak total havoc, the time it takes to patch becomes a minor inconvenience when weighed against both the technical challenges and possible regulatory penalties of not patching.

The Splunk Security Team is excited to share some of the new and enhanced capabilities of Splunk Phantom, Splunk’s security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) technology. Phantom’s latest update (v4.10) makes automation implementation, operation and scaling easier than ever for your security team.

Visual Basic (VB) and its derivatives – VBA and VBScript – are common attack vectors when targeting Windows systems. These languages allow users and attackers alike to complete security-sensitive tasks such as accessing the internet, running command-line instructions and editing the Registry.