For many companies it would be a nightmare to discover that they are the latest unwitting victim of a ransomware attack, capable of crippling computer systems and locking up data if a payment isn’t made to cybercriminals. There’s no magic wand that can make a ransomware attack simply disappear with no impact at all on an organisation, but you can lessen the problem by carefully following tried-and-trusted steps in the immediate aftermath of an attack.

I’ve spoken before about Zero Trust approaches to security, but for many of those starting on their journey, there isn’t an obvious place to start with the model. With this post, I wanted to share an example approach I’ve seen working that many organisations already have in place and can be easily rolled into a larger program of Zero Trust hardening: understanding your Shadow IT.

Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) deals with more than protecting an organization from cyber-attacks on third parties. It also addresses third parties to those third parties (known as “fourth parties”). Further still, a vendor to your vendor’s vendor is a fifth party, then a sixth party, etc. Your SCRM should involve knowledge of how far, complex and even convoluted your supply chain is. Then measure this complexity with your risk appetite.

A critical vulnerability in Instagram’s Android and iOS apps could have allowed remote attackers to run malicious code, snoop on unsuspecting users, and hijack control of smartphone cameras and microphones. The security hole, which has been patched by Instagram owner Facebook, could be exploited by a malicious hacker simply sending their intended victim a boobytrapped malicious image file via SMS, WhatsApp, email or any other messaging service.

Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) published a joint report entitled “Cyber Planning Response and Recovery Study” (CYPRES) in partnership with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and eight of its Regional Entities (REs) in order to review the methods for responding to a cybersecurity event.

If you had asked 10 year old Tyler what he wanted to be when he grew up, the answer would have been a very enthusiastic, “Teacher!” Over time, however, that desire lessened as my fascination with technology grew. I ultimately ended up attending Fanshawe College to study Computer Systems Technology. I never fully abandoned that desire to teach, though. For a period of time in high school and college, I wrote tutorials for a major online security forum.

Cyber-attacks against maritime and shipping organizations are only increasing. Notwithstanding the IMO’s requirement for organizations in this sector to achieve cyber resilience by 2021, more and more entities are being crippled by malicious attacks.

For many organizations, security flows from the top down. That’s a problem when executives don’t emphasize security as much as they should. Cisco learned as much in its CISO Benchmark Study “Securing What’s Now and What’s Next20 Cybersecurity Considerations for 2020.” Here are just some of the findings from Cisco’s study: The reason for these findings wasn’t immediately apparent from Cisco’s study.

By now, we know a lot about secure configuration management (SCM). We know the way it works, the integral processes of which it consists, the areas of your IT infrastructure that it can help secure as well as the different types of best practice frameworks and regulatory compliance standards with which it can help you to maintain compliance. All we’re missing is how to procure and deploy an effective SCM solution.

In a fast-changing world, stopping to assess your success isn’t really an option anymore. It is increasingly important that security teams are constantly proving their worth and tracking their successes with a view to constantly improving so as to not to get caught behind the times and therefore exposed.