Many organizations have Information Security Programs (ISPs), but many executives and boards do not know how to measure progress within these programs. They are therefore hesitant to believe any investment in technology will mitigate perceived or even unknown risks. Some organizations use regulated compliance standards such as PCI DSS or AICPA attestations as measures of their ISP.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in effect for two years in the European Union (EU). As Americans continue to become attentive to GDPR and their own data privacy, it’s not surprising that some data protection guidelines are emerging in the United States. Indeed, it’s safe to assume that California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was modeled from the EUs data privacy framework.
The demand for cloud computing has skyrocketed in recent years. Lower costs, a faster time to market, increased employee productivity, scalability, and flexibility are some of the beneficial factors motivating organizations to move to the cloud. It’s not likely that organizations will slow down with their migration plans, either.
What the heck has happened on Twitter? Twitter accounts, owned by politicians, celebrities, and large organisations suddenly started tweeting messages to their many millions of followers, at the behest of hackers. What did the messages say? Here is a typical one which appeared on the account of rapper, songwriter, and optimistic Presidential candidate Kanye West and was distributed to his almost 30 million followers.
Research into recent ransomware submissions revealed that more than a tenth of crypto-malware infections now involve some element of data theft. In the second quarter of 2020, ID Ransomware received 100,001 submissions of crypto-malware pertaining to attacks that had targeted organizations and government entities. Of those attacks, 11,642 involved the theft of victim data by their perpetrators. That’s over 11% of the attacks for that six-month period.
For healthcare organizations that handle a lot of patient data, including very sensitive information, cloud computing is a revolution to data storage. Cloud computing in healthcare lowers data storage costs (compared to the old paper-storage era), enables easy retrieval of patient data and also improves the privacy of patient information. This has inevitably led to a rise in the adoption of cloud computing in healthcare.
Containers are on the rise. As reported by GlobalNewswire, Allied Market Research estimated that the application market would grow from its 2016 value of $698 million to $8.20 by 2025. With a compound annual growth rate of 31.8% between 2018 and 2025, this increase would largely reflect both the surge in popularity in application container technology along with a growing number of organizations’ migration to the cloud.
Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, are not exactly a new technology. When I started my career in IT about 15 years ago, VPN tunnels were the standard way we connected remote offices by extending private networks over the public Internet. Recently, as workforces continue to decentralize due to the rise of Cloud Computing as well as the current pandemic, VPN has become an even hotter topic and is being marketed as a critical security solution.
Things just got serious. Business Email Compromise is no longer solely the province of chancers and opportunistic Nigerian actors such as the Yahoo Boys. Organised criminal gangs with a high level of professionalism have seen the opportunity and seized it. Security researchers at Agari have published a report detailing their investigations into a Russian cybercrime gang they say have stolen millions of dollars from companies in 46 countries since mid-2019.
The highly anticipated structural update to the MITRE ATT&CK framework was released July 8th, 2020. After a quiet first half of the year, it appears the ATT&CK team has been putting in lots of work into some significant redesign of the framework’s structure. This update introduces a new layer of abstraction: sub-techniques.
