In an alarming revelation, First American Financial Corporation, the second-largest title insurance company in the United States, disclosed that a cyberattack in December resulted in a significant data breach affecting 44,000 people. This incident underscores the importance of robust cybersecurity measures and services such as phishing takedown, online risk evaluation, stolen credentials detection, and darknet monitoring.

Vendor risk scoring is a critical component within vendor risk management (VRM) or third-party risk management (TPRM) programs and an organization’s overall risk management strategy. Risk scoring is an integral tool in the risk assessment process, helping organizations identify, evaluate, and mitigate potential risks associated with third-party vendors or service providers.

The Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names (e.g., datadoghq.com) into IP addresses via a process called DNS resolution. This translation facilitates all kinds of network communication, from enabling web browsers to connect to a desired page without requiring users to remember IP addresses, to internal communication across private infrastructure, such as Kubernetes environments.

The Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC) has exposed prompt injection vulnerabilities in the EmailGPT service. EmailGPT is an API service and Google Chrome extension that assists users in writing emails inside Gmail using OpenAI's GPT models. The service uses an API service that allows a malicious user to inject a direct prompt and take over the service logic. Attackers can exploit the issue by forcing the AI service to leak the standard hard-coded system prompts and/or execute unwanted prompts.

Elastic 8.14 is now available! This release supports our mission to modernize security operations with AI-driven security analytics. 8.14 includes major features like the brand new Attack Discovery, significant enhancements to Elastic AI Assistant for Security, and the general availability of ES|QL — all of which provide the SOC with contextual, streamlined SecOps.

Machine learning (ML) and AI tools raise concerns over mis- and disinformation. These technologies can ‘hallucinate’ or create text and images that seem convincing but may be completely detached from reality. This may cause people to unknowingly share misinformation about events that never occurred, fundamentally altering the landscape of online trust. Worse – these systems can be weaponised by cyber criminals and other bad actors to share disinformation, using deepfakes to deceive.

Firewall technology has mirrored the complexities in network security, evolving significantly over time. Originally serving as basic traffic regulators based on IP addresses, firewalls advanced to stateful inspection models, offering a more nuanced approach to network security. This evolution continued with the emergence of Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), which brought even greater depth through data analysis and application-level inspection.

In today’s complex IT ecosystems, extending equal protection across the entire network is simply not feasible. Instead, organizations need to determine which systems are inherently most critical and prioritize maintaining their operational integrity through effective IT monitoring: tracking performance and activity across servers, applications and other technology components.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) serves as a strategic framework for evaluating an organization’s security posture. CTEM is specifically designed to identify and address vulnerabilities and other security gaps within an organization’s digital infrastructure. In essence, CTEM is a systematic approach to fortify cyber defenses and mitigate potential security risks effectively. Gartner, which created CTEM, sees it as a sort of Vulnerability Management 2.0.

If you've ever worked in security or another technical field, you've probably been burned many times by tools that overpromised and underdelivered. I still have scar tissue from my time leading security teams at eBay and DocuSign - we saw so many tools that demoed extremely well but turned out to be undeployable.