Open-source software has been a godsend for the development community. They bring lower development costs, faster application delivery, and greater flexibility; it’s no wonder nearly 90% of modern applications comprise third-party software nowadays. That’s not to say open-source software doesn’t come with its share of pitfalls, including security risks and vulnerabilities.

In the realm of information security, risk management is often regarded as a vital component in safeguarding organizations against cyber threats. However, despite the efforts of security personnel and the existence of risk management systems, many organizations continue to encounter issues. It is crucial to acknowledge that the clunkiness of information security risk management – and the subsequent misunderstandings – can be major obstacles to achieving effective risk mitigation.

The public sector is critical to national and international security. Yet, new research from SecurityScorecard and the Cyentia Institute found that 61.6% of public sector agencies have open cyber vulnerabilities, taking a median of 309 days to remediate. What’s more, 53% of public sector agencies are losing ground closing their cyber vulnerabilities, due in large part to a greater reliance on third-party vendors with less-than-optimal cybersecurity hygiene.

Discover the changes CISA has made to their Cyber Security Evaluation Tool and what it could mean for your business.

Today’s corporate IT environments are complex and diverse. The security system to protect those environments can easily have hundreds of individual parts, and all of those parts need to be looked at individually and as a whole. To assure that all those parts are working as intended, you should perform a cybersecurity audit. Audits aren’t just good sense, either; many data privacy and security regulations require audits. That said, the steps for a cybersecurity audit can be long.

The attack surface for most organizations is constantly expanding, and security teams struggle to decide which parts of that surface deserve priority for effective risk mitigation. Traditional methods of ranking risks such as malware and ransomware on a high-, medium-, low- scale have unraveled as different people interpret those categories differently. What’s needed: more accurate cyber risk assessments.

Market pressures and growth opportunities are accelerating digital transformation. According to Gartner, 89 percent of board directors say digital is embedded in all business growth strategies. Meanwhile 99 percent say that digital transformation has had a positive impact on profitability and performance (KPMG). The cloud, connected IoT devices, and remote work capabilities are the cornerstones of digital transformation.

Attending the RSA Conference can be an exciting time – whether you’re there representing your company or participating in the educational sessions. Just walking around the Moscone Center during RSAC 2023 provided insight into the latest trends and challenges in the risk and compliance industry. One of the most striking takeaways from the conference was the complexity and challenges involved in risk and compliance management faced by modern organizations.

Co-authored by David Willis and Gary Jenkins As we wrote in an earlier blog, the concept of cybersecurity risk continues to be codified, qualified, and, finally, quantified. With the rise of RESTful API endpoint support and near-real time telemetry sharing, companies can seize the opportunity to automate the IT/security stack’s response to risky users (in addition to devices, data, and applications—to be covered in future blogs).

The number and complexity of software vulnerabilities is continuously growing. The ability of development and security teams to assess the threat level a given vulnerability poses and prioritize fix efforts accordingly greatly depends on access to as much context as possible about the vulnerability.