Corporate cybersecurity professionals must be on constant alert to avoid the wide range of cyberattacks that can be thrown at them today: malware, ransomware, trojan horses, social engineering, and spear-phishing attacks, to name just a few. Among the most serious of attacks is the advanced persistent threat (APT). An APT is an attack that uses sophisticated methods to gain access to information systems and sensitive information.
One of the key reasons SecurityScorecard commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study was to help the market move on from using spreadsheets as a Vendor Risk Management (VRM) tool. The primary reason for IT teams to look at SecurityScorecard or any other VRM automation platform is simple. IT (Information Technology) will help IT teams get better leverage on their two rarest commodities in the security world, time and talent.
It’s the stuff of IT managers’ nightmares and it is coming to a server near you: ransomware attacks, phishing schemes, privacy breaches, and other yet-to-be imagined cyber threats aiming to pilfer the sensitive data stored on your IT systems. Cybercriminals target large companies like Microsoft, Equifax, Expedia, and Barnes & Noble just to mention a few big victims from 2020.
Cybersecurity is more than “just” technology these days. With legislative bodies increasingly writing more laws, technology and legal terminologies have become more intertwined than ever before. As organizations build cyber risk strategies, they need to understand risk mitigation’s underlying goal. This is why understanding the difference between due care and due diligence is important to how you set your risk mitigation strategies.
Businesses sit on massive, ever-growing piles of data. According to Dave Reinsel, senior vice president, IDC's Global DataSphere, 64.2 zettabytes (ZB) of data was created or replicated in 2020. And the amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the advent of digital storage. But data isn’t just growing, it is spreading to more applications, more users, and more devices than ever.
Penetration testing, also known as “pen testing,” is an intentional, simulated cyberattack against your IT systems to find vulnerabilities and test the efficacy of cybersecurity controls. For example, penetration testers can use this tactic to improve web application security mechanisms such as firewalls. Pen testing might involve an attempt to breach access controls to gain access to a private network.
The old saying “it takes a village” applies to many things in life, including securing your organization. Security is a team sport that requires a variety of solutions and providers — such as a firewall, endpoint protection, security information and event management (SIEM), threat intelligence provider, IT service management (ITSM), governance, risk, and compliance solution (GRC), and cloud access security broker (CASB) — to name a few.
As you go about the work of managing your IT environment, it’s likely that you already apply the Principle of Least Privilege (POLP, also known as “least privilege access”) — probably without giving this important concept a second thought. After all, not every employee in your company has admin rights on your website, or access to your financial accounts.
Cybersecurity can seem intimidating, especially when you’re not already familiar with security and IT. There are so many threats and a lot of terms you need to know in order to understand the countermeasures that can help keep your data safe from attackers. What is an attack surface, after all? And what’s a rootkit? Non-technical employees and decision-makers might find their eyes glazing over when cybersecurity terms start getting thrown around.
