Let’s talk technical debt. It’s that silent, creeping problem many of us have faced—those quick fixes and shortcuts we took to keep things running smoothly. They accumulate over time, leaving us with a tangled web of outdated systems and patchwork solutions. In cybersecurity, this isn’t just a minor annoyance—it’s a ticking time bomb. So, what’s technical debt consolidation?

WannaCry, Log4j, Follina, Spring4Shell — these incidents send shivers down the spines of anybody who works in IT or security. Zero-day vulnerabilities are unknown or unaddressed exploitable software or hardware security flaws that are typically unknown to the vendor and for which no patch or other fix is yet available.

‍ ‍ ‍One of the most simultaneously exciting and challenging aspects of working in the cybersecurity industry is that the risk landscape and management practices never stop evolving. Additional data is continuously being gathered, and new frameworks are constantly developed to help organizations better assess, measure, and secure themselves against threat actors poised to exploit system weaknesses.

Before Crowdstrike caused the world to melt down for a few days, the talk of the security town was a recent OpenSSH vulnerability (CVE-2024-6387). Dubbed by its celebrity name regreSSHion, it is a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in some versions of OpenSSH discovered by the Qualys Threat Research Unit on July 1, 2024. Specifically, versions of OpenSSH compiled against the glibc library, which is to say “probably most of them”, were impacted.

Cybersecurity teams across all disciplines, including vulnerability management, are challenged to move faster than ever before. Whether it’s responding to a security incident, finding a new vulnerability, or stopping an attack, speed is at a premium.

‍After cyber insurance rates skyrocketed from late 2020 to 2022, when the majority of the market had little choice but to switch to a completely remote way of working, prices have slowly started to drop. This new downward trend is promising, as organizations are increasingly searching for the most cost-effective ways to manage their cyber risks and offset potential losses.

Most organizations now recognize that even if they have a strong internal security posture, a security lapse by any one of their many third-party vendors or partners can be just as catastrophic to their business as a direct breach. Industry and government regulators are increasingly focused on this topic as well, resulting in a wave of new compliance requirements that extend to third-party risks.

As modern enterprise IT environments become more complex, the need for robust cybersecurity measures continues to grow. Because of this expanding complexity, DevSecOps functions are more common, requiring the integration of security into the application development lifecycle. Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solutions offer a unified framework for securing the diverse application environment and merging security into the application development process.