If you help to manage cloud environments, you’re probably familiar with the concept of identity lifecycle management. Identity lifecycle management helps you keep track of who is allowed to do what within your cloud. But merely understanding identity lifecycle management isn’t enough to administer modern cloud identities effectively. You also need a way to automate identity lifecycle management at massive scale.

It should come as no surprise that as cryptocurrencies become more popular and edge towards the mainstream, the mining of these digital currencies—which uses computing power to solve complex math problem— has given rise to a new form of cyber attack: cryptojacking. Cryptojacking may sound like a way to steal someone's cryptocurrency assets, but it's a less obvious form of theft.

You’ve secured your cloud identities. You’ve hardened your cloud security posture. You’ve configured strong cloud access controls. But there’s still one more thing you need in order to secure your cloud environment: a cloud workload protection platform, or CWPP. Cloud workload protection platforms secure the workloads that run on your cloud — which are distinct from the infrastructure, user identities and configurations that form the foundation of your cloud environment.

Tetra Defense, an Arctic Wolf® company, partnered with Chainalysis to analyze the link between the Karakurt cyber extortion group to both Conti and Diavol ransomware through Tetra’s digital forensics and Chainalysis’ blockchain analytics. As recent leaks have revealed, Conti and Trickbot are complicated operations with sophisticated structures. But, our findings indicate that web is even wider than originally thought, to include additional exfiltration-only operations.

April Patch Tuesday brings 145 vulnerability fixes from Microsoft — the highest number in 19 months—including CVE-2022-26809, a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Windows Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Runtime library that impacts all supported Windows products. Notably, Microsoft also released security updates for Windows 7, an end-of-life product since January 2020, which highlights the severity of CVE-2022-26809.

On Monday, April 11, 2022, NGINX published a security blog post detailing three vulnerabilities in the NGINX LDAP reference implementation. NGINX is web server software that also performs reverse proxy, load balancing, email proxy, and HTTP cache services. No CVE has been assigned to these vulnerabilities at this time. The reference implementation uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to authenticate users of NGINX proxied applications.

According to the 2021 Devo SOC Performance ReportTM — which is based on the results of a survey of more than 1,000 security practitioners — having an understaffed SOC or constant turnover of security talent can cripple an organization’s security posture. Let’s look at some of the root causes that can lead to these two interconnected problems.

Good security may come from strong defenses, but strong security comes from a good offense. This is especially true for network security, where minutes can make the difference between a breach and a near miss. For example, if an unknown IP address triggers an alert for suspicious or abusive behavior, the faster you can isolate and block that address, the less likely it is that the person or entity at the other end can do damage.

According to the 2021 Devo SOC Performance ReportTM — which is based on the results of a survey of more than 1,000 security practitioners — having an understaffed SOC or constant turnover of security talent can cripple an organization’s security posture. Let’s look at some of the root causes that can lead to these two interconnected problems.

In our second episode, we speak with Elastic’s Product Marketing Director James Spiteri, an experienced security practitioner turned product marketer with a passion for making security accessible and easy for anyone and everyone.