Why leveraging live environment simulations and putting ICS tools to the test is the best way to evaluate their fitness. Track and field was one of my favorite sports growing up. I didn’t begin competitively participating until I was a teenager, but I was instantly hooked once I started. Why? Because the clock didn’t lie. The tape measure didn’t lie. The fastest time always won, and the longest throw always won. I like to think of ICS security tools in a similar way.

Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fear and uncertainty surrounding the current global health and economic situation as well as sudden shifts and exposures in IT environments to launch COVID-19 related attack campaigns. The bad guys are moving full-steam ahead in their efforts to lure victims by playing on their fears.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. In these strange times certain platforms have gained increased popularity, Zoom being one appears to have attracted a lot of attention and not just from it’s users. Both sides of infosec have taken a bite. The news appears to be changing rapidly as Zoom react and deal with it. What is really true about the claims?

Maximizing productivity from a remote environment, particularly if it’s a new arrangement, can be a multifaceted challenge. Enabling employees to plan out their time, optimize their workspace, and minimize distractions are all important, but another key part of ensuring continuity from anywhere is finding ways to be digitally organized, using the tools at their disposal to label, organize and secure content even outside of your organization’s four walls.

Are you using Venmo to send and receive payments? People use Venmo for everything, and in these times when no one wants to handle actual money for fear of spreading infection, Venmo is a brilliant idea. Of course, the difference between Venmo and other mobile payment applications is that Venmo adds a social networking component to its process. While this makes things very easy for transacting payments, it creates some serious privacy concerns.

Coronavirus has disrupted daily life for so many around the world in a shockingly short span of time. Lifestyles have shifted. A new normal, albeit a panic-stricken one, has set in. One-third of the global population is under lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus. Many organizations have adopted temporary work-from-home measures to keep themselves up and running.

Outsourcing, digitization, and globalization have led to new products and services, increased specialization, lower costs, and better access for customers and organizations alike. They've also introduced significant cyber risk, particularly the risk of unintended data exposure in the form of a data breach or data leak. In fact, a recent study by the Ponemon Institute and IBM put the average cost of a data breach at $3.92 million.

Outsourcing, digitization, and globalization have created new products and services, increased specialization, lowered costs, and improved access for customers and organizations alike. The downside is they've introduced cyber risk. Particularly the risk of data breaches and data leaks. In fact, a recent study by the Ponemon Institute and IBM put the average cost of a data breach at $3.92 million.

What’s happened? Well, Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) happened. Okay, smart alec. I know about that. What else is going on? Well, because so many people are (wisely) staying at home, they’re using videoconferencing and chat technology like Zoom to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. In fact, Zoom says that daily usage has soared from approximately 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to over 200 million today. Zoom must be pleased. I’m sure they are.

Whether you're making API calls from Node.js or in the browser, connection failures are going to happen eventually. Some request errors are valid. Maybe the endpoint was wrong or the client sent the wrong data. Other times you can be sure that the error is the result of a problem with the connection to the server or one of the many hops in-between. While API and web service monitoring can inform you about the problem, a more active solution can take care of it for you.