Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Bringing on your first cybersecurity professional is a major milestone for any growing business. This strategic hire signifies that your company recognizes the increasing risks that come with growing your business and is committed to protecting and building trust with your customers. Because this is such an important role, knowing when to make this hire and how to find the ideal candidate is crucial. ‍

Japan’s Golden Week is one of the most anticipated holiday seasons in the region, but for IT and network operations teams it’s a well-known pressure test. As businesses reopen after a full shutdown, millions of workers log in simultaneously at 9:00 AM local time, creating an intense and rapid traffic surge. At Cato Networks, we’ve come to anticipate this moment each year. But this time, our goal wasn’t just to ‘handle it’.

Identity-based attacks have become the predominant vector for sophisticated threat actors targeting enterprise networks, particularly those using Microsoft Active Directory. Active Directory (AD), which serves as the authentication and authorization framework in over 90% of organizations, represents a critical attack surface that, when compromised, provides adversaries with extensive capabilities for lateral movement, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration.

Ransomware attacks are projected to occur every 2 seconds by 2031, up from every 11 seconds in 2021. Organizations paid approximately $813.55 million to ransomware groups in 2024. Email remains the primary attack vector, with malicious attachments twice as common as phishing links. Organizations with compromised backups face $3M average recovery costs, with 45% requiring more than a month to recover. Active ransomware groups increased 55% from Q1 2023 (29) to Q1 2024 (45).

Modern security teams face a dual challenge: they’re bombarded with alerts while still missing critical signals that indicate real threats. Fidelis Active Threat Detection tackles this problem by correlating weak signals across multiple phases of attacks, transforming them into actionable intelligence. Let’s examine the technical mechanics behind this capability within the Fidelis Elevate platform.

I got this Coinbase-related scam in my personal inbox last week. Coinbase is one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange sites. So big and trusted, it’s the first cryptocurrency exchange to be added to the US S&P 500. I’ve been a Coinbase member from the beginning, so this email got my attention. I was pretty skeptical from the start, and upon further exploration, it was definitely a scam.

Commodity phishing kits are increasingly serving dynamically generated phishing pages, according to researchers at ESET. These kits allow unskilled threat actors to launch sophisticated attacks tailored to individual users. ESET describes one of these attacks, using a phishing email that informed the user of an unfamiliar sign-in to their account.

If it’s worth building, it’s worth securing. Vibe coding has been generating a lot of buzz. While automating and coding with AI isn’t new, vibe coding holds the promise of democratizing software development: simply describe what you want in natural language and let the LLM do the rest.

At this stage in AI's evolution, we’ve all heard the big promises - and overpromises - from vendors. But what about the people on the front lines of security operations? How are real practitioners feeling about using AI in their day-to-day work? In a recent webinar with guest speaker Allie Mellen, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, we dug into how AI is actually being adopted in the SOC - what’s working, what’s not, and what's getting lost in the noise.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with traditional SOC. Many SOC teams do great work within this structure. But there are also serious issues with the three-tier model - it’s rigid, costly, and unsustainable for any company that isn’t a large enterprise. In the push to address these limitations, the concept of an “autonomous SOC” has emerged, with some vendors already claiming to offer fully autonomous solutions.