There are never enough hours in the day to do everything. I think we all have a to-do list that is at least twice as long as the time available to complete it. To cope, we prioritize what’s “on fire” or what has the most potential to immediately cause damage if it’s not taken care of. Often the things we “should” focus on fall to the wayside as they are outshined by what we must do immediately.

Digital and cloud transformation has unlocked new business opportunities and operational efficiencies for organisations. But migration to the cloud also means our approach to deploying applications and services has radically changed, as enterprises move away from traditional data centres. Likewise, flexible working means users have also moved away from traditional offices and branches.

As part of our recently released 2022 Threat Roundup report, Forescout Vedere Labs described how the Mirai IoT botnet continues to evolve via new variants and adaptations, such as Gafgyt and RapperBot, more than six years after it started taking over IoT devices and had its source code leaked.

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a security solution designed to protect web applications from various attacks, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and others. There are two types of WAF: on-premise and cloud-based.

Many of the businesses that already have revenue-generating web applications are starting an API-first program. Now, old monolithic apps are being broken into microservices developed in elastic and flexible service-mesh architecture. The common question most organizations grapple with is – how to enhance application security designed for web apps to APIs and API security? Protecting APIs against modern cyber threats requires going beyond the traditional solutions.

Defining and implementing a network microsegmentation strategy is paramount to securing the network and protecting assets. However, it’s also a time-consuming and resource-intensive endeavor. This means it’s vital that enterprises are confident that their zone-to-zone security policy is functioning as intended.

Rapid digitization means that organizations are now more connected than ever. Most organizations now host a combination of interconnected IT, OT, IoT and sometimes IoMT devices in their networks, which has increased their attack surface. Forescout’s data shows that around 24% of connected devices in every organization are no longer traditional IT.

The last decade has seen a notable step in the evolution of network security and operations as companies move to a Software Defined Network (SDN) model, centralising control of switches, routers, VPN concentrators, load balancers and SD-WAN devices. This simplifies the management and operation of the network, driving down operational costs and reducing risk through better patch and update management.