As I sit in the 2024 Seattle Convene conference this week and listen to speaker after speaker talk about their successful security awareness training programs, one thing is perfectly clear. They all prefer carrots and fewer sticks. A question human risk managers frequently ask me is what role negative consequences should play in a successful security awareness training program?

Thirty-four percent of state and local government entities were hit by ransomware in 2024, a new report from Sophos has found. While this is a decrease compared to the attack rate in 2023, the mean cost of recovery for these entities has more than doubled to $2.83 million. Seventy-two percent of ransom demands made to state and local government organizations in 2024 were for $1 million or more, with 37% of demands for $5 million or more.

The momentous rise of AI continues, and more and more customers are demanding concrete results from these early implementations. The time has come for tech companies to prove what AI can do beyond adding conversational chat agents to website sidebars. Fortunately, it’s easy to see how cloud data protection has already benefited from advancements in AI and ML. Headline-grabbing large-language models are also making protecting data in the cloud easier to manage across organizations. ‍

In an economy where securing data can mean the difference between success and failure, implementing proven data exfiltration prevention strategies is more critical than ever. According to a study conducted by IBM, a data breach can cost global organizations an average of nearly $5 million per incident. In addition to the financial ramifications, data theft can lead to lower customer trust, a loss of future revenue, and even potential lawsuits.

In this version of the Hacker’s Playbook Threat Coverage round-up, we are highlighting attack coverage for several new threats, including those discovered via original research by the SafeBreach Labs team. SafeBreach customers can select and run these attacks and more from the SafeBreach Hacker’s Playbook to ensure coverage against these advanced threats. Additional details about the threats and our coverage can be seen below.

You can tell if you have spyware on your device by looking for signs such as your device’s battery draining quickly, overheating, increased pop-ups or data usage and unfamiliar apps. Spyware is a kind of malware that, once unknowingly installed on your device, allows cybercriminals to spy on you and steal your private information. This information could be used by cybercriminals or sold on the dark web to commit fraud or identity theft.

Snyk Code was the only code security tool shortlisted by developers as an AI tool they’ve been regularly using this past year or are looking forward to using next year in Stack Overflow’s recent 2024 AI Search and Developer Tools survey. This underlines Snyk’s dominance as the favorite AI security tool of both developers and security teams and confirms that Snyk Code is providing immense value to developers.

Read our key takeaways from Drupal GovCon 2024, where Drupal experts explored secure open-source solutions for U.S. government websites and collaborative tools.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to revolutionize various sectors, ensuring it is developed and deployed in alignment with ethical standards and fundamental rights is critical for businesses that use it. The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), formally adopted on March 13, 2024, addresses this critical necessity by establishing a comprehensive and detailed legal framework for AI systems within the EU.

In part one of our series on PCI DSS 4.0, we covered the updates in the latest version 4.0.1 and how to operationalize those changes. In this blog we are going to dig deeper into Requirement 11.6, how to interpret the nuance and automate the current guidance. Guidance that will become a mandate in March, 2025. Let’s start with what Requirement 11.6 is and why it’s so important.