Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

One of the lasting changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic is that it forced organizations to rethink the concept of a workspace. As remote work became inevitable, IT teams had to enable the secure transition to remote work almost overnight. Opening up offices, on the contrary, will likely be executed in planned phases. A United States Department of State advisory recommends that workforces return to an office in three phases, with the employees most at risk coming in at a later stage.

The past decade has witnessed many organizations adapting to a digital workspace, replacing the traditional physical offices setups with virtual workplaces encompassing all the technologies that employees require to get their work done. Because of the pandemic, even companies that were once against the concept of a distributed workforce have now been forced to embrace remote work. Though a digital workspace offers a more flexible user experience for employees, it comes with its own set of challenges.

The job of IT admins and IT security analysts are, without a doubt, some of the most important jobs in any company. When things are running smoothly, it is easy for everyone to forget they exist. However, the moment things go askew, everyone points fingers at them. IT security professionals are expected to know everything. Most of them are self-taught and have learned on-the-job. Over time, experience has turned them into battle-hardened soldiers.

Securing access to business resources has always been of high priority for admins and IT teams. In the wake of the pandemic, workforces are more distributed than ever before, and 76 percent of global office workers state that they would like to work from home even when the pandemic is over.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, even companies that had said no to BYOD have come to terms with it, as a fair share of remote work would not even be possible without such a policy. Pandemic or no pandemic, on-the-go data access has always enabled employees to get work done quickly and efficiently. It guarantees better communication with colleagues, improves customer service, and device familiarity brings employee satisfaction and increased productivity.

Universal Health Services (UHS), a Fortune 500 company and healthcare services provider, has reportedly shut down systems at facilities throughout the United States after the Ryuk ransomware hit its network on September 27, according to an article on the Health IT Security website. What is Ryuk ransomware? Ryuk is a sophisticated ransomware threat that targets businesses, hospitals, and government institutions across the world.

In this blog in the IT security under attack series, we will learn about an advanced Active Directory (AD) domain controller (DC) attack to obtain persistence in AD environments. Dubbed DCShadow, this is a late-stage kill chain attack that allows a threat actor with admin (domain or enterprise admin) credentials to leverage the replication mechanism in AD to register a rogue domain controller in order to inject backdoor changes to an AD domain.