Where were you when you first heard about the SolarWinds breach? It’s not unusual for information security professionals to learn about a breach. Keeping track of the news is part of the job. The SolarWinds attack, however, was different for two primary reasons. First, it reached the level of mainstream news. The majority of breaches stay mostly in the industry press.

After a year of lockdown, or nearly full lockdown, due to the ongoing health crisis, we learned a lot from how our organizations responded when we all had to change our work habits to a home-office setup.

Digital attackers are increasingly launching sophisticated campaigns in an effort to target U.S. federal agencies and other organizations. Two recent examples demonstrate this reality. These are the SolarWinds supply chain attack and the HAFNIUM Exchange exploit campaign.

Hidden deep in Google’s release notes for the new version of Chrome that shipped on March 1 is a fix for an “object lifecycle issue.” Or, for the less technically inclined, a major bug. Bugs like these have been common in Chrome, leading some to wonder whether the world’s most popular web browser is as safe as it could be? Google created Chrome as a secure browser and has loaded it with a growing set of security features along the way.

Cybercriminal extortionists have adopted a new tactic to apply even more pressure on their corporate victims: contacting the victims’ customers, and asking them to demand a ransom is paid to protect their own privacy. At the end of March, Bleeping Computer reported that the Clop ransomware gang had not stopped at threatening hacked companies and contacting journalists, but had taken the additional step of direct emailing victims’ customers whose details had been found in stolen data.

Integrity is a word thrown around a lot in the cybersecurity space. That’s not surprising. It is one of the three components that make up the CIA Triad, after all. However, the meaning and use of the word has been relatively limited in many security circles up until now. Let’s take a look at the security industry more broadly. In most conversations dealing with integrity, data security and File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) controls often end up being the primary focal areas.

Asset management is a tricky subject. In many cases, organizations have no idea about how many assets they have, let alone where they are all located. Fortunately, there are tools that can assist with reaching your asset management goals. While Tripwire Enterprise (TE) is great for detecting unauthorized changes on your system and also for ensuring your systems are hardened (as well as stay hardened), you must first get a handle on managing the assets that you’re monitoring.

When it comes to cybersecurity, industrial IT—consisting mainly of operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS)—has failed to keep up with development in the enterprise IT world. That’s mostly because industries’ adoption of internet technology has been slower when compared with enterprises. It would take some time to close the gap, but concerted efforts have already been made to upgrade the security of industrial IT and improve the efficiency of OT and ICS.

Organizations are increasingly turning to containers to fuel their digital transformations. According to BMC, a 2019 survey found that more than 87% of respondents were running containers—up from 55% just two years earlier. Additionally, 90% of survey participants that were running applications in containers were doing so in production. That was up from 84% in 2018 and two-thirds of surveyed IT professionals a year before that.

The latest Honeywell USB Threat Report 2020 indicates that the number of threats specifically targeting Operational Technology systems has nearly doubled from 16% to 28%, while the number of threats capable of disrupting those systems rose from 26% to 59% over the same period. Let’s face it. Critical infrastructure operators in manufacturing, aerospace, energy, shipping, chemical, oil and gas, pulp and paper, water and wastewater, and building automation are heavily relying on USB devices.