In my previous article, we discussed how organizations are shifting how IT resources are deployed and managed. We covered three methods in particular: automated image creation and deployment, immutable image deployment and containers. We’ll now explore how organizations can make the best of these methods in a dynamic environment.

The CMMC enforcement model will require a significant adjustment to the way contractors conduct government business – from procurement to execution. In Part 2 of this series, I discussed the possible impacts of having your company’s security rating made public. In Part 3, I would like to discuss the impact of having one unified standard for cybersecurity on a company’s compliance practices.

As a regular reader of Tripwire, you are aware that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Way back in 2015, when the world was an entirely different place, I contributed an article that offered some tips for protecting yourself. Since that article, other scams have taken a front seat towards compromising our security. They are not new, but they seem to be the new “flavor of the day.”

We at The State of Security are committed to helping aspiring information security professionals reach their full potential. Towards that end, we compiled a list of the top 10 highest paying jobs in the industry. We even highlighted the U.S. cities that tend to reward security personnel with the best salaries, amenities and other benefits. Knowing which job title you’d like and where you’d like to live goes a long way towards advancing one’s infosec career.

Healthcare continues to see staggering growth in breaches to patient health information. In the first half of 2019 alone, 32 million health records were breached, compared to 15 million records in the entire year of 2018. However, this trend of growing cyber breaches in healthcare is likely to persist due to the following characteristics of the healthcare industry...

An estimated 16,000 websites are believed to be running a vulnerable and no-longer-maintained WordPress plugin that can be exploited to display pop-up ads and redirect visitors to webpages containing porn, scams, and–worst of all–malware designed to infect users’ computers. Researchers at WordFence went public about how hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in a third-party WordPress plugin called Rich Reviews to inject malvertising code into vulnerable WordPress sites.

Like storytelling, data visualization can be used to provide a narrative about your organization’s cybersecurity posture. Cybersecurity is never a single thing; it is an amalgamation of an often growing list of issues that never seem to end. So in order to make some sense of what it means for the health of your organization, I am combining several metrics to define a singular one—cybersecurity posture—in a visual manner.

Just a few years ago, most IT environments were made up of deployed servers on which personnel installed applications, oftentimes as many as that one system could handle. They then remained and ran that way for years. In the meantime, the IT team maintained the system and updated the applications as needed. Sometimes there were test versions of those systems, but this wasn’t often. Even then, the OS often didn’t match the production version of the same system.

Information security is an exciting and rapidly growing field for individuals who are interested in protecting users and their data. In an effort to map out the industry as a possible career choice, we recently conducted research into the top 10 infosec jobs based on overall pay grade. We now continue with the second part of our two-part series.

In part one of this series, I addressed what DoD contractors could be doing to prepare for the CMMC security level rating. In part two of the series, I want to discuss our customers’ concerns about the possible impacts of having their company’s security rating made public. According to the CMMC FAQ, all companies conducting business with the DoD must be certified (not just those who handle CUI), and the level of certification for each company will be made public.