The move to the cloud — in many ways — is a return to the early days of computing. When I took my first computer class in 1978, we used an IBM 360 system time share. We rented out time on a remote system — sent our jobs over a modem to a computer at a university — and got back the results of the program run. Today, we’re using the cloud, which is just a fancy version of the old time-share systems.
In May 2019, Verizon Enterprise released the 12th edition of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Researchers analyzed a total of 41,686 security incidents, of which there were 2,013 data breaches, for the publication. More than half (52 percent) of those reported breaches involved some form of hacking. The report listed the most prominent hacking variety and vector combinations, with “vulnerability exploitation” making the top three.
Although DNS rebinding attacks have been known for over a decade now, they are only recently receiving attention as a practical attack surface. In the last year, quite a few popular products have been shown to lack DNS rebinding protections, and as a result, someone could operate them remotely using a malicious web site. Manufacturers have made a habit of giving consumers connected devices that are controlled by unauthenticated HTTP requests via the local network.
The 2017 Deep Root Analytics incident that exposed the sensitive data of 198 million Americans, or almost all registered voters at the time, should remind us of the risks associated with storing information in the cloud. Perhaps the most alarming part is that this leak of 1.1 terabytes of personal data was avoidable. It was simple negligence.
With data breaches regularly marking the headlines, it is no surprise that digital threats constitute an increasingly significant concern for the C-Suite and cyber security experts. What is surprising, however, is that these two groups don’t seem to share the same view of information security. They have different opinions when it comes to the digital threat landscape in general as well as their organization’s level of preparedness in particular.
Detection of change is easy… There, I said it. Anyone can do it. One thousand monkeys with keyboards can pound out scripts to detect change. What is not so easy, what the monkeys can’t do, is reconcile change. Even worse, it’s usually the monkeys who make the changes that bring everything crashing down around your knees. It’s the reconciliation of change that most organizations have the most trouble with. What was the change? When was it made? Who made it? Was it authorized?
Once upon a time, endpoint security was just a hall monitor. It watched for known bad files identified with a simple signature and sent you an alert when the file was blocked. To be safe, it would scan every machine daily, an intrusive activity that slowed down machines and sped up the heart rates of affected users and hapless analysts at help desks.
It’s been nearly a year since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became enforceable. In that span of time, news outlets have reported various stories largely concerning the regulation and its penalties scheme.
As recently as 2017, security and compliance professionals at many of Tripwire’s large enterprise and government customers were talking about migration to the cloud as a possibility to be considered and cautiously explored in the coming years. Within a year, the tone had changed.
