The Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA or GLB Act), or financial modernization act, is a bi-partisan federal regulation passed in 1999 to modernize the financial industry. It repealed vast swathes of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the Bank Holding Act of 1956, allowing commercial banks to offer financial services such as investments or insurance. It also controls how financial institutions deal with their customer's private information.
It’s no secret that the U.S. power grid is one of the main foundations of the nation’s economy, infrastructure, and daily way of life. Now that almost everything is digitized, it is hinging on it even more. We wouldn’t be able to use even most vending machines (not to mention cell towers or the internet) without a working electrical supply, and the importance of keeping it safe cannot be understated. Thankfully, a lot of positive changes have already been made.
Elon Musk's ascension isn't the first thing to cause waves of scams on Twitter, and it certainly won't be the last. On July 20th of 2022, data belonging to over 5 million Twitter users was put up for sale on the internet underground for $30,000. The FTC reported that we've experienced a recent "gold mine for scammers" and the April bump to a 10,000-character limit (for Twitter Blue) only makes things more interesting.
At the turn of the most recent century, the financial world was in a moment of unregulated growth, which lead to some serious corporate misdeeds in the United States. This presented the opportunity for two senators to enact a new law to ensure accurate and reliable financial reporting for public companies in the US. The result was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002. But what does financial reporting have to do with cybersecurity and IT compliance?
Attackers always seek the easiest path to get into our systems and compromise data. System misconfigurations and insecure default settings are often the criminals' favorite vectors since these errors allow them easy access to critical systems and data. The rise of misconfiguration errors was primarily driven by cloud data storage implementations deployed without appropriate access controls.
The NSA has published a guide about how to mitigate against attacks involving the BlackLotus bootkit malware, amid fears that system administrators may not be adequately protected against the threat. The BlackLotus UEFI bootkit made a name for itself in October 2022, when it was seen being sold on cybercrime underground forums for $5,000.
If you’re busy securing the perimeter, mandating strong authentication practices, and restricting software downloads, you may be missing the mark. (Just to be clear: if you are doing those things, keep it up. You’re off to a good start, and none of what follows here replaces classic and vital cybersecurity measures.) Protecting your organization from outside threats is foundational to any effective cybersecurity strategy.
In the early days of computer networking, the idea of restricted permissions was shunned. Network administrators could access every system in the environment. In some extreme cases, a CEO would demand full administrative access to a network, thinking that this would protect against a rogue employee. As you can imagine, this set up a point of failure beyond logic.
Zero trust is a hot topic in cybersecurity, and for a good reason. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to securing your data and networks; rather, zero trust offers a more holistic perspective comprised of many different safety measures and practices and a shift in perspective on security.
They say character isn’t gained in a crisis; it’s displayed in one. By the time the disaster hits, the time for preparation has passed. But what if you could go through that earth-shattering event beforehand so when the time came, you’d be ready? Well, in security, you can. And it's not called cheating – it's called Red Teaming.
