Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Your passwords should be at least 16 characters long. The longer your password is, the more secure it is. This is because of something known as password entropy which refers to how the combination of the characters that make up a password determines the strength of it. Password entropy considers the length and character variation of a password to calculate how difficult it would be for cybercriminals to crack or guess it.

Phishing is the weapon of choice for many adversaries. And it’s easy to understand why: Users fall victim to attacks in under 60 seconds on average, novice cybercriminals can launch effective phishing campaigns thanks to off-the-shelf phishing kits and generative AI, and above all, it works — 71% of organizations reported at least one successful attack in 2023.

Adversaries are increasingly attacking cloud environments, as evidenced by a 75% surge in cloud intrusions year-over-year in 2023. They are also getting faster: The fastest breakout time was clocked at just over 2 minutes, according to the CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report. Today’s adversaries are outpacing legacy security approaches. Disjointed point solutions can’t scale or provide visibility into a rapidly growing attack surface.

In 2016, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland fell prey to a vicious and devastating attack.

(A thought from The Matrix: Neo likely used a SIEM before he took the red pill and could see the matrix without one...) One of the best ways to monitor security-related activities for your organization is to collect audit logs from every network device and analyze those logs for activities which violate acceptable behavior. This is precisely the role of a SIEM or Security Information and Event Manager. Let me simplify your life by providing some best practice suggestions for deploying and using a SIEM.

Businesses manage a series of balancing acts every day—between innovation and reliability, for instance, investment or profit, speed or security. Each leader contributes to how decisions are weighed and made, and traditionally CISOs have been expected to operate at one end of that scale, as the chief protector of the business.

As businesses engage in increasingly complex and interdependent relationships, ensuring all parties maintain high cybersecurity standards becomes essential. One method to achieve this is using security scores, which are similar to personal credit scores, and assessing the efficacy of an organization's cybersecurity program. However, there are certain changes and additions that should be made to how scoring is conducted that will ensure a more accurate scores, which will benefit stakeholders at all levels.