For the past 20 years, I’ve served as CISO for companies across different sectors. In this role, I have shouldered responsibility for protecting each organization from a wide swath of rapidly developing cybersecurity threats. I have also learned firsthand how much stress security leaders face day-to-day. Recent conversations with my peers have shown stress in cybersecurity is an industry-wide problem. The CISO role is one of the most stressful in any organization.

Despite the growing interest in cloud accounts by opportunistic and state-sponsored actors, too many organizations fail to implement basic security measures to protect their cloud apps, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) for administrators and users. This is the concerning finding of a report recently released by Microsoft, according to which just 22% of Azure Active Directory customers implement strong authentication mechanisms such as MFA or passwordless authentication.

Microsoft released a valuable new Azure feature in December of 2021: custom security attributes. This feature is still in preview. Custom security attributes enable organizations to define new attributes to meet their needs. These attributes can be used to store information or, more notably, implement access controls with Azure attribute-based access control (ABAC). Azure ABAC, which is also in preview, enables an organization to define access rules based on the value of an object’s attribute.

On Jan. 26, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published its widely anticipated final version of its zero trust architecture strategy, identifying top cybersecurity priorities for the federal government. This achievement raises the country’s cyber defense strategy to a level commensurate with the “increasingly sophisticated and persistent threat campaigns” it faces.

As Egnyte’s business and customer base grows, we have an engineering responsibility to provide data quickly and at high availability. In this blog I’ll recap one of those efforts—a proof-of-concept API caching project that serves our large folder listing capabilities and has future applications in other Egnyte services.

In 2021, the WhiteSource Diffend automated malware detection platform detected and reported more than 1,200 malicious npm packages that were responsible for stealing credentials and crypto, as well as for running botnets and collecting host information from machines on which they were installed.

Today, anyone can contribute to some of the world’s most important software platforms and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, the Linux kernel or Python. They can do this because these platforms are open source, meaning they are collaboratively developed by global communities. What if we applied the same principles of democratization and free access to cybersecurity?