IT and security decision-makers need to prepare for an expanding digital world and consider how increasing cloud usage, consumer distrust, new legislation, and a permanently distributed workforce impacts the ways in which they do business.
Cyber Security
Cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and even the occasional disgruntled employee are constantly looking to gain unauthorized access for a variety of purposes: theft of money, cyber espionage, personal information for sale or for use in scams, and damage to critical infrastructure for just a few of the most common.
So how does an organization mitigate an entire world full of continual cyber attacks? Just as buildings have a number of necessary elements of physical security: access control, cameras, alarms and so on; there are similar key elements of cyber security that are absolutely vital for just about any modern business.
It starts with identifying and closing the most common doors that attackers use. For example, phishing attacks on employees are far and away the most common initial point of entry. The breach of even a low-level employee account can quickly turn into an escalation in access privileges and the ability to reach sensitive information. This is also true of smart devices, which are generally more poorly secured than computers and phones.
SDP helps companies to secure the connection when moving data into the cloud for disaster recovery by shifting perimeter defenses to the software of the DR application.
Another social media platform API has been abused for data scraping. A listing offering 700 million LinkedIn profiles has appeared on an underground hacking forum.
Data security and cybersecurity are often conflated but require distinct approaches. Traditional cybersecurity, focused on access control and encryption, overlooks the complexities of data consumption.
In a malware attack on Bapco, hackers gained access to the network and loaded the data wiper into the central anti-virus software, from where it was distributed to all machines.
The District of Columbia Board of Elections data breach claimed by a Russian ransomware gang leaked the entire voter roll, including personal information and voting records.
Russian hackers have claimed responsibility for recent DDoS attacks against NATO that disrupted a number of its operations including earthquake relief efforts for the Turkish-Syrian earthquake.
Customers affected by an Azure outage on July 30 were likely trying to access it during a newly confirmed DDoS attack, which Microsoft says was exacerbated by an error in the implementation of their automated defense systems.
Because of the significant damage a DDoS attack can cause, many IT teams will put protecting against the threat high on their agenda. However, what many IT teams may be completely unaware of is that there are a wide variety of different types of DDoS attack vectors in a cybercriminals’ arsenal.
For nearly eight-hours, AWS DNS servers were hit by a sustained DDoS attack. The servers were essentially jammed such that their basic mitigations appeared to have little or no effect.










