App security is too important to be an afterthought. With the threats facing modern web applications, organizations need to find a new way to ensure protection without impeding innovation. To move forward, security and DevOps will need to work together to solve the challenges they face—in terms of both security and organizational politics.
Proofpoint, Inc. and Ponemon Institute released the results of a new study on “The Cost of Cloud Compromise and Shadow IT.” The average cost of cloud account compromises reached $6.2 million over a 12-month period, according to over 600 IT and IT security professionals in the U.S. In addition, 68% of these survey respondents believe cloud account takeovers present a significant security risk to their organizations, with more than half indicating the frequency and severity of cloud account compromises has increased over the last 12 months.
Palo Alto Cortex Xpanse research team spent the first three months of 2021 monitoring the activities of attackers to better understand how much of an edge adversaries have in detecting systems that are vulnerable to attack. They followed a benchmark that they call “mean time to inventory” (MTTI), which is simply how long it takes somebody to start scanning for a vulnerability after it’s announced.
Xpanse research found 79% of observed exposures occurred in the cloud.
The traditional approach to securing cloud access goes against everything that DevOps is about. Regardless of what providers of legacy IAM, PAM, and other security solutions claim about their ability to scale with cloud application dev cycles, they’re concealing the extensive time, effort, and resources required to manage their solutions – three things that are in short supply in DevOps teams. So, the challenge becomes: how can enterprises integrate world class technologies for securing identities and access to cloud environments without bringing DevOps to a grinding halt?
News quickly spread about a vulnerable call recording app for iPhone named “Call Recorder,” or “Acr call recorder,” as its listing in the Apple App Store states. TechCrunch was the first outlet to flag a design flaw with the mobile application’s API when it obtained call recordings from AWS S3 cloud storage to prove it was insecure and therefore open to API-based attacks. The weaknesses exhibited by the mobile app represent a vital shift occurring in cybersecurity towards the importance of the protection and hardening of APIs. From this instance alone, we can learn a number of valuable lessons as API attacks are set to rise drastically this year. Most of the issues in the Call Recorder vulnerability map directly to the OWASP API Security Top 10, a list that captures the most common API mistakes. This document is a great reference for DevOps and security teams that are looking to implement strong API security that can be applied to both web and mobile application systems, including those in the cloud.
As we continue to embrace hybrid work, chief information security officers (CISOs) and compliance teams are wading through and in some cases even overlooking many different areas related to collaboration security. We’ve highlighted the top three areas of risk in this post which should keep CISOs awake at night. The remote workplace continues to evolve at lightning speed, and so too should CISOs – or risk sensitive materials ending up in the wrong hands.
Life used to be simpler for security teams. In the legacy world, they had a clear understanding of the environment they needed to protect—typically the standard LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP). Within this straightforward, relatively static infrastructure, they could carve out a network layer all for themselves to implement the security technologies of their choice. They also had a direct line to vendors to discuss the security controls that needed to be implemented. But in the age of DevOps and cloud, things just don’t work this way anymore. Four key changes have left security teams struggling to protect applications and organizations.
While the flexibility granted to remote workers is game changing, employers have new concerns about the security of a hybrid setup. COVID-19 vaccinations are now within reach for a majority of Americans, meaning enterprises need to re-examine the remote office model many were forced to adopt over the past year. Experts anticipate that a hybrid work model with an equal number of workers in office and remote to be the new model of choice.
If you’d like to learn how your enterprise can re-tool security strategies and ensure security for both remote and in-office employees, keep reading on for a conversation with cybersecurity expert Brent Johnson, CISO at Bluefin, on how leadership can address security challenges specific to a hybrid work model.
The Seattle Theatre Group (STG) recently used a cloud video surveillance to solve their surveillance and server management challenges. The solution helped STG streamline their video security infrastructure by being compatible with existing IP cameras and networks.
