The need for improved security for remote workers requires more resources; however, the ongoing economic conditions often require lowering costs. A Microsoft survey found most leaders increased budgets for security and compliance (58 and 65% noting an increase), while 81% of respondents also reported pressure to lower security costs overall. IT is therefore tasked with protecting their company’s networks from the remote work-related threats while operating with leaner budgets. Doing this effectively will require multiple strategies to make sure your network is secure with the shift to remote work. Here are three examples on how broader security can be achieved.
Building security and privacy into product development is more critical today than ever before. First introduced through the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing initiative in the early 2000s, the well-known security development lifecycle (SDL) is a framework designed to do just that. It was originally devised to enhance software security, but an SDL process can and should be applied to all types of products to help root out security and privacy vulnerabilities, while establishing long-term resilience in the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
Social engineering is a term that refers to efforts by hackers and cybercriminals to use people — rather than technology — to gain access to sensitive systems and information. It’s a problem that information security experts have been wrestling with for years and one that, in the midst of COVID-19, has become both more prevalent and more challenging.
Meet Stephanie Benoit-Kurtz, lead of cybersecurity faculty at the University of Phoenix – Las Vegas. She is also director of cybersecurity for Station Casinos in Las Vegas. She has spent three decades in the IT industry, working for a variety of large and small organizations and as a consultant. In the early days of her career, despite being part of the team responsible for implementing decisions at the IT company where she was employed, she “was routinely left out of the decision-making process. Here, we talk to Benoit-Kurtz about how the cybersecurity space has changed over time, and how the industry can embrace more individuals to meet demand and close the cybersecurity gap.
Building a cyber-resilient enterprise informed by threat intelligence is not an easy task. Risks and requirements are often as unique and diverse as organizations themselves. Determining factors like industry, size, and market contribute to one simple truth: a one-size-fits-all approach to incorporating threat intelligence does not exist. Some invariants, however, do remain; successful threat intelligence programs must staff the right people in the right positions. Below, I’ll introduce four core threat intelligence focuses to consider as businesses plan and allocate budgets for 2021:
Securing identities and their privileges and access should be at the center of your strategy for reducing your cloud attack surface. The old network perimeter, with its limited number of points of ingress secured with firewalls and other perimeter defenses has given way to a distributed arrangement. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) today is the new IT, and cloud identities are the new perimeter with thousands of users and points of potential failure existing outside of your traditional security protocols. The greatest threats to this new perimeter include:
The cyber intent strategy is to seek out the reconnaissance traffic that precedes an attack and manipulate it so well that the attack never succeeds. Leveraging and countering malicious cyber intent as your earliest defense draws from information warfare. Investing a small misdirection here could pay dividends later.
The role of the chief information security officer – or CISO for short – is to understand a corporation’s cyber threat landscape and know where vulnerabilities lie. And given the relentless increase in sophisticated hacking, their clout and importance to the CEO and Board is increasing exponentially.
What is causing digital fraud to rise year over year? From current trends and consumer attitudes to technological enhancements and more sophisticated tactics, let’s take a look at the top nine reasons digital fraud is rapidly increasing:
Organizations' migration to the cloud is a broad term that encompasses many different trends: (1) Moving existing applications from private data centers to AWS, Azure, or the Google Cloud Platform as cloud service providers (CSPs), often referred to as lift-and-shift or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS); (2) Completely restructuring how applications are built to make heavier use of prepackaged services available on these cloud service platforms – often referred to as lift-and-reshape, serverless, or platform-as-a-service (PaaS); (3) Choosing to forgo running copies of standard applications instead of having the application vendor host them is sometimes referred to as drop-and-shop or software-as-a-service (SaaS).