Now more than ever before, the small business sector is beginning to prioritize cybersecurity and cyber liability insurance to mitigate potential crippling financial risk, which is setting the stage for a major trend moving forward: the merging of cybersecurity technology and insurance to mitigate insurer’s risk and provide the best overall coverage for small businesses.
Ransomware – a cyberattack in which attackers hijack computer systems and demand payment to release them – has skyrocketed from a relative rarity a few years ago to the single biggest type of cybercrime today. And there is no end in sight to its growth trajectory. Last year, 2,354 American government entities, healthcare organizations and schools were the victims of ransomware attacks. The average ransomware payout swelled to $178,000 in the first half of 2020, up from $112,000 a year ago, according to ransomware incident response firm Coveware, and few clandestine culprits were caught.
2021 has proven to be busy for law enforcement operations already, taking down numerous high-profile dark web marketplaces and forums including Dark Market (500k users, 2.4k sellers, transactions ~ €140 million), Emotet, Netwalker, and Egregor, with some even producing arrests of site operators. Digital Shadows’ new report, “Cybercriminal law enforcement crackdowns in 2021,” highlights the impact that these takedowns have had to date.
CISA has issued Emergency Directive (ED) 21-02 and Alert AA21-062A addressing critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange products. Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to access on-premises Exchange servers, enabling them to gain persistent system access and control of an enterprise network.
Malaysia Airlines has confirmed it has suffered a "data security incident" via a third-party IT service provider. The company also said the breach had not affected its carrier's core IT infrastructure and systems.
Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC) researchers have discovered CVE-2020-27223, a denial of service vulnerability in Eclipse Jetty, a widely used open source web server and servlet container.
Positive Technologies security researcher Alexander Popov has discovered and fixed five similar issues in the virtual socket implementation of the Linux kernel. These vulnerabilities could be exploited for local privilege escalation, as confirmed by Popov in experiments on Fedora 33 Server. The vulnerabilities, known together as CVE-2021-26708, have received a CVSS v3 base score of 7.0 (high severity).
Unfortunately, diversity is still underrepresented in security. Our profession continues to struggle to attract and/or advance diverse candidates into leadership ranks in numbers that accurately represent a cross section of the working population.
Now that we’ve learned this dependency on the cloud will continue to grow, there are new challenges that organizations have to solve in the year ahead – starting with making these cloud infrastructures more secure. To do this, organizations must reroute the security perimeter to focus on identity. While cloud-based identity can be a complicated concept for a number of reasons, there are a few simple steps organizations can take to evolve their identity access management (IAM) strategies. By moving beyond “effective permissions,” they should instead focus on threats and risks, following a cloud IAM lifecycle approach.
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