Security News
An incomplete identity management strategy has a serious impact on the success of digital transformation, as well as increasing cyber risk exposure. Identity data plays a fundamental role in this, and achieving impactful results is all but impossible without effective identity management.
Nothing ever stays the same for long in IT. New ways to meet the changing requirements of businesses are constantly needed alongside in-house structural and policy reforms, plus the added complication of complying with new and updated regulations. For busy IT staff there isn't always the time to comprehensively strip everything back to build in the new.
Most IT infrastructures evolve over time as the needs of the business and its users change to meet fresh demands and comply with updated organizational policies and regulatory requirements. Because IT staff rarely have the time to orchestrate root and branch transformations, they generally end up layering additional tools and applications on top of, or alongside, the ones they already have to smooth the transition.
As an experienced vulnerability management professional and a former system administrator who specialized in patching and remediated 800,000 vulnerabilities over the course of my career, I can offer some realistic perspective on this topic. One reoccurring discussion I've had is how long it takes for a new vulnerability to get exploited.
Although guidance from the White House and CISA advising on this heightened risk for U.S. businesses and the increase in the proposed budget for cybersecurity within the federal government signals that more resources are needed to properly defend against these risks, this does not necessarily translate to more IT budget or security staff within most organizations in the private sector. Prioritizing the modernization of aging technology stacks will be essential to mitigate rising cybersecurity vulnerabilities and ensure the security of the organization's critical systems and applications from malicious cyber campaigns.
Whether it's through stolen credentials, phishing attacks, or simply user errors, people continue to pose the greatest risk to cybersecurity. While behavioral attacks are nothing new, Verizon's recently released Data Breach Investigations Report shows that it's as bad as ever, with 82% of breaches in the report involving a human element.
In this Help Net Security video, Etai Hochman, CTO at Mirato, talks about Shift Left, a concept that means to find and prevent defects early in the software delivery process. Shifting application security left to engage developers earlier in the software development lifecycle results in faster fixes and less wasted energy prioritizing and fixing vulnerabilities that pose little to no risk.
In the traditional vulnerability management process, the definition of a vulnerability is straightforward, "A CVE or a Software Vulnerability." CVEs are important to be managed; however, it is not sufficient to deal with the complex attack surface. Advanced Vulnerability Management provides a broader approach to vulnerabilities and addresses different security risks in the IT vulnerability landscape.
Bitwarden announced the results of a global survey of enterprise security decision makers, conducted by 451 Research, which explores enterprise password management practices and intent. Weak passwords are vulnerable to password theft or compromise, which has led the enterprise to complement passwords with strategies such as OTP, email verification codes, SMS, or biometric factors.
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about 15 security flaws in Siemens SINEC network management system, some of which could be chained by an attacker to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. "The vulnerabilities, if exploited, pose a number of risks to Siemens devices on the network including denial-of-service attacks, credential leaks, and remote code execution in certain circumstances," industrial security company Claroty said in a new report.