First the good news: according to a published report there were more than 16,000 software vulnerabilities disclosed during the first nine months of this year. Now, that’s quite a few vulnerabilities that could enable attackers, exploits, and malware to scurry onto an enterprise environment. However, it is 7 percent fewer vulnerabilities than 2017.
Last year the OWASP Top 10 committee was prophetic in at least one of its inclusions in the update to its industry benchmark list. For the first time, the group included insecure APIs as one of the most common attack vectors that developers need to avoid adding to their code when creating software. Looking back on 2018, you can see why they sounded the warning.
Mariottt International has suffered what can be considered one of the largest data breaches in history, trailing only the 2013 Yahoo breach. The world’s largest hotel chain said some 500 million customer records were compromised.
This year’s online holiday shopping season was kicked off to tremendous fanfare, as deal hunters went crazy last week with record-breaking spending. According to USA Today, holiday sales on Cyber Monday topped $7.9 billion in just the US alone. Meanwhile, mega retailer Amazon reported that Cyber Monday was the single biggest global shopping day in its company history—people ordered more than 18 million toys from Amazon on Cyber Monday and Black Friday combined.
If your organization has a healthy cybersecurity culture, consider yourself lucky — less than five percent of organizations do.
Phishing remains a key attack vector for bad actors to compromise not just individual user accounts, but also to establish a foothold in the entire infrastructure of a given organization. This is possible because attackers know one thing very well: a company’s first line of defense, its staff, is also its weakest security layer.
In May 2017, the WannaCry ransomware took copious amounts of data hostage and demanded hefty sums in exchange for the decryption keys. The contagion, allegedly the work of North Korean hackers, spread like wildfire, infecting countless systems worldwide and dealing billions of dollars in damages. Some victims ceded to the attackers’ demands, but few got their data back.
BYOD programs have had a mixed track record over the years. Some say they increase mobility, flexibility, efficiency and collaboration, leading to a more productive workforce overall. Other businesses still shun the practice outright.
Many organizations today are adopting a multi-cloud strategy, using services from several cloud providers and deploying offerings such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to meet a variety of business needs.
The lack of political leadership to face targeted attacks is contributing to the poor job the UK is doing on its national security strategy, says a UK government report discussing the cyber security of the nation’s critical national infrastructure.
The advanced attack targeting Pakistan described by Cylance mentions an evasion technique that incapacitates the security solutions provided by 8 vendors. Bitdefender products have been successfully blocking this threat since 2016. We conducted our own analysis of this malware and we have new findings to share.
EU data protection legislation aims to give users more control over their personal data, and threatens companies with fines for collecting data without user consent and for data breaches. Countless companies have been struggling to become GDPR compliant, but it seems major tech players may not have taken it seriously. After Facebook and Google drew criticism for violating EU’s data protection law, it is now Microsoft’s turn to take the heat.
