All about Virtualization and Cloud Security | Recent Articles:

• Ransomware attacks are on the rise and costing companies millions of dollars, and enterprises need to take steps to protect themselves from these threats.
• Best practices for defending against ransomware include strengthening the overall security posture with stronger access controls such as strong endpoint protection, two-factor authentication, employee training, and data backups.

Ransomware is hitting organizations hard, and there seems to be no end in sight for these damaging attacks on enterprises of all sizes and across industry verticals. With major ransomware news breaking almost daily, enterprises are beginning to take the threat seriously due to the risk of financial losses, business downtime, loss of customers, bad publicity, and other unpleasant results.

“There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

 C.S. Lewis

• 25% of Canadian IT decision-makers report they suffered a COVID-19-themed cyberattack
• IT teams from private and public sectors forced to create in-house policies and cybersecurity trainings for remote workers
• Only 36% of organizations have informed a regulatory body after suffering a data breach

Despite the downsides of replacing on-premise work with remote work, 84% of companies anticipate a consistent expansion of remote work practices, according to a 2020 Remote Work-From-Home Cybersecurity Report published earlier this week.

Hardly a day goes by without a high-profile institution or company announcing that its files have been hacked. Such data breaches can cause financial losses and affect an organization’s reputation for years. A look at high-profile victims like Equifax, Marriot, and British Airways shows they all lacked a clear and complete understanding of their attack surface and the presence of risky endpoints.

High-profile security breaches come every week, creating a guessing game of who will make the headlines next. Recent compromises include Equifax, Marriot, and British Airways, which just received the largest fine in GDPR history for the breach of its customer financial data.

Recent attacks on MSPs have confirmed once again that both managed service providers and customers are increasingly targeted by cybercriminals, and the attacks often succeed.

The Facebook data breach of 2018, probably the biggest of the year, illustrates better than any other example that no company, big or small, is immune to hackers. One would expect a company of Facebook’s size to sustain top-tier research and development for cybersecurity, but last year’s breaches prove it’s vulnerable anyway.

2020 will bring the end of Windows 7, following Microsoft’s announcement that it will no longer offer support and updates for the operating system starting January 14, 2020. But companies appear to have had a good run with it and are not yet ready to say goodbye, a Kollective survey of 1,000 US and UK enterprise IT professionals has found.

The increase in cloud adoption has significantly impacted the way organizations think about security, in the sense that threat visibility into infrastructures has become mandatory in light of how the threat landscape has evolved. Starting from the premise that threat actors can and will breach infrastructures, organizations need to begin focusing on detecting and responding to these breaches as swiftly as possible to restore affected environments, ensure business continuity, and stay compliant with new regulations.

Targetted attacks and advanced persistent threats have become the new normal in enterprises the world over. As high profile attacks multiply, the need for comprehensive threat intelligence across the organization becomes mandatory.

The use of machine learning algorithms in the security industry has become a necessity with the rapid growth of malware samples. Obfuscation, polymorphism and encryption have caused a surge in new malware, which now numbers in the hundreds of millions of samples hunting on the internet.