Although the objective of achieving comprehensive cybersecurity measures is not a recent one, it remains an ongoing challenge. Software developers frequently view cybersecurity as a potential market opportunity, motivated to develop an integrated suite of applications that they believe can satisfy their customers’ security requirements. In this pursuit, interoperability with other software is relegated to a secondary consideration and is given inadequate attention during the development process.

Corporations often hold different perspectives on cybersecurity. For these entities, cybersecurity encompasses the entire company’s security architecture, which can be complex due to the diverse business needs of multiple units that may not integrate easily. This is particularly relevant in critical national infrastructure, such as power plants, where automation systems are utilized and may be compatible with some cybersecurity solutions, but not others. As a result, these systems must undergo rigorous validation processes to ensure operations won’t be affected by the installation of new cybersecurity solutions.

One approach to addressing interoperability challenges in cybersecurity is to redefine the concept of “cybersecurity architecture” and think of it as if it was a single, comprehensive “cybersecurity product.” This can be compared to building a car, where the end product is not just a collection of individual components (such as windows or an engine), but rather the fully assembled vehicle. Unfortunately, achieving this level of integration has proven to be a significant challenge for the cybersecurity industry, mostly because the ultimate nature of the “cybersecurity product” is still undefined. In other words, there is no clear consensus on what constitutes a truly comprehensive cybersecurity solution, and as a result, new products are continually being developed with claims of addressing novel security concerns.

Interoperability is a necessary requirement in cybersecurity precisely because the problem of cyber threats remains unresolved. Even if all available cybersecurity software is integrated, new vulnerabilities are discovered daily, prompting the need for innovative solutions. In the previous example, a car solves the problem of mobility, whereas cybersecurity applications cannot entirely rectify the problem of cyberattacks. It is possible that a future may exist where the problem is mostly resolved, but that day has not yet arrived.

Because of this unresolved cybersecurity problem, organizations are less likely to settle on a single solution when they invest in cybersecurity solutions. While it’s in their best interest to do so, they worry they will need the newest features advertised by the newest companies coming into the marketplace. Or worse, they fear that if they are subject to a cyberattack, they will have to answer to the court of public opinion for not implementing the latest solutions.

When asked about this in a recent survey, 77% of respondents stated they would like to see more support for open standards, and 83 percent believe that a product’s integration capabilities are important (ESG & ISSA Research, 2022). Yet, in the cybersecurity market, two costly mistakes are commonly observed. First, competitors frequently develop similar functionalities to offer a comprehensive solution that displaces all other options. Second, these companies fail to recognize that their competitive interests often hinder their own innovation processes, resulting in the development of software that is neither new nor innovative. This approach creates a “moat” around their solutions, which ultimately slows down the development of additional solutions by other third-party providers. In the cybersecurity industry, there is often a disconnect between the intended audience for cybersecurity software and who their vendors believe the customers at the organization are. While many agree that IT personnel should be the primary end-users of such software, we can’t have IT people everywhere; cybersecurity is needed. For instance, certain organizations, such as critical national infrastructure and industrial systems, rely on non-IT experts to run their cybersecurity programs. It’s also important to recognize that the ultimate end-user of the “cybersecurity product” is neither IT or other operations personnel, but rather corporate executives and government authorities who conduct cybersecurity investigations.

Even so, many Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are primarily trained to focus on new software features and assume that if a solution works for IT, it works for the organization as a whole. This approach is misguided and will need to be corrected. Cybersecurity is not merely about features; it is primarily about ensuring compliance, managing risk, and mitigating liabilities. In addition, cybersecurity plays a critical role in helping authorities prosecute cybercrime cases. As such, if a cybersecurity solution doesn’t work for these authorities, then the solution doesn’t work at all.

While corporate executives and government authorities are ultimately responsible for ensuring effective cybersecurity measures, IT personnel are crucial in configuring and maintaining complex software solutions. In other words, IT is an essential component of the “cybersecurity product” and not the end-user—it’s part of the car, not the driver of the car.

In addition, cybersecurity measures are essential for ensuring the security of national resources and maintaining critical infrastructure, such as the availability of electricity, water, and communication services. If the national infrastructure is not protected, the country may be unable to defend itself in future conflicts, thereby impeding the growth of the entire cybersecurity ecosystem.

About the Author

Juan Vargas, Cybersecurity and Engineering Consultant, Artech L.L.C. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Juan Vargas started his career doing data analysis at Intel Corp before focusing on automation and control systems at Emerson Electric and finally becoming a cybersecurity expert for those systems. He has worked with most control systems in power generation and on various projects for the top 10 utility companies in the United States.

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The whitepaper begins by highlighting the increasing significance of API security and the potential consequences of overlooking vulnerabilities. It emphasizes the need for a proactive and holistic approach to API security, encompassing technical measures, organizational policies, and awareness. The author emphasizes that understanding and addressing the evolving threat landscape is paramount to safeguarding sensitive data and preventing unauthorized access.

Key insights from the whitepaper shed light on various best practices for API security. Firstly, the importance of adopting a robust authentication mechanism is highlighted, emphasizing the use of strong credentials, multi-factor authentication, and secure token management. Furthermore, the whitepaper emphasizes the significance of authorization and access controls, advocating for the implementation of fine-grained access restrictions and role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure that only authorized entities can access and manipulate data.

Another key insight centers around the significance of secure communication channels. The whitepaper also emphasizes using secure protocols such as HTTPS and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt data transmitted through APIs, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. Additionally, implementing secure coding practices, including input validation, output encoding, and proper error handling, is highlighted as a crucial aspect of API security.

In addition, this whitepaper addresses the importance of regular security assessments and testing to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities. It emphasizes the need for comprehensive penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, and security code reviews to proactively identify and address potential weaknesses in API implementations. It also highlights the importance of secure API documentation and developer training to ensure that best practices are followed consistently throughout the development process.

To access the complete whitepaper and gain in-depth insights into API security best practices, readers can download it by submitting their details through a provided form. By doing so, organizations and professionals can equip themselves with valuable knowledge and guidance to enhance their API security posture, effectively mitigate vulnerabilities, and protect critical assets from potential threats.

In conclusion, “API Security: Best Practices for Vulnerability Mitigation” by Jagdish Mohite is a comprehensive guide for organizations and professionals aiming to fortify their API security measures. By adopting the best practices outlined in this whitepaper, organizations can enhance their resilience against evolving security threats, ensure the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data, and foster a secure and trustworthy environment for their API ecosystem. Download the whitepaper today and embark on a journey towards robust API security implementation and mitigation of vulnerabilities.

About the Author

Jagdish Mohite is an experienced Cybersecurity Professional with 20 years of experience working for Akamai Technology as a Principal Security Consultant. He holds a Master’s degree in Cyber Security from Purdue Global and has multiple certifications, OSCP, OSWP, CRTP, CEH, CISSP, CHFI, CISA, and PMP. Jagdish earlier worked on various international engagements and was in Germany and Sweden for a few years. His work extensively contributes towards securing Web Applications and APIs; he is good at malware reverse engineering. Jagdish is based in the beautiful mountain state of Colorado in the USA.

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Security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations of storage and backup devices present a significant threat, especially as ransomware attacks have taken hold of businesses over the past few years. Yet, the security posture of most enterprise storage systems is strikingly weak.

According to Gartner’s recent report on Cyberstorage: ‘Although numerous solutions are available for endpoint protection, centralized storage lacks active protection against malicious attacks.’

Organizations must act immediately to better protect their storage – as well as backup systems – to ensure their data is secure against ransomware and other cyberattacks.

To help organizations gain the visibility they need to understand their storage vulnerability risk and avoid blind spots, CISO MAG partnered with Continuity to provide a practical guide for CISOs and security practitioners.

This guide provides an overview of the evolution of storage and backup technology, recent security threats, and the risks they pose. It also includes a set of recommendations for the secure configuration and protection of storage and backup systems.

Learn all about this and much more, by downloading the Whitepaper.

The post The CISO Playbook: Storage & Backup Security Edition appeared first on CISO MAG | Cyber Security Magazine.

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Recent surveys of C-level executives and CIOs reveal that Ensuring Compliance (52%), Data Security (52%), and Incident Response (43%) are top priorities.

This responsibility is extraordinarily challenging given that:

• Investigations are multiplying and diversifying.
• Litigation data is becoming almost exclusively digital.
• Global trends like bring your own device (BYOD), the internet of things (IoT), working remotely, proliferating privacy regulations and cloud computing are complicating organizations’ ability to conduct effective investigations.
• Investigations are becoming more collaborative within the enterprise, involving nonlegal professionals that require real-time, remote access to forensic technologies.
• Existing data management and investigative capabilities can’t keep up with the explosion of data across a growing range of devices, platforms and systems.

In this guide, we’ll cover how CIO, CISO, and CLO priorities are converging, and how to better work together to create outcomes that:

• Help ensure compliance with complex regulations
• Place data management as a critical business initiative
• Cover gaps in incident response processes

The guide is designed to walk CIOs, CISOs and their technical teams through the trends, challenges and solutions that may impact their technology planning including:

• Global developments and security issues affecting compliance, investigative and e-discovery Processes.
• Market observations and predictions demonstrating the increasing urgency for and move towards achieving excellence in incident response inside corporations.
• Strategies for increasing collaboration and efficiency, while reducing waste, risks and costs.
• Category-specific solution checklists and questions to leverage as they chart their technology maps and evaluate different types of solutions.
• Exterro’s point of view on why these leaders should take a holistic approach to manage legal governance, risk and compliance challenges.

Learn all about this and much more, by downloading the Whitepaper. 

 

 

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Cyber/digital forensics, without a doubt, has become an integral part of the cybersecurity domain, and the increasing cyberattacks have made everyone take the security of their digital assets more seriously. The role of Digital Forensics (DF) in the security architecture is to examine the incidents and detect the digital footprint left by the attacker. The DF aims at identifying vulnerabilities that were missed by multiple layers of deployed security. Like any other domain of cybersecurity, digital forensic is also susceptible to the impact of emerging technologies. It could be said that cyber forensics is continuously evolving in the digital landscape due to developing technologies and their implementation into cybercrime by threat actors.

It has become imperative for the DF community to look at these issues and develop its assets, scope, and policies to overcome these challenges, and we believe that the best possible place to start the development of DF is the corresponding education programs. From the perspective of cybersecurity education in digital forensics, this survey attempts to gauge the upcoming challenges that will arise upon the deeper integration of digital forensics with these technologies. By understanding the challenges faced by the forensic community during the investigations involving trending technologies and developmental features, a curriculum could be constructed around it to further the understanding of the students/aspirants and make them forensic-ready for all existing and potential challenges.

The CISO MAG study not only highlights the challenges of incorporating digital forensics in emerging technologies such as IoT, could, etc., but also shed light upon the existing branches of digital forensics such as malware forensics, databases forensics, browser forensics, dark web forensics, etc., which are either seeing development in some of their aspects or the overall change brought due to their implementation into an evolving digital landscape.

To better understand the challenges and state of readiness in implementing Digital Forensics in emerging technologies,

The post Implementing Digital Forensics in Emerging Technologies appeared first on CISO MAG | Cyber Security Magazine.

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As Benjamin Franklin once said: “Out of adversity comes opportunity”. Unfortunately, for businesses the world over the rapid spread of COVID-19 has created a perfect storm for cybercriminals – fear, uncertainty, vulnerability, widespread remote working, and increased online activity – who have seized this opportunity to escalate their nefarious activities. This poses the question: has it taken a crippling global pandemic for cyber risk to evolve from an IT issue to a top board priority and for organizations to realize the importance of establishing a proactive cyber risk strategy?

Cyberattacks were clearly on the risk radar before the pandemic. Awareness of the cyberthreat has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by businesses increasing reliance on data and IT systems – and an escalation of high-profile incidents. So much so that cybercrime has evolved into the world’s biggest criminal growth industry – it is estimated that global cybercrime costs will reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015.

With businesses forced to shutter their doors and shift to remote working at scale following the introduction of lockdown restrictions, the pandemic has accentuated what was already a serious problem. Operating models have been altered and digital footprints expanded, widening the attack surface for cybercriminals almost overnight. These unscrupulous actors are subsequently cashing in on increased workloads, unfamiliar ways of working, and heightened stress levels by developing themed social engineering attacks that use COVID-19 as bait.

This cyber onslaught against businesses throughout the world and across all industries poses the question: what is at stake for them? The financial, operational, and reputational implications of cybercrime can be crippling – and are a serious wake-up call for boards to prioritize cybersecurity:

• Intellectual property losses
• Legal expenses
• Reputational damage
• Business disruption
• Administrative cost

Having outlined the ever-growing threat posed to businesses by cyberattacks, their consequences, and the impact at the board level, this eBook from Camms answers two pertinent questions:

• What is the role of the board?
• How can an integrated risk management system help a business mitigate cyber risk?

Find out the answer to these questions, and much more, by downloading the Whitepaper here.

 

The post Cyber Risk Management: Does cyber risk get enough boardroom airtime? appeared first on CISO MAG | Cyber Security Magazine.

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Before “Industry 4.0,” which revolutionized digital transformation, health care followed a straightforward path – from provider to patient. But with digitization taking center stage, everything from monitoring, detecting, controlling, and responding, is done by interconnected or IoT-based devices. While the health care sector across the board embraces the shift into the modern digital era, cyberthreats have equally continued to grow stealthily in both sophistication and volume. Thus, governing cybersecurity and privacy measures is now a chief priority for health care C-suite leaders and their organizations.

The other arm of health care is the pharmaceutical sector. And with countries like India, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, China, and Russia running the rat race in pursuit of manufacturing and exporting these vaccines, heightened activities among state-sponsored cybercriminals have also been observed recently.

Want to know more about the cyberthreats lurking in the darker depths of the health care industry? 

Cyberthreats to the health care and pharmaceutical organizations are real, and regulations are only a single step towards addressing the bigger issue at hand. Cybersecurity efforts must be a business initiative with equal weightage on people, processes, and technology to combat the threats at bay.

Today, at a time when the entire world’s health care system is reeling through the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, what if WannaCry hits back? The entire health care infrastructure will simply collapse. Thus, there is a dire need of knowing these risks and countering them beforehand. But how?

To get a deeper understanding of the latest health care-related cyberthreats, and be better equipped to protect their people, data, and assets, CISO MAG editors worked closely with CYFIRMA’s cyber threat intelligence (CTI) team, who burrowed through the trenches of the threat landscape to provide critical and resourceful information that can help today’s decision-makers in making well-informed decisions.

To know more

CYFIRMA’s CTI is predictive, outside-in, and personalized, based on the Industry type and landscape. To connect the dots between the hacker, motive, campaign, and method, visit us on www.cyfirma.com

The post Cyberthreats: The Stealthily Spreading Cancer in the Health Care Sector appeared first on CISO MAG | Cyber Security Magazine.

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What are Common Vulnerability Remediation Delays?

What’s slowing you down? Usually one of two issues. The first can be mechanical – perhaps your organization lacks the technology to automatically distribute patches across all its assets. The second is more cultural and related to change management policy or the processes and procedures that your organization has to minimize the risk of disruption during production changes. This field guide can help you manage both of these and accelerate your response.

The Guide: Automated Remediation Areas Covered

At a high level, “remediation” generally means the required actions to eliminate a security vulnerability. But, designing a solution to solve remediation automation’s technical complexities can be challenging. In this field guide, we look at the various unique-to-your-environment steps you can take. You’ll find topics like mapping the environment, automated remediation solution types, and automation in action to help you build your solution path.

How you manage existing asset types directly affects approaches and the types of solutions employed. You need a highly detailed view of the environments in your vulnerability management program’s scope. Since you’ll be following an automation path, you’ll need a way to interface with the assets in question and determine which solutions or technologies are in play.

Evaluating automated vulnerability remediation solutions can be tricky: it hasn’t been treated as a separate category by the industry and analysts. Your foundation – The solution shall identify the appropriate remediation action based on identifying a vulnerability and providing a mechanism for the remediation action to be triggered.

Why automate the remediation process? To reduce the vast window of opportunity for attackers. Your vulnerability remediation program could be entirely self-guiding or contain built-in human oversight with the same impact as self-guided. To make this strategy viable across many organization types, you’ll need to account for blocking factors that would interfere with faster remediation.

Evolve from a time-consuming process to one that leverages new processes and recent technological advances. Get your guide – and get started today. 

 

The post Is Automated Vulnerability Remediation the Answer? appeared first on CISO MAG | Cyber Security Magazine.

“Why do security programs ultimately fail?”

The answer to this dilemma can be found in a strategic whitepaper published by a cybersecurity solutions firm, Praetorian.

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The researchers at Praetorian, often came across this anomaly when they tore down the defenses of their customers during Red Team exercises. They noticed that despite technical innovations, trained assets, and billions being invested in security, many businesses still struggle and ultimately fail to keep an attacker at bay. In their words, “Businesses end up losing their ‘Crown Jewels’ to the attacker, more often than not.”

Thus, with a forward-looking view of showing the mirror to the businesses of where exactly they are going wrong and failing in the pursuit of becoming secure, Praetorian security engineers decided to help the community with their expertise through a whitepaper titled  “The Elephant in the Room: Why Security Programs Fail” 

The whitepaper is an outcome of three years of innumerable client discussions and meticulous research from Praetorians’ security engineers. It answers the myths and some burning questions like, how and why many security programs spend too much time and money on things that do not appreciably reduce their business risks. This document has been written to guide those responsible for setting security strategies and to understand the common root causes of security programs’ strategic failure. This will in turn help them take corrective steps to evolve into a more effective, risk-informed security program. Here are some of the key highlights covered in the whitepaper:

• Factors leading to the misdirection of security programs.
• Misapplication of frameworks.
• The disturbance caused by compliance.
• Tenets of designing effective security programs.
• The economics of security effectiveness.

Let’s address the “Elephant in the Room” by downloading the whitepaper here.

 

 

ADVERTORIAL

The post Here’s Why Security Programs Often Fail appeared first on CISO MAG | Cyber Security Magazine.

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Third-party assessments are a common way in which organizations prove their cybersecurity practices to vendors, customers, and prospects. SOC  2 examinations have become one of the de facto standards for organizations to prove how they are securely managing their customers’ data to protect their interests and privacy. For most organizations conducting business with a SaaS provider, a SOC 2 examination is a minimum requirement. SOC 2 reports are also common for other service organizations as well such as law firms, marketing agencies, accounting firms, healthcare organizations, and more.

How do SOC 2 reports help?

According to the AICPA, these reports can play an important role in:

• Oversight of the organization
• Vendor management programs
• Internal corporate governance and risk management processes
• Regulatory oversight

ByteChek wrote a whitepaper to provide a simple understanding of SOC 2 and how to do SOC 2 examinations. Use this whitepaper and the ByteChek Learning Center as your source of truth for all things SOC 2.

SOC 2 is a report on a service organization’s controls relevant to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, or Privacy. SOC 2 reports are intended to inform users of detailed information and assurance about the controls at the service organization. These reports are provided by qualified CPAs, who form an opinion about the service organization’s system and the control environment.

SOC 2 reports are becoming more prevalent in the market and more companies are asking for them in order to meet contractual obligations, supply chain management, due diligence, or other requirements. For the service organization, the report becomes not just a means to deliver on these obligations, but also a way of showcasing your security posture, as well as improving it through making sure your controls will operate properly.

Read everything there is to know about SOC 2 in this whitepaper.

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