Ethical web scraping and data rights [Q&A]

streaming from the deep

Web scraping, automatically harvesting and extracting data from websites, can be a useful tool for businesses to learn about their customers.

But it's easy to fall into the trap of harvesting data just because it's there, leading to information overload not to mention privacy concerns for the consumer. To find out more about web scraping and how it can be used in an ethical way we spoke to founder and CEO of Rayobyte, Neil Emeigh.

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61 percent of Americans rely on free antivirus programs

Protect_Web_Threat

A new report on the antivirus market from Security.org reveals that almost three-quarters of Americans still strongly believe computers need antivirus to protect their devices and 61 percent are relying on free options like Microsoft Defender.

The number relying on free solutions has held steady, down only one point since 2021. Interestingly, only eight percent of free antivirus users have experienced a breakthrough virus in the past year, compared to 10 percent of paid users.

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Why SBOMs have become a vital element of supply chain risk management [Q&A]

SBOM Software Bill of Materials

In recent years, the software bill of materials (SBOM) has become a key element of software security and software supply chain risk management.

We spoke to Tim Mackey, head of software supply chain risk strategy at Synopsys to find out more about the benefits and challenges of SBOMs.

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Kubernetes market matures as optimization and control of costs become key

Kubernetes

A new survey from Pepperdata of 800 executives and senior ITOps and DevOps professionals across major industries finds the Kubernetes market is maturing, the number of clusters that are being deployed has grown to six to ten per organization.

The variety and types of workloads is increasing too, including data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics, databases, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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Business data at risk from oversharing

file sharing

Sharing is caring, as the saying goes, but when it comes to business data oversharing is a big problem. A new report from Concentric AI shows the number of overshared files rose 60 percent in 2022 compared to 2021.

Largely this is down to the impact of hybrid remote work, cloud migration and information sprawl across on-premises and cloud data, as well as email and messaging environments on data security.

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WithSecure creates an 'undo button' for ransomware

Undo button

Ransomware attacks continue to plague organizations and can have an effect beyond the financial, damaging reputations and customer trust.

Now though WithSecure has developed a new technology called Activity Monitor that can essentially undo the damage malware can cause.

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Talent shortage remains top developer challenge

Vacant chair

Recruiting developers with the right skills remains the top challenge for 2023, according to a new survey of over 2,200 software developers and IT professionals carried out by Infragistics' Reveal.

While nearly all developers (88.8 percent) work with a designer or design team, nearly half of a developer's time (43.4 percent) is spent on coding an app, the survey finds. The lack of skilled developers is being solved by turning to low-code/no-code tools in three-quarters (76.8 percent) of organizations.

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What do we want? Data! What shall we do with it? Ermmm...

folder stack

A new global survey of nearly 10,000 business leaders shows 80 percent say data is crucial to decision making in their organization.

However, the study from Salesforce also shows that a third lack the ability to generate insights from data, only 29 percent are using data to inform their strategy when launching in new markets, and 67 percent are not using data to decide on pricing in line with economic conditions, such as inflation.

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84 percent of codebases contain known open source vulnerabilities

open source

A new study, based on the results of more than 1,700 audits of commercial and proprietary codebases involved in merger and acquisition transactions, finds 84 percent contain at least one known open source vulnerability, an increase of almost four percent from last year.

The Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report, produced by the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC), shows growing use of open source. In the education technology sector it's grown by 163 percent, with educational courses and instructor/student interactions increasingly pushed online.

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CISOs in smaller businesses suffer stress that puts the company at risk

stressed overwork pressure

A new study from extended detection and response platform Cynet finds 94 percent of CISOs in small to mid-sized companies report being stressed at work.

What's more 65 percent admit work-related stress issues are compromising their ability to protect their organization. Among the CISOs surveyed, 100 percent say they need additional resources to adequately cope with current IT security challenges.

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Ransomware detection improves but attacks persist

Ransomware skull

Defenders have become more successful at detecting and preventing ransomware, but even so its share of incidents declined only four percentage points from 2021 to 2022.

The latest X-Force Threat Intelligence Index from IBM Security also finds that attackers continue to innovate, with the average time to complete a ransomware attack dropping from two months down to less than four days.

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Protecting the software supply chain [Q&A]

supply chain

As developers come under increasing pressure to deliver projects quickly, there's a rising level of conflict between development and security teams. And attackers are taking advantage of this conflict in order to target software supply chains.

So, what kind of threats do enterprises face and what can they do to protect themselves? We spoke to Pete Morgan, co-founder and CSO of supply chain security company Phylum to find out.

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Collaboration tools still top the app download charts

Zoom logo on a building

Video conferencing and collaboration tools like Zoom catapulted to popularity during the pandemic as organizations made the shift to remote working.

But data published today by Finbold shows that even as we return to more normal working patterns Zoom remains the most downloaded business app in the US, with Teams in second place.

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Enterprises plan to spend more on identity verification

A new report shows that 91 percent of organizations in the financial services, technology, telecoms, and aviation sectors worldwide intend to increase their spending on identity verification solutions in the next one to three years.

The report from Regula says 17 percent of businesses intend is to dedicate 11-20 percent of their IT budget annually to IDV solutions, with 15 percent of businesses opting for 21-30 percent.

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Over 98 percent of organizations have misconfigured clouds

cloud confusion

According to a new report, 98.6 percent of organizations have concerning misconfigurations in their cloud environments that can cause critical risks to their data and infrastructure.

The research from Zscaler finds cloud misconfiguration errors related to public access to storage buckets, account permissions, password storage and management, and more, have led to the exposure of billions of records.

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