It’s the 20th anniversary of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it’s safe to say a lot has changed in the cybersecurity industry since then. For example, just over the last year, we have seen the meteoric rise of generative AI and the huge impact it is already having on the cybersecurity industry.

Aaron Kiemele, CISO at Jamf, argues that now with the rise of generative AI, the threat posed by techniques such as phishing has completely changed: "With the advancements in large language models for machine learning, such as ChatGPT, cybercriminals are leveraging AI to automate attacks, analyze vast amounts of data, and craft more effective phishing emails or malware to achieve their nefarious ends. We can no longer rely on bad spelling or sketchy formatting."

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Imagine if you were attacked and you didn’t know the identity of the assailant. Not knowing who they were, what their motivations are, or their attack track record would leave you feeling helpless.

There is a disturbing new trend in ransomware attacks: anonymity. In the "halcyon" days of early attacks, the group attacking the victim would always say who they were. Now though, we are seeing a spike in attacks where the offending group is concealing their identity, and finding out who they are is a complicated process. If you’re lucky enough to have a wealth of dark web and other data to examine, threat actors are human, which means they usually make a mistake that reveals them.

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Facing an onslaught of cyber-attacks originating from social engineering is now par for the course for many security professionals. However, a growing but often overlooked issue is how this technique is being manipulated to help gain entry to physical offices and workplaces to perpetrate cybercrime.

Very similar to social engineering in the digital world, cybercriminals are relying on human vulnerabilities to trick individuals into allowing them entry to premises.  Referred to as physical social engineering (PSE), this form of deception exploits typical behaviors and emotions with the goal of obtaining security credentials to give attackers access to confidential data and sensitive information held on computer systems.

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With the increasing reliance on APIs, detecting suspicious API traffic has become crucial to ensure the security and integrity of these interactions. Suspicious API traffic poses a huge threat to the overall system and its data, the traffic can indicate malicious intent such as unauthorized access attempts, data breaches, or even potential attacks targeting vulnerabilities in the API infrastructure.

API traffic refers to the data and requests that are transmitted between different applications or systems using APIs. This allows software programs to communicate and exchange information, enabling seamless integration and interaction between various platforms. API traffic also involves the transfer of data, such as requests for data retrieval or updates, between the client application and the server hosting the API. 

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Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are a scorching hot topic right now, and for good reason. A recent MIT study shows that LLMs can improve worker productivity by 50 percent in white-collar settings. Consequently, more than half of C-suite members globally (56 percent) feel pressured to adopt comprehensive GenAI tools during the next year -- yet two in three fear the consequences of rapid GenAI adoption, particularly as it applies to disinformation and data governance.

Leaders are overwhelmed by the prospective benefits -- and consequences -- of adopting GenAI. They may be surprised to learn that a managed service provider (MSP) can assuage their worries and prepare their organization for this newest iteration of digital transformation.

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The modern workforce is more distributed and dependent on devices than ever before. In this hybrid work environment, digital employee experiences are siloed. IT teams are on the hook to ensure end-user productivity despite strained financial resources and the IT talent war.

Despite their technical expertise, IT service teams are limited in their ability to be in multiple locations at once. Distributed workforces further cause significant blind spots and open up businesses to vulnerabilities hiding in the dark estate. That’s where hidden issues live, yet IT teams can’t see them. The potential for unknown risks is nothing new in IT. So why should businesses care about the dark estate, especially now when IT departments are already burdened by lengthy lists of service requests, putting out fires, and keeping up with security challenges?

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In the ever-evolving realm of the cloud, dwell times are now measured in moments, not days. Whereas Mandiant’s 2023 M-Trends report highlighted a global median dwell time of 16 days for on-premises environments, the Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) recently reported in their 2023 Global Cloud Threat Report that cloud dwell time is five minutes.

To better understand the stark difference between defenders' abilities to find attackers in the cloud and on-premises, I sat down with the Sysdig TRT to discuss their findings. They circled around four distinct, but closely related reasons.

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Despite considerable efforts by business leaders to protect their digital assets, in today’s cybersecurity landscape, a security breach is all but inevitable. According to reports, threat actors have already compromised hundreds of millions of records in 2023, and IBM says 83 percent of businesses had more than one breach in 2022. Companies must prepare themselves to respond and seamlessly recover post-attack in this climate and starting at the endpoint could help bolster their cyber resilience.

Endpoint management plays a pivotal role in supporting a robust cyber resilience strategy. By maintaining an up-to-date inventory of all devices connected to your network, endpoint management allows for the rapid identification and isolation of potentially compromised systems, preventing the spread of security incidents and minimizing their impact.

An endpoint management approach to cyber resilience is also supported by principles found in the MITRE Corporation’s Cyber Resiliency Engineering Framework (CREF) Navigator. Their cyber resilience framework focuses on sharing an understanding of what it takes to maintain and inform preparedness and is guided by four pillars. These include:

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Amidst a challenging economic climate many businesses are unsurprisingly reviewing their spending, with research from the Institute of Directors finding most businesses are unlikely to increase investment over the next 12 months.

One area currently bucking this trend is the cloud. Research shows almost half of tech and business leaders are increasing investment in cloud-based products and services, and a third of them plan to migrate their legacy enterprise software and on-premises workloads to the cloud.

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When CISOs think about cybersecurity for their companies, there are certain expectations. Password protection, firewalls, and continuously training employees on the latest phishing scams, to name a few. And to be sure, cyber risks like these are as relevant as ever. The persisting problem is, cybersecurity is like any defense contest: the burden (and therefore the disadvantage) is on the defender. You have to win every time, whereas an attacker only has to win once to cause major damage.

Frustratingly, cyber criminals have shown time and time again that they are actually quite gifted at creative approaches, thinking outside the box, and combining advanced tech with old school techniques. For instance, a suspicious-looking form letter email is easy to spot and delete. However, by purchasing even a small amount of personal data from the dark web, a smart criminal can craft a phishing email with just enough familiarity so that its target will most likely open it without hesitation. With enough patience and photoshopping, a malicious actor can send customers a message from their favorite store that leads them to a spoofed website solely created to steal their credit card information. Increasingly today, these attacks targeting customers are more prevalent.

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Although chief information officers have been at the forefront of enterprise digital transformation efforts for years, they are still too often reduced to the company’s "technology expert." Even if the reality is different, perception counts for a lot. It’s now time for CIOs to change that perception and evolve into more wide-ranging business strategists, enabling their IT departments to leverage their expertise for high-value business outcomes.

The good news is that most enterprise CIOs already have nimble, intelligent and scalable technology to facilitate that change. What’s needed is an approach that improves efficiency and increases productivity in ways that are directly tied to company goals. Here are four questions every CIO of a B2B enterprise should be asking as they seek to maintain the momentum of their digital transformation.

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As Cybersecurity Awareness Month celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, it's the perfect time to reflect on the strides we've made in security education and awareness. It’s also a chance to look ahead, combining education with the right technology to protect people at scale.

Two decades is a very long time on the internet -- there was no Facebook or YouTube in 2003. Now there are more than 500 times as many secure websites. Phishing was just beginning to catch on. Now phishing is widely reported to be a multi-billion-dollar problem, with millions of attacks detected and taken down each year. As the internet has evolved, so have cybercriminals.

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In the beginning, software ran mostly on a smart server dumb terminal networked or entirely on a local machine. If there was a defect, it was that the given program wouldn’t run. Once desktops, laptops, mobile phones and even physical devices such as refrigerators started interconnecting via the internet, a software defect could open the device to an attack or shut down a life-critical system. The very real need to stay on top of software updates has been escalating every day.

In the early 2000s, when computer malware began as a few innocent viruses before morphing into full-on malevolent worms, the software giants such as Microsoft (but by no means limited to Microsoft) denied responsibility. There was significant push back with vendors saying that compromise was only possible in only a limited number of scenarios -- almost as though the end user was responsible. Increasingly, though, it became clear that maybe the software itself could be responsible for some of the malicious activity on the early internet. And maybe the software industry needed to take that seriously.

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As APIs emerge as the unsung heroes behind modern software development for their ability to accelerate innovation and streamline processes, it’s no secret or even a surprise that API security is a lingering problem that the broader cybersecurity industry has yet to fully solve. Since abandoning the use of APIs is not a viable option, organizations need to focus on building strong AppSec programs that give the teams developing with APIs, the structure and tooling to ensure connections are secure and software deployed is safe.  

To be most effective, organizations need to prioritize designing security best practices into development workflows from the beginning and by adopting secure-by-design based principles.

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Today’s enterprises are grappling with a very modern IT dilemma: how to carry out cloud migration as cost-effectively as possible.

According to recent research on the views of IT leaders, more than half of enterprises worldwide (55 percent) believe a move to the cloud is "inevitable." The benefits of migrating to the cloud are now widely-acknowledged -- from replacing unreliable legacy infrastructure that hinders business agility, to providing support for modern, collaborative workloads. Many enterprises’ eagerness to adopt AI technologies is also driving cloud migration. This is because the cloud offers the computing power required to deploy AI models at scale.  

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