Growing digital ecosystems, increasing cybersecurity risk, fragmented regulations and economic challenges emphasizes need for holistic API security
The challenges that the global business community has faced in the last few years have been unprecedented. A pandemic, inflation, an energy crisis, war, an economic downturn, and fragmented and delayed supply chains have all created issues for organizations and have left no industry, market, or region untouched.
Yet, despite these issues, our digital ecosystems and footprint grows ever bigger and increasingly complex. The global digital transformation market was worth $731.13 billion in 2022, and it is now expected to grow at a CAGR of 26.7 percent by 2030; driven in the main by businesses trying to gain competitive advantage. However, it is the size and intricacy of our digital world that makes cyber risks and threats both more present and more potent.
Recovering from ransomware is a long-term commitment -- and a long-term expense
According to Forrester, nearly two-thirds of organizations (63 percent) were breached by ransomware in 2021, up 4 percent from the previous year. Recovery was a long, hard road for many of those enterprises -- while for others, the downstream effects of ransomware were ultimately insurmountable. The alarming rise in ransomware must guide IT leaders' cybersecurity decisions in 2023.
Why is ransomware on the rise? For one, bad actors are becoming far more advanced and prolific. Ransomware gangs continued to make headlines in 2022 for their high-profile attacks and advancements in post-breach encryption. On the other end of the spectrum, the barrier to entry for ransomware is lower than ever before. Ransomware as a service (RaaS) -- which allows bad actors to deploy ransomware for a fee -- has ushered in a new generation of hackers who can target enterprises of all sizes despite their relative inexperience with cybersecurity protocols.
Automation challenges unpacked -- Part 2: Process complexity
In my last article about automation challenges, I covered how to manage endpoint diversity -- all of the people, systems and devices that execute tasks within an end-to-end automated process. In this piece, I’ll focus on process complexity, which is closely intertwined with endpoint diversity.
Many organizations share the ambitious goal of automating their processes as much as possible. However, in reality, processes are often automated “locally,” or within a single software system, team, or group of devices. To execute a process, you need to coordinate the execution of all of its tasks, based on a certain logic. Most processes -- even if they sound simple -- follow a more complex logic than the straightforward series of steps involved in a confined local process.
Locking cyber doors: How organizations can be cyber safe in 2023
Our tech-filled lives put us at daily risk of cybercrimes, as we spend the majority of our time interacting with devices that could give hackers access to our personal data. In fact, according to DataProt, nearly 60 Percent of Americans say they have experienced cybercrime or somehow fell victim to a hacker. As every aspect of our lives becomes more connected, the opportunities for bad actors rise.
Businesses are not immune to these persistent threats. Reports show that 70 Percent of small businesses are unprepared for a cyberattack, and almost 90 Percent of professional hackers can penetrate a company within 12 hours. It is no surprise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially ranked cybercrime as one of its agency’s most important interests.
Automation challenges unpacked -- Part 1: Endpoint diversity
Overall, 96 Percent of IT leaders in the State of Process Orchestration report say process automation is critical to helping them accelerate their digital transformation goals. Even so, 72 Percent agree that their real-world, business-critical processes are becoming more difficult to maintain. Why is that the case? For many companies, process automation challenges tie to two core concepts: endpoint diversity and process complexity.
I’ll cover process complexity in part two of this series, but for now, let’s dig into some of the challenges that stem from endpoint diversity and how to solve them.
Adopting passwordless authentication -- first, make sure it's passwordless
Passwords have been under attack for a long time. Not just by data breachers, but by people writing, ad nauseum, about how passwords are an ineffective means of authentication. And yet, after years of password warnings by IT departments, and plenty of hand wringing over how passwords need to be more complex and how often people should change them, the most used passwords are easily guessable (things like Password123, 123456 and QWERTY).
Still, passwords remain in wide use today, and we are paying for it. According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 82 percent of data breaches are due to the "human element." Chief among this element is stolen credentials, which means passwords.
Don’t let one 'war room' too many exacerbate the risk of quiet quitting in your DevOps team
As organizations and their customers become more reliant on digital services, DevOps teams are often required to get together quickly to troubleshoot and resolve outages or user experience problems.
However, against the backdrop of the 24/7 economy and a shortage of technology skills, it’s time to reassess whether these 'war rooms' remain an effective tactic for dealing with urgent issues. Or, could they be exacerbating the challenges organizations face in retaining staff and managing skilled DevOps teams’ workloads?
Microsoft 365 Defender is now AI-powered
Since its inception, Microsoft Defender Antivirus (FKA Windows Defender) was considered somewhat of a joke by power users. They would assert that it provided you with the protection of an umbrella in a hurricane. While its deficiencies were often exaggerated, indeed, it didn’t give you the same depth and scope as high-quality third-party solutions.
When Bitdefender retired its free antivirus solution in 2021 (only to release a new free antivirus in 2022), many turned back to Microsoft Defender. After all, Microsoft should ultimately know the best ways to secure its software. It's surprising it took so long for the company to expand the coverage of its Microsoft Defender line, especially, with the largest share of its revenue being made from intelligent cloud computing.
What are the top 5 tools to effectively combat fake news?
When we’re going about our days -- ingesting media from a mountain of different sources -- it is always possible that the information we come across, be it in print, radio, or on the internet, may not be accurate. False information has been around since the beginning of time, but due to the ever-present online world, we are now more likely to consume content that is distorted or fabricated unintentionally.
People are used to having their thoughts shaped by the material they come across online, for example, through influencer marketing or celebrity endorsements. Even if facts don't back up these opinions, they still have a significant impact, and a lot of false news is created to evoke strong emotions. Therefore, it is essential that we take a moment to check if what we have read or heard is true when our feelings are affected.
TikTok: What's going on and should you be worried?
Since 2020, several governments and organizations have banned, or considered banning, the immensely popular social media app TikTok from their staff’s devices.
With all these alarming bells ringing, we thought it might be handy to break down what we know and see if we can plot a sensible strategy from there. So, if your hair is on fire, extinguish it and consider this with a cool head.
The real risks of OpenAI's GPT-4
While many were marveling at the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Monitaur was busy analyzing the accompanying papers that examined the risks and technical design of its latest engine. In this commentary, I examine this through the lens of proper governance, responsible use, and ethical AI, while also considering the larger landscape of language models within which OpenAI sits.
The analysis results were not what were hoped for.
Which sectors could thrive from digital transformation?
Historically, some sectors have moved towards a digital transformation quickly, while others have taken longer to progress. Here, we will look at how living in the per-digitalised age can be dangerous, as well as issues surrounding companies falling behind their competitors, and how and why traditional processes can be changed.
Digital transformation happens when companies shift away from traditional methods and introduce technology as a fundamental part of their strategy. This can take place through either digital technology being integrated into an organization or through a cultural shift within the business.
Opportunities and considerations for small businesses experimenting with ChatGPT
For the past few months, the tech -- and tech-adjacent -- world has been fascinated by ChatGPT. A generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool that has been open for public use since late 2022, it’s designed to interact with humans to answer questions or develop content based on a prompt written in simple, conversational English rather than a complex data query.
ChatGPT has been used to write Valentine’s Day poems, plan a Thanksgiving menu and write other humorous outputs. It also has quickly become a research hub, programming tutor and source for writing inspiration. Famously, a leading tech news site used ChatGPT to write some of its articles, to varying degrees of success.
Ransomware-in-a-box: Why containers are a cybersecurity risk
With the creation, storage, and use of data continuing to accelerate dramatically, security vulnerabilities and risks to data integrity are also escalating across the board. The trends are alarming, with one recent study from IDC -- looking at the requirements for ransomware and disaster recovery preparation -- revealing that in 2022, almost 80 percent of organizations surveyed had activated a disaster response. What’s more, 83 percent had experienced data corruption, and most worrying of all, almost two-thirds said that a ransomware attack had resulted in unrecoverable data.
Indeed, there is currently no application type that can be considered to be completely safe from ransomware. Among the wide range of possibilities this situation creates are the risks posed to organizations that are refactoring their applications for Kubernetes. Refactoring is an increasingly popular approach to application deployment, whereby apps are broken down into a range of services that can subsequently be operated independently. One of the key benefits this offers is that the application’s underlying hardware is used more efficiently, while each service can also be scaled as required without impacting other services and resources.
Sharing deployment best practices helps all developers
Developers are constantly innovating better and more efficient ways to deploy software, but not all teams are privy to the new strategies. We as a developer community need to eliminate all gatekeeping and share best practices. What benefits one team will help another, allowing us to continuously build on these improvements together.
Deployment velocity drives business value, but only if the software is reliable. Users won't care about receiving frequent updates if they don't work. Sharing deployment best practices can eliminate manual tasks and enable developers to focus on coding, leading to more reliable deployments and apps and more efficient processes.
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