Security

While 47 percent of IT decision-makers strongly agree that COVID-19 has accelerated their cloud maturity, only 29 percent of line-of-business IT employees feel the same.

A new report from technology modernization firm SPR surveyed 400 IT decision-makers and the same number of workers to look at how IT teams see their businesses’ cloud resiliency strategy for 2020 and beyond.

A new Data Risk Report from Varonis reveals that an average financial services employee has access to nearly 11 million files and for larger companies the number is 20 million.

This level of exposure means that if just one employee clicks on a phishing email there is potentially a huge amount of sensitive information at the hacker's fingertips.

The shift in working patterns prompted by COVID-19 has caused unnecessary short-term investment in technology, which will leave companies at risk with data being stored on a wide range of devices.

This is according to 78 percent of respondents to a new survey from data erasure specialist Blancco Technology Group, which also reveals 47 percent of large global enterprises have created roles responsible for implementing and ensuring compliance with e-waste policies specifically to deal with issues generated from the pandemic.

The popular game Animal Jam, enjoyed by millions of children around the world, has advised parents of a hack which has exposed the personal details of 46 million account records.

The company behind Animal Jam, WildWorks, has issued a warning that details revealed in the attack include 7 million email addresses used to create accounts, and 32 million player usernames. A proportion of the 46 million accounts affected have had full name and billing address details exposed.

Enterprises have embraced the moving of multiple applications to the cloud using containers and are utilizing Kubernetes for orchestration. But the findings of a new report also confirm that many are inadequately securing the data stored in these new cloud-native environments.

The report from cloud-native data protection specialist Zettaset shows businesses are continuing to leverage existing legacy security technology as a solution.

The latest threat quarterly landscape report from managed security service provider Nuspire shows a 128 percent increase in Q3 over the previous quarter, representing more than 43,000 malware variants detected a day.

The report also shows threat actors developing a more ruthless streak in selecting their targets. Throughout Q3, hackers shifted focus from home networks to overburdened public entities, including the education sector and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

Businesses are increasingly reliant on data. In the past that's generally been in a structured form but, thanks to increasing amounts of customer information gleaned via the IoT and channels like social media, unstructured data has taken on a new importance.

Yet unstructured data also introduces new risks. AI-based solutions specialist Concentric is launching a new data access governance solution that addresses the challenge of unstructured data security. We spoke to Karthik Krishnan, CEO at Concentric, to find out more.

In the face of restrictive lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, IT budgets have held up remarkably well according to a new study, as technology becomes a critical ingredient in launching new products and services.

The report from OpsRamp is based on responses from 230 IT operations and DevOps executives in the US and UK with at least 500 employees and $5 million in annual IT budgets.

Cyberattacks increasingly take aim at multiple devices and users simultaneously while employing a range of tactics, forcing defenders to employ a range of different tools across their IT estate.

Now though Cybereason is launching a new Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solution that brings together endpoint telemetry with behavioral analytics to help enterprises to swiftly detect and end cyberattacks anywhere on their networks.

Last month, security researchers at Google's Project Zero released details of a zero-day vulnerability in Windows that was being actively exploited.

Hacklers were taking advantage of a Windows Kernel Cryptography Driver security flaw (CVE-2020-117087) to gain elevated privileges in Windows 7, 8, and 10, as well as Windows Server 2008 and higher. As part of yesterday's Patch Tuesday release, Microsoft has now issued a fix for the vulnerability.

A new study reveals that 82 percent of Europeans don't trust US tech giants with their personal files, despite increasing reliance on cloud services due to COVID-19.

The survey of 4,500 people across the UK, France and Germany, conducted by pCloud, one of Europe's fastest-growing file-sharing and cloud storage providers, finds the biggest concerns are personal data being used for commercial gain (51 percent) and the possibility of hacks (43 percent).

What do you want for Christmas? How about a coffee maker that can eavesdrop on your conversations, or a fitness tracker that can analyze the tone of your voice?

The fourth-annual Privacy Not Included holiday shopping guide from Mozilla aims to arm shoppers with the information they need to choose gifts that protect the privacy and security of their friends and family while spurring the tech industry to do more to safeguard consumers.

This year's massive and sudden shift to remote working has boosted the adoption of cloud technology and the security implications of this transition will reverberate for years to come, according to the latest Trusted Access report from Cisco company Duo Security.

Daily authentications to cloud applications surged 40 percent during the first few months of the pandemic, the bulk of these coming from enterprise and mid-sized organizations looking to ensure secure access to services.

Although ransomware has dominated 2020's cyber threat landscape, DDoS attacks haven’t gone away. In fact the year has seen the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, peaking at 2.3 Terabytes per second.

The attack was carried out by deploying hijacked CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) web servers and caused three days of downtime for the unnamed targeted business. This is one of the things highlighted in new analysis from Digital Shadows.

The overnight switch to remote working triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented amount of change to the usual ways of working. The impact will continue to be felt for the foreseeable future -- and as a result, IT departments’ approach to delivering services to their organizations will need to keep pace with the evolving requirements of this newly remote staff.

To that end, IT needs to embed itself deeper in the organization to understand the unique requirements of every single stakeholder -- be it the C-suite or the manager answering the customer call -- so that those professionals can do their jobs effectively, enabling the business to realize its strategic goals. In practical terms, what does this mean? How can IT departments put these tactics into practice in their enterprises?