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Events like the recent massive CDK ransomware attack – which shuttered car dealerships across the U.S. in late June 2024 – barely raise public eyebrows anymore.  Yet businesses, and the people that lead them, are justifiably jittery. Every CISO knows that cybersecurity is an increasingly hot topic for executives and board members alike. And when the inevitable CISO/Board briefing rolls around, everyone wants answers: Are we safe from attacks? Are we making progress? Could <insert name of CVE or incident that keeps you up at night here> happen to us? These are all fair concerns.  The question is, how do we best answer them? A company board deserves clear, concise information tied to business goals , not technical details about fixes or attack methods. A communication gap between the CISO and the board can lead to misunderstandings, increased risk, and potentially devastating cyberattacks. And this is why one of the overriding challenges for CISOs today remains: How to pr

The modern kill chain is eluding enterprises because they aren't protecting the infrastructure of modern business: SaaS .  SaaS continues to dominate software adoption , and it accounts for the greatest share of public cloud spending. But enterprises and SMBs alike haven't revised their security programs or adopted security tooling built for SaaS.  Security teams keep jamming on-prem pegs into SaaS security holes  The mature security controls CISOs and their teams depended on in the age of on-prem dominance have vanished. Firewalls now protect a small perimeter, visibility is limited, and even if SaaS vendors offer logs, security teams need homegrown middleware to digest them and push into their SIEM.  SaaS vendors do have well-defined security scopes for their products, but their customers must manage SaaS compliance and data governance, identity and access management (IAM), and application controls — the areas where most incidents occur. While this SaaS shared responsibility mod

As a vCISO, you are responsible for your client's cybersecurity strategy and risk governance. This incorporates multiple disciplines, from research to execution to reporting. Recently, we published a comprehensive playbook for vCISOs, "Your First 100 Days as a vCISO – 5 Steps to Success" , which covers all the phases entailed in launching a successful vCISO engagement, along with recommended actions to take, and step-by-step examples.  Following the success of the playbook and the requests that have come in from the MSP/MSSP community, we decided to drill down into specific parts of vCISO reporting and provide more color and examples. In this article, we focus on how to create compelling narratives within a report, which has a significant impact on the overall MSP/MSSP value proposition.  This article brings the highlights of a recent guided workshop we held, covering what makes a successful report and how it can be used to enhance engagement with your cyber security clients.

While some SaaS threats are clear and visible, others are hidden in plain sight, both posing significant risks to your organization. Wing's research indicates that an astounding 99.7% of organizations utilize applications embedded with AI functionalities. These AI-driven tools are indispensable, providing seamless experiences from collaboration and communication to work management and decision-making. However, beneath these conveniences lies a largely unrecognized risk: the potential for AI capabilities in these SaaS tools to compromise sensitive business data and intellectual property (IP). Wing's recent findings reveal a surprising statistic: 70% of the top 10 most commonly used AI applications may use your data for training their models. This practice can go beyond mere data learning and storage. It can involve retraining on your data, having human reviewers analyze it, and even sharing it with third parties. Often, these threats are buried deep in the fine print of Term

The heightened regulatory and legal pressure on software-producing organizations to secure their supply chains and ensure the integrity of their software should come as no surprise. In the last several years, the software supply chain has become an increasingly attractive target for attackers who see opportunities to force-multiply their attacks by orders of magnitude. For example, look no further than 2021's Log4j breach, where Log4j (an open-source logging framework maintained by Apache and used in a myriad of different applications) was the root of exploits that put thousands of systems at risk.  Log4j's communication functionality was vulnerable and thus provided an opening for an attacker to inject malicious code into the logs which could then be executed on the system. After its discovery, security researchers saw millions of attempted exploits, many of which turned into successful denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. According to some of the latest research by Gartner, close t

Are your tags really safe with Google Tag Manager? If you've been thinking that using GTM means that your tracking tags and pixels are safely managed , then it might be time to think again. In this article we look at how a big-ticket seller that does business on every continent came unstuck when it forgot that you can't afford to allow tags to go unmanaged or become misconfigured.  Read the full case study here . Google Tag Manager saves website owners time and money. Its visual interface lets them attach tracking tags to their sites and then modify them as needed without the need to call a developer every time. Such tags gather the marketing and analytics data that power growth, and GTM makes them easier to manage, but with strict rules around data privacy to consider, you can't trust it completely; it needs active oversight. The ticket seller A case in point that we recently became aware of involves a global company that sells tickets to live events. With global operations i

Recent supply chain cyber-attacks are prompting cyber security regulations in the financial sector to tighten compliance requirements, and other industries are expected to follow. Many companies still don't have efficient methods to manage related time-sensitive SaaS security and compliance tasks. Free SaaS risk assessment tools are an easy and practical way to bring visibility and initial control to SaaS sprawl and Shadow AI. These tools now offer incremental upgrades , helping security professionals meet their company budget or maturity level.  Regulatory pressure, SaaS and AI proliferation, and increased risk of breaches or data leaks through 3rd party apps, make SaaS security one of the hottest areas for practitioners to learn and adopt. New regulations will require robust third-party SaaS risk lifecycle management that begins with SaaS service discovery and third-party risk management (TPRM) and ends with the requirement from CISOs to report incidents in their supply chain

You're probably familiar with the term "critical assets". These are the technology assets within your company's IT infrastructure that are essential to the functioning of your organization. If anything happens to these assets, such as application servers, databases, or privileged identities, the ramifications to your security posture can be severe.  But is every technology asset considered a critical asset? Moreover, is every technology asset considered a  business -critical asset? How much do we really know about the risks to our  business -critical assets?  Business-critical assets are the underlying technology assets of your business in general – and we all know that technology is just one of the 3 essential pillars needed for a successful business operation. In order to have complete cybersecurity governance, organizations should consider: 1) Technology, 2) Business processes, and 3) Key People. When these 3 pillars come together, organizations can begin to understand the

GitHub has rolled out fixes to address a maximum severity flaw in the GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) that could allow an attacker to bypass authentication protections. Tracked as  CVE-2024-4985  (CVSS score: 10.0), the issue could permit unauthorized access to an instance without requiring prior authentication. "On instances that use SAML single sign-on (SSO) authentication with the optional encrypted assertions feature, an attacker could forge a SAML response to provision and/or gain access to a user with administrator privileges," the company said in an advisory. GHES is a self-hosted platform for software development, allowing organizations to store and build software using Git version control as well as automate the deployment pipeline. The issue impacts all versions of GHES prior to 3.13.0 and has been  addressed  in versions 3.9.15, 3.10.12, 3.11.10 and 3.12.4. GitHub further noted that encrypted assertions are not enabled by default and that the flaw does not a

SaaS applications are dominating the corporate landscape. Their increased use enables organizations to push the boundaries of technology and business. At the same time, these applications also pose a new security risk that security leaders need to address, since the existing security stack does not enable complete control or comprehensive monitoring of their usage. LayerX has recently released a new guide, " Let There Be Light: Eliminating the Risk of Shadow SaaS " for security and IT teams, which addresses this gap. The guide explains the challenges of shadow SaaS, i.e., the use of unauthorized SaaS apps for work purposes, and suggests practices and controls that can mitigate them. The guide also compares various security controls that attempt to address this risk (CASB, SASE, Secure Browser Extension) and explains how each one operates and its efficacy. Consequently, the guide is a must-read for all security leaders at modern organizations. Here are the main highlights:

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,