Even as its top marketplace, Dream Market, prepares to close its doors, the dark web continues to thrive. In fact, Darkode, one of the most well-known hacking forums and black markets, has recently reopened. And what are some of the most common wares at these underground markets? Organizational data, and the tools needed to get more. As long as the dark web exists, organizations must learn more about the threat they pose, and how to protect themselves.

Demands on organizations continue to intensify – the precarious balance of requests for more access with the need to be more secure is difficult to maintain. Additionally, all of this is to be achieved faster, with fewer resources. It is more important than ever for each organization to develop a strategy for managing and governing user access in an automated manner. A well-defined Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) program is becoming an increasingly critical piece of an organization’s security portfolio.

With the prevalence of cyber attacks from individuals and groups looking to exploit corporate vulnerabilities and sensitive information assets, companies sometimes overlook another common threat: their own employees. It’s incredibly disheartening to think of trusted current or former colleagues looking to exploit sensitive information for their own monetary gain, but it’s increasingly common. Luckily, there are some telltale signs of this malicious activity that can enable you to identify and rectify problems as quickly as possible using the strategies detailed.

  Through penetration testing, you can proactively identify the most exploitable security weaknesses before someone else does. However, there’s a lot more to it than the actual act of infiltration. Penetration testing is a thorough, well thought out project that consists of several phases. Read on to learn about what it takes to complete a successful pen test.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are a cybercrime category directed at business and political targets. APTs require a high degree of stealth over a prolonged duration of operation in order to be successful. The attack objectives typically extend beyond immediate financial gain, and compromised systems continue to be of service even after key systems have been breached and initial goals reached. APTs can best be summarized by their named requirements:

For the second year in a row, Privileged Access Management (PAM) is listed as a top security priority by Gartner. Despite being around for decades, PAM tools are becoming increasingly vital as organizations’ access privileges become more complex. In fact, experts predict that more than two thirds will implement PAM in their enterprise by 2020.

In 1989, the first instance of ransomware was delivered to thousands of people on floppy disks and demanded that money be sent in the form of a cashier’s check or international money order to a P.O. box in Panama. These days, ransomware has become increasingly more streamlined. Just about anyone can purchase a ransomware strain off the dark web and deploy it without needing to be all that tech savvy. Additionally, using cryptocurrency like Bitcoin helps attackers stay anonymous and untraceable.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, a number of instances of financial fraud were uncovered in large public corporations, leading to a growing feeling of distrust in the market. Back in 2001, for instance, a scandal surrounded the American energy company Enron when they were discovered to have used fraudulent accounting practices and loopholes to hide their losses in financial reports. This incident, along with numerous other scandals like it, prompted the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to provide more oversight.                      

What is Penetration Testing? Penetration testing is a direct test of an application, a device, a website, an organization, and even the people that work at an organization. It first involves attempting to identify and then attempting to exploit different security weaknesses that can be found in these various areas.

It always seems like the clichéd image of a security expert is them sitting in a dark room with upwards of four to six bright monitors displaying different complex tasks. Regardless of how many monitors they use, we know security teams are using just as many, if not more, complex tools. According to analyst firm EMA’s Security Megatrend Report, 75% of respondents use more than six consoles to do their jobs.

Imagine if you had cuckoo clock, but instead of chiming at the top of the hour, it chimed after every minute. Not only would you be overwhelmed by noise, you’d also have a hard time figuring what time it was. This is increasingly the experience of IT Teams as they are inundated with syslog events, with no time to discern which alerts should take precedence over others.

As each year draws to a close, the temptation is always to wipe the slate clean, put the past behind us, and have a fresh start come January. However, for most things, and particularly when it comes to cybersecurity, the best way to ensure a successful year ahead is to utilize what we learned over the past year as a foundation to build on. Read on as we revisit pieces from the past year that will remain relevant into 2019 and beyond.

Antivirus solutions are like a water filter for your IT environment – they catch impurities that can poison your system. This is what makes detection rates such an important consideration when Linux IT security professionals are choosing an antivirus solution. These ratings analyze not only how much an antivirus solution catches, but also what it catches.

It’s hard to escape hearing about cryptocurrency these days. But this new monetary system is not utilized by a large percent of the population, and is incredibly complex, so many of us are left to simply smile and nod when it’s brought up in conversation.

Organizations face a unique balancing act when dealing with privileged users. On the one side, they require high level access in order to successfully do their jobs.

Though the common vernacular is “The Cloud,” the truth is, there are multiple cloud environments and providers available to organizations looking to utilize this growing technology. Read on to learn about the different types of cloud environments, and the biggest security obstacle each presents. Cloud Types Terminology in cloud computing is growing almost as rapidly as the technology. The following list outlines the important differences between the most common types of cloud deployments:

Even doubters now agree that the forecast of the future of cloud computing is sunnier than ever. As more and more people and organizations transition to cloud services, the question of how to keep the cloud secure becomes more important than ever. Though initially unclear, as the latest report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) suggests, the agreement that cloud security is a shared responsibility between cloud providers and cloud users has now firmly taken hold. How those responsibilities shake out, however, is an ongoing conversation.

Privileged Account and Session Management (PASM) software, better known as password vaulting, is a type of Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution that helps organizations manage accounts by restricting root access to their environment. These solutions are invaluable for protecting data.

Privileged Account and Session Management (PASM) tools, better known as password vaulting, are a type of PAM solution that restricts user access to IT systems and protects an organization’s data. Some organizations implement password vaulting technology to get started with managing privilege. However, as an infrastructure becomes more multifaceted, additional solutions that utilize other access management strategies should be integrated to maintain speed and security.

Acronyms abound when it comes to Privileged Access Management (PAM). PIM, PAM, PUM, and SUPM, to name a few. As PAM solutions have evolved, analyst firm Gartner has established two further classifications to highlight different approaches: Privileged Account and Session Management (PASM) and Privilege Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM). PASM and PEDM are two categories of security tools that have distinct approaches in how they manage access.

The threat landscape can be a frightening scene when you look at the malicious attacks and ransomware infiltrating organizations around the globe. The good news: Endpoint antivirus applications are making enormous strides in their ability to protect enterprise-level equipment and data from attack. The bad news: Many companies overlook the need to secure non-Windows infrastructure and focus their antivirus security efforts only on individual user workstations.

With cyberattacks still on the rise, you can never be too careful when it comes to securing your company’s data and the systems that house it. The problem is, without advanced endpoint protection it can be hard to discover the malware, viruses, and worms that may be lurking not only on user workstations, but also in server environments.

As a syslog server incessantly pings with every security notification, security teams can feel as though they are drowning in a sea of security warnings. Without a SIEM, it’s difficult to know which events are truly critical and which can be ignored. However, when a SIEM has been implemented, security teams get a much clearer picture of their environment’s security. There could truly be no threats, or multiple incidents may be occurring that simply have not yet affected performance.

Security experts are in general agreement that passwords will simply no longer suffice when it comes to system security. As the numerous breaches within the past years have shown, it is too easy to crack passwords and gain access to all the data across entire systems. So, what can an organization do to better protect its systems? This is where granular access controls, a key feature in certain privileged access management solutions come in. 

Open source SIEM solutions provide basic functionality that can be great for smaller organizations that are just beginning to log and analyze their security event data. But over time, many IT pros find that open source SIEM software is too labor-intensive to be a viable option as the organization grows. In short, many organizations simply outgrow their open source solution.