Social Engineering

The top 12 tech stories of 2022

The technology sector’s vulnerability to the vagaries of geopolitics and the macroeconomy became clearer than ever in 2022, as IT giants laid off workers en masse, regulators cracked down on tech rule-breakers, nations negotiated data privacy, the EU-China chip war widened, and the Ukraine war disrupted business as usual. Through it all the classic tech themes—including innovation, constant change, and the fight to bolster cybersecurity—continued as ChatGPT was released, Broadcom sought to purchase VMWare, a…

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How Marvel’s Avengers inspire Pinsent Masons CISO to adapt cybersecurity hiring

Cybersecurity’s ongoing battle with a “skills shortage” has seen the sector lose its way regarding talent hiring and retention, says Christian Toon, CISO at London-based law firm Pinsent Masons. In an industry crying out for diversity and innovation, this year’s number one UK CSO 30 Awards winner says he takes inspiration from the Marvel Comics universe to challenge traditional HR approaches and more effectively recruit and keep security talent. “We have what some describe as…

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Social media use can put companies at risk: Here are some ways to mitigate the danger

We live in a social world, but should our businesses? For many, the answer to that is increasingly no—that’s why laws and regulations have recently been put in place restricting access to some social media in certain situations because of the hidden risks of these seemingly innocuous platforms. The United States federal government and some US states, for example, have barred government-issued devices from the use of Chinese-owned TikTok, which allows users to create and…

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How to enable event collection in Windows Server

Event logs register information about software and hardware events that occur in a system, and they are a key weapon in the arsenal of computer security teams. Windows Server has offered Windows Event Forwarding (WEF) for aggregating system event logs from disparate systems to a central event log server for several versions now. High end security information and event management (SIEM) or security, orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) systems are the ideal in an enterprise…

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US consumers seriously concerned over their personal data

A report released today by Big Four accounting firm KPMG found that large majorities of the American public are highly concerned about the security of their personal data, and that US companies aren’t helping matters by ramping up their collection of that data. Fully 92% of respondents to KPMG’s survey said that they were concerned to some extent about how personal data that they provide to companies is handled, and nearly nine in 10 said…

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MTTR “not a viable metric” for complex software system reliability and security

Mean time to resolve (MTTR) isn’t a viable metric for measuring the reliability or security of complex software systems and should be replaced by other, more trustworthy options. That’s according to a new report from Verica which argued that the use of MTTR to gauge software network failures and outages is not appropriate, partly due to the distribution of duration data and because failures in such systems don’t arrive uniformly over time. Site reliability engineering…

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F5 expands security portfolio with App Infrastructure Protection

F5 on Thursday announced the launch of F5 Distributed Cloud Services App Infrastructure Protection (AIP), expanding its SaaS-based security portfolio. The new release is a cloud workload protection solution that will provide application observability and protection to cloud-native infrastructures.  AIP is built using technology acquired with Threat Stack and will be a part of the F5 Distributed Cloud Services portfolio, launched earlier this year.  AIP will complement F5’s API Security F5 already has a service…

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Dozens of cybersecurity efforts included in this year’s US NDAA

Last week, members of the US House of Representatives and Senate reconciled their versions of the annual must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Each year the NDAA contains a wealth of primarily military cybersecurity provisions, delivering hundreds of millions, if not billions, in new cybersecurity funding to the federal government. This year’s bill is no exception. Titled the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, the legislation clocks in at over…

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Microsoft’s EU data boundary plan to take effect Jan. 1

Microsoft on Thursday said it will begin rolling out the first phase of its European Union data boundary plan from January 1, 2023 that’ll allow customers to store and process their customer data within the EU. The move comes two days after the EU commission said it had officially begun the process of approving the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Under the first phase of the plan, companies that use Microsoft products and services will be…

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GAO warns government agencies: focus on IoT and OT within critical infrastructure

The US Government Accounting Office (GAO) continues to highlight shortcomings in the cybersecurity posture of government entities responsible for the protection of United States infrastructure when it comes to internet of things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) devices and systems. In a recent report, the GAO shone a light on the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation. How each of these entities reacted and responded to its recommendations was telling.…

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