Cybersecurity

We all dread them; we all need them – security audits. They can take multiple forms, but without security audits we are unable to measure cybersecurity improvements and many deficiencies may never be brought to light. Security audits involve evaluating or analyzing people, processes, and technology surrounding the security aspects of an organization. Likewise, as organizational networks and cyber threats are constantly changing, security audits should be performed regularly to assess if current controls and processes sufficiently reduce risk against the ever-changing threat landscape.

Pardon the lack of fanfare that this report deserves, but this serves as an FYI that arguably the most heralded cybersecurity industry report, the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, affectionately known as the “DBIR,” was released this morning. According to Verizon, the Verizon Business 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report (2021 DBIR) examines more breaches than ever before. Some of the high-level findings include:

Ransomware attacks have ubiquitous relevance for all organizations, regardless of targeting set/victimology or targeted system (IT or OT) of the attributed ransomware group/family for any given incident. For every cyber threat group that claims they don’t target particular sectors or types of organizations, there are many more groups that do not espouse similar tenets. For example, while Darkside proclaims to only support targeting high-value victims capable of paying outrageous demands, many other ransomware groups are indiscriminate and opportunistic and project no such illusion.

In 2004, Bill Gates prematurely postulated that passwords were dead. According to a recent DarkReading post, in 2005 security expert Mark Burnett wrote a book called Perfect Passwords, in which he floated the idea of dedicating one day in the calendar each year when everybody should change their passwords. Here we are in 2021 and passwords are still pertinent today and for the projected future.