Tag Archive for: Organizations

“A privacy-first engineering approach is central to organizations’ cyber resilience”

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Many enterprises have started realizing the benefits of adopting confidential computing in today’s distributed work environment. In an interaction with Express Computer,  Ivar Wiersma, Head of Conclave, R3 outlines how organizations can leverage confidential computing to  securely aggregate their datasets to solve shared business problems for their customers and across markets. 

What are the current cyber security challenges, especially in the new normal post the pandemic? 

The new normal definitely poses new challenges for cyber security given the fact that many businesses have found ways to operate virtually. There has been a 17% increase in the number of data breaches now compared to 2020 which underlines the importance of ensuring the security of user data for many businesses in this day and age. 

Coupled with the projection that 75% of the world’s population will have their personal data online by 2023, user data security will not only become a responsibility of businesses but a priority for businesses who wish to thrive in a post-pandemic world. To cater to the demands of a growing digital citizenry, businesses have ramped up their partnerships with other businesses to collaborate digitally in a distributed environment.  

When doing so, this gives rise to the need to ensure that the data shared is kept secure, confidential and tamper proof. To prevent any tampering of confidential data, many businesses simply do not share their confidential data with partners. This is a key challenge for businesses in the post-pandemic world. Information sharing offers great opportunities for businesses in which customer data can inform actionable insights, enhance customer experience and build a more resilient, pandemic-proof organization. However, many businesses are still hesitant to share their data as the space remains difficult to control from a technological standpoint once the data is made available. 

In the light of these challenges, what are the changes that cyber security practitioners need to adopt? 

One possible solution for companies who wish to enhance the security of their complex enterprise structure could be to adopt confidential computing. With this type of…

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CrowdStrike Introduces CrowdStrike Asset Graph to Help Organizations Proactively Identify and Eliminate Blind Spots

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AUSTIN, Texas and RSA Conference 2022, SAN FRANCISCO – June 6, 2022 – CrowdStrike (Nasdaq: CRWD), a leader in cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data, today introduced CrowdStrike Asset Graph, a new graph database powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud that provides IT and security leaders with a 360-degree view into all assets (both managed and unmanaged) alongside unprecedented visibility into their attack surface across devices, users, accounts, applications, cloud workloads, operational technology (OT) and more to simplify IT operations and stop breaches.

As organizations accelerate their digital transformation, they are expanding their attack surface exponentially. This has dramatically increased their risk exposure to adversaries who are discovering and exploiting these soft targets and vulnerabilities faster than IT and security teams can discover them. Visibility is one of the foundational principles of cybersecurity because you cannot secure and defend the assets you don’t know exist. This, in turn, creates a race between adversaries and companies’ IT and security teams to find these blind spots. According to a 2022 report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), “69% of organizations have experienced a cyberattack in which the attack itself started through the exploit of an unknown, unmanaged, or poorly managed internet-facing asset.”

CrowdStrike Asset Graph solves this problem by dynamically monitoring and tracking the complex interactions between assets, providing a single holistic view of the risks those assets pose. While other solutions simply provide a list of assets without context, Asset Graph provides graphic visualizations of the relationships between all assets such as devices, users, accounts, applications, cloud workloads and OT, along with the rich context necessary for proper security hygiene and proactive security posture management to reduce risk in their organizations.

“Digital transformation has led to an equal and pronounced acceleration of security transformation in the modern enterprise. For companies furthest along on this journey, IT operations and security teams – once distinct silos – are…

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65% of Singaporean organizations hit by ransomware in 2021

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ransomware is

(Source – Shutterstock)

Ransomware continues to affect organizations all over the world. In Southeast Asia, Singapore is one of the most advanced countries in the world when it comes to tech adoption. However, with increased usage and dependence on technology, the risks that come with it increase as well.

According to a report by Sophos, 65% of Singaporean organizations surveyed in its State of Ransomware 2022 report were hit with ransomware in 2021. With a 25% increase since 2020, the average ransom paid by organizations in Singapore that had data encrypted in their most significant ransomware attack also increased by more than sixfold from US$187,500 in 2020 to US$1.16 million in 2021.

Despite having sufficient data recovery and backup capabilities, 48% of the organizations that had data encrypted still paid the ransom to get their data back. The report summarises the impact of ransomware on 5,600 mid-sized organizations in 31 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, with 965 sharing details of ransomware payments.

For Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at Sophos, the survey showed that the proportion of victims paying up continues to increase, even when they may have other options available. He believes there could be several reasons for this, including incomplete backups or the desire to prevent stolen data from appearing on a public leak site.

“In the aftermath of a ransomware attack, there is often intense pressure to get back up and running as soon as possible. Restoring encrypted data using backups can be a difficult and time-consuming process, so it can be tempting to think that paying a ransom for a decryption key is a faster option. It’s also an option fraught with risk,” commented Wisniewski.

He also pointed out that organizations don’t know what the attackers might have done, such as adding backdoors, copying passwords, and more. If organizations don’t thoroughly clean up the recovered data, they’ll end up with all that potentially toxic material in their network and potentially exposed to a repeat attack.

The report also showed that 64% of attacks resulted in data being encrypted, a…

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Absolute Ransomware Response accelerates endpoint recovery for organizations

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Absolute Software released Absolute Ransomware Response, enabling customers to strengthen preparedness and accelerate endpoint recovery in the face of the ever-growing threat of ransomware attacks.

Absolute Ransomware Response

With this new offering, part of the company’s Secure Endpoint product portfolio, organizations have the key capabilities and services needed to assess their ransomware preparedness and cyber hygiene across endpoints; ensure mission-critical security applications, such as anti-malware and device management tools, remain healthy and capable of self-healing; and expedite the quarantine and recovery of devices if an attack occurs.

Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that organizations will face a new ransomware attack every two seconds by 2031, up from every 11 seconds in 2021. While the top priority for IT and security teams has historically been securing and restoring critical infrastructure, such as servers and business applications, the accelerated adoption of ‘work-from-anywhere’ has significantly expanded the potential ransomware attack surface – and in turn, has increased the need to extend preparedness and recovery efforts to end user devices.

“The reality is that, while organizations are very concerned about the time to recover from ransomware attacks, they often solely focus on prevention tools, without planning for the worst-case scenario: falling victim to an attack,” said Eric Hanselman, Principal Research Analyst at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, in a recent webinar. “By building a plan and improving their preparedness and simplifying the endpoint recovery process for their organizations, they can accelerate businesses’ ability to recover and resume operations.”

“Ransomware is more prevalent, more sophisticated, and more capable of disruption and damage than ever and organizations need to plan for ‘when,’ not ‘if,’ they are successfully attacked,” said John Herrema, EVP of Product & Strategy at Absolute. “When a ransomware attack occurs, organizations are often forced to weigh the risks of cutting off all communication with an infected device, losing the ability to restore or recover it, or leaving the door open for…

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