AI continues to become more weaponized with nation-state attackers and cybercrime gangs experimenting with LLMs and gen AI-based attack tradecraft. The age of weaponized LLMs is here.
At the same time, multi-cloud-based infrastructures more businesses rely on are coming under attack. Exfiltrating any identity data available from endpoints and then traversing a network to gain more access by collecting more credential data is often the goal.
Cyberattacks that combine AI and social engineering are just beginning
Attackers have a version of human-in-the-middle, too, but their goal is to unleash AI’s offensive attack capabilities within social engineering campaigns. Last year’s social engineering-based attacks on MGM, Comcast, Shield Healthcare Group, and others serve as a case in point.
CrowdStrike’s2024 Global Threat Report finds that cloud intrusions jumped 75% last year. There was a 76% increase in data theft victims named on data leak sites and a 60% increase in interactive intrusion campaigns. Worse, 75% of attacks were malware-free, making them difficult to identify and stop. There was also a 110% YoY increase in cloud-conscious cases.
PwC’s 2024 Digital Trust Insights Report finds that 97% of senior management teams have gaps in their cloud risk management plans. 47% say cloud attacks are their most urgent threat. One in three senior management teams is prioritizing cloud security as their top investment this year.
Gartner sees a more complex threatscape driving growth
Nation-state attackers are picking up the pace of their stealthy AI arms race. They’re looking to score offensive first victories on an increasingly active digital battlefield. Gartner predicts that in 2027, 17% of the total cyberattacks and data leaks will involve generative AI.
Another key assumption driving Gartner’s latest forecast is that by 2025, user efficiency improvements will drive at least 35% of security vendors to offer large language model (LLM)-driven chat capabilities for users to interact with their applications and data, up from 1% in 2022.
Gartner has also factored in the surge in cloud attacks and the continued growth of hybrid workforces. One of their key assumptions driving the forecast is that “by the end of 2026, the democratization of technology, digitization, and automation of work will increase the total available market of fully remote and hybrid workers to 64% of all employees, up from 52% in 2021.”
Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, Published February 29, 2024
Market subsegments predicted to see the most significant growth through 2027 include the following:
Gartner has high expectations for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) growth, stating the worldwide market was worth $575.7 million in 2021 and predicting it will soar to $3.99 billion in 2027, attaining a 31.6% CAGR in the forecast period.
Identity Access Management (IAM) is predicted to grow from $4 billion in 2021 to $11.1 billion in 2027, attaining a 17.6% CAGR. Identity Governance and Administration software is predicted to grow from $2.8 billion in 2021 to $5.77 billion in 2027, attaining a 12.8% CAGR.
Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) are predicted to grow from $9.8 billion in 2021 to $26.9 billion in 2027, achieving a 17.2% CAGR.
Threat Intelligence software is predicted to grow from $1.1 billion in 2021 to $2.79 billion in 2027, growing at a 15.6% CAGR through the forecast period.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) is predicted to grow from $928M in 2021 to $4.75 billion in 2027, attaining a CAGR of 30.2%. Gartner believes that the market share of cloud-native solutions will continue to grow. They are predicting that the combined market for cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) will reach $12.8 billion in constant currency by 2027, up from $4.6 billion in 2022. Gartner continues to also see strong demand for cloud-based detection and response solutions that include endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR).
Cybersecurity, privacy and security startups have raised $1.9 billion in three months this year, on pace to reach $7.6 billion or more in 2021, over four times more than was raised throughout 2010 ($1.7 billion), according to a Crunchbase Pro query today.
22,156 startups who either compete in or rely on cybersecurity, security and privacy technologies and solutions as a core part of their business models today, 122 have pre-seed or seed funding in the last twelve months based on a Crunchbase Pro query.
From network and data security to I.T. governance, risk measurement, and policy compliance, cybersecurity is a growing industry estimated to be worth over $300B by 2025, according to C.B. Insight’s Emerging Trends Cybersecurity Report downloadable here.
Today, 680 cybersecurity, privacy, and security startups have received $6.8 billion in funding over the last twelve months, with $4 million being the median funding round and $12.6 million the average funding round for a startup. The number of startups receiving funding this year, funding amounts and the methodology to find the top 20 cybersecurity startups are all based on Crunchbase Pro analysis done today.
New startups and established vendors are attracting record levels of investment as all organizations look to thwart increasingly complex, costly and unpredictable cyberattacks. There is an arms race going on between cyber attackers using A.I. and machine learning and the many startups and existing vendors whose goal is to contain them. CBInsights and PwC recently published their latest quarterly joint study of the venture capital landscape, MoneyTree™ Report, Q4, 2020. The study finds that monitoring and security deals were the third fastest-growing vertical in 2020, with Q4 being exceptional for all verticals, as the heat map below shows:
The 20 Best Cybersecurity Startups To Watch In 2021
Based on a methodology that equally weighs a startup’s ability to attract new customers, current and projected revenue growth, ability to adapt their solutions to growing industries and position in their chosen markets, the following are the top 20 cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021:
Axis Security – Axis Security’s Application Access Cloud™ is a purpose-built cloud-based solution that makes application access across networks scalable and secure. Built on zero-trust, Application Access Cloud offers a new agentless model that connects users online to any application, private or public, without touching the network or the apps themselves. Axis Security is a privately held company backed by Canaan Partners, Ten Eleven Ventures, and Cyberstarts. Axis is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with research and development in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Bitglass – What makes Bitglass unique and worth watching is how they are evolving their Total Cloud Security Platform to combine cloud access security brokerage, on-device secure web gateways, and zero-trust network access to secure endpoints across all devices. Its Polyscale Architecture is delivering uptimes of 99.99% in customer deployments. Bitglass’s 2020 Insider Threat Report has several interesting insights based on their recent interviews with a leading cybersecurity community. One interesting takeaway is 61% of those surveyed experienced an insider attack in the last 12 months (22% reported at least six).
Cado Security – Cado Security’s cloud-native forensics and response platform helps organizations respond to security incidents in real-time, averting potential breaches and security incidents. The Cado Response platform is built on analytics components that perform thorough forensic analyses of compromised systems. Cado’s platform, Cado Response, is an agentless, cloud-native forensics solution that allows security professionals to quickly and comprehensively understand an incident’s impact across all environments, including cloud and containers as well as on-premise systems. “Finding the root cause of security incidents in cloud or container environments is incredibly difficult. Traditional tools don’t support these new environments, and there is a shortage of people who know both forensics and cloud security,” said CEO James Campbell, formerly Director, Cyber Threat Detection and Response at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Our Cado Response platform completely changes how security professionals can respond to incidents in the cloud.”
Confluera – Originally mentioned as one of the 20 Best Cybersecurity Startups To Watch In 2020, Confluera’s sustained innovation pace in the middle of a pandemic deserves special mention. They are one of the most resilient startups to watch in 2021.Confluera is a cybersecurity startup helping organizations find sophisticated security attacks going on inside of corporate infrastructures. The startup delivers autonomous infrastructure-wide cyber kill chain tracking and response by leveraging the ‘Continuous Attack Graph’ to stop and remediate cyber threats in real-time deterministically. Confluera’s platform is designed to detect and prevent attackers from navigating infrastructure. Confluera technology combines machine comprehended threat detection with accurately tracked activity trails to stop cyberattacks in real-time, allowing companies to simplify security operations radically. It frees up human security personnel to focus on more important work instead of spending hours trying to join the dots between the thousands of alerts they receive daily, many of which are false positives. The following is a video that explains how Confluera XDR for Cloud Infrastructure works:
DataFleets – DataFleets is a privacy-preserving data engine that unifies distributed data for rapid access, agile analytics, and automated compliance. The platform provides data scientists and developers with a “data fleet” that allows them to create analytics, ML models, and applications on susceptible data sets without direct access to the data. Each data fleet has easy-to-use APIs, and under-the-hood, they ensure data protection using advances in federated computation, transfer learning, encryption, and differential privacy. DataFleets helps organizations overcome data privacy and innovation struggle by maintaining data protection standards for compliance while accelerating data science initiatives.
DefenseStorm – DefenseStorm’s unique approach to providing cybersecurity and cyber-compliance for the banking industry make them one of the top startups to watch in 2021. Their DefenseStorm GRID is the only co-managed, cloud-based and compliance-automated solution of its kind for the banking industry. It monitors everything on a bank’s network. It matches it to defined policies for real-time, complete and proactive cyber exposure readiness, keeping security teams and executives updated on bank networks’ real-time security status. The company’s Threat Ready Active Compliance (TRAC) Team augments its bank customers’ internal teams to protect business continuity and skills availability while ensuring cost-effective coverage and management.
Enso Security – Enso is an application security posture management (ASPM) platform startup known for the depth of its insights and expertise in cybersecurity. With Enso, software security groups can scale and gain control over application security programs to protect applications systematically. The Enso ASPM platform discovers application inventory, ownership, and risk to help security teams quickly build and enforce security policies and transform AppSec into an automated, systematic discipline.
Ethyca – Ethyca is an infrastructure platform that provides developers and product teams with the ability to ensure consumer data privacy throughout applications and services design. It also provides your product, engineering, and privacy teams with unmatched ease of use and functionality to better care about your user’s data. The company helps companies discover sensitive data and then provides a mechanism for customers to delete, see, or edit their data from the system. Ethyca’s mission is to increase trust in data-driven business by building automated data privacy infrastructure. Ethyca’s founder and CEO Cillian Kiernan is a fascinating person to speak with on the topics of privacy, security, GDPR, and CCPA compliance. He continues to set a quick pace of innovation in Ethyca, making this startup one of the most interesting in data privacy today. Here’s an interview he did earlier this year with France 24 English:
Havoc Shield – Havoc Shield reduces the burden on small and medium businesses (SMBs) by giving them access to advanced security technology that protects against data breaches, phishing, dark web activity, and other threats. The Havoc Shield platform offers comprehensive security and compliance features that meet the standards of Fortune 100 companies, making it easier for businesses working to win deals with those companies. “For a long time, cybersecurity technology has been virtually inaccessible to small businesses, who largely can’t afford those resources,” said Brian Fritton, CEO and co-founder of Havoc Shield. “We created Havoc Shield because we believe in democratizing cybersecurity for the little guy. Small businesses deserve the ability to protect what they’ve built, just as much as larger companies that have dedicated cybersecurity staff.” Since the end of Q2 2020, Havoc Shield has quadrupled its client list. In the coming months, the company aims to grow its team to help more small businesses protect themselves from threats and achieve customer trust.
Illumio – Widely considered the leader in micro-segmentation that prevents the spread of breaches inside data centers and cloud environments, Illumio is one of the most interesting cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021. Enterprises such as Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, Salesforce, and Oracle NetSuite use Illumio to reduce cyber risk and achieve regulatory compliance. The Illumio Adaptive Security Platform® uniquely protects critical information with real-time application dependency and vulnerability mapping coupled with micro-segmentation that works across any data center, public cloud, or hybrid cloud deployment on bare-metal, virtual machines, and containers. The following video explains why Illumio Core is a better approach to segmentation.
Immuta – Immuta was founded in 2015 based on a mission within the U.S. Intelligence Community to build a platform that accelerates self-service access to and control sensitive data. The Immuta Automated Data Governance platform creates trust across data engineering, security, legal, compliance, and business teams to ensure timely access to critical data with minimal risk while adhering to global data privacy regulations GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Immuta’s automated, scalable, no-code approach makes it easy for users to access the data they need when they need it while protecting sensitive information and ensuring customer privacy. Selected by Fast Company as one of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, Immuta is headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices in College Park, MD, and Columbus, OH.
Isovalent – Isovalent makes software that helps enterprises connect, monitor and secure mission-critical workloads in modern, cloud-native ways. Its flagship technology, Cilium, is the choice of leading global organizations, including Adobe, Capital One, Datadog, GitLab, and many more. Isovalent is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Cisco Investments. Earlier this month, Isovalent announced that it had raised $29 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google with participation from Cisco Investments. Google recently selected Cilium as the next-generation dataplane for its GKE offering calling Cilium “the most mature eBPF implementation for Kubernetes out there” in its “New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers” blog: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/bringing-ebpf-and-cilium-to-google-kubernetes-engine.
JupiterOne – JupiterOne, Inc. reduces cloud security cost and complexity, replacing guesswork with granular data about cyber assets and configurations. The company’s software helps security operations teams shorten the path to security and compliance and improve their overall posture through continuous data aggregation and relationship modeling across all assets. JupiterOne customers include Reddit, Databricks, HashiCorp, Addepar, Auth0, LifeOmic, and OhMD. Earlier this year, JupiterOne received $19 million in venture funding. The Series A round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with additional investment from Rain Capital, LifeOmic, and individual investors. “JupiterOne has developed a compelling product that integrates quickly, has applicability across enterprise segments, and is highly reviewed by current customers,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures and former CEO at Symantec. Salem now joins the JupiterOne board. “We see a multibillion-dollar market opportunity for this technology across mid-market and enterprise customers. Asset management is the first step in building a successful security program, and it’s currently a tedious, imperfect process that’s well-suited for automation.”
Lightspin – Lightspin is a pioneer in contextual cloud security protecting native, Kubernetes, and microservices from known and unknown risks and has recently announced a $4 million seed funding round on November 24th. They will use the proceeds of the round to finance continued R&D on how to secure cloud infrastructures. The financing round was led by Ibex Investors LLC, the firm’s first global investment from its new $100 million early-stage fund, and also included participation from private angel investors. Lightspin’s technology uses graph-based tools and algorithms to provide rapid, in-depth visualizations of cloud stacks, analyze potential attack paths and detect the root causes, all of which are the most critical vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
Orca Security – Orca Security is noteworthy for its innovative approach to providing instant-on, workload-deep security for AWS, Azure, and GCP without the gaps in agents’ coverage and operational costs.Orca integrates cloud platforms as an interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on environmental context. Delivered as SaaS, Orca Security’s patent-pending SideScanning™ technology reads cloud configuration and workloads’ runtime block storage out-of-band, detecting vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, weak and leaked passwords, and unsecured PII.
SECURITI.ai – SECURITI.ai is an AI-Powered PrivacyOps company that helps automate all significant functions needed for privacy compliance on a single platform. It enables enterprises to grant individual and group rights to data and comply with global privacy regulations like CCPA and bolster their brands. They collect and manage consent from multiple sources, including web properties, web forms, and SaaS applications. Their AI-Powered PrivacyOps platform is a full-stack solution that operationalizes and simplifies privacy compliance using robotic automation and a natural language interface. SECURITI.ai was founded in November 2018 and is headquartered in San Jose, California.
SecureStack – SecureStack helps software developers find security & scalability gaps in their web applications and offers ways to fix those gaps without forcing them to become security experts. The results are faster time to business and a 60%-70% reduction in the app attack surface.
The SecureStack platform’s intelligent automation manages security controls across distributed infrastructures using rules and profiles customizable by customers. SecureStack is noteworthy for its analytics and logging expertise in helping enterprises scale applications across cloud infrastructures.
Stairwell – What makes Stairwell one of the top startups to watch in 2021 is its unique approach to cybersecurity built around a vision that all security teams should be able to determine what alerts are threat-related or not and why. Mike Wiacek, the founder of Google’s Threat Analysis Group and co-founder and former Chief Security Officer of Alphabet moonshot Chronicle, leads the company as its CEO and founder. Wiacek is joined by Jan Kang, former Chief Legal Officer at Chronicle, as COO and General Counsel. Stairwell is backed by Accel Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Gradient Ventures, and Allen & Company LLC.
Ubiq Security – What makes Ubiq Security one of the top cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021 is how rapidly their API-based developer platform is maturing while gaining traction in the market. Ubiq Security recently signed commercial agreements with the United States Army and the Department of Homeland Security. This month, the startup announced it had raised $6.4 million in a seed equity investment round. Okapi Venture Capital, an early investor in Crowdstrike, led the round with participation from TenOneTen Ventures, Cove Fund, DLA Piper Venture, Volta Global, and Alexandria Venture Investments. Ubiq will use the funds to accelerate platform development, developer relations, and customer acquisition.
Unit21 – Unit21 helps protect businesses against adversaries through a simple API and dashboard to detect and manage money laundering, fraud, and other sophisticated risks across multiple industries. Former Affirm and Shape Security employees Trisha Kothari and Clarence Chio founded Unit21 in 2018 and work with customers like Intuit, Coinbase, Gusto, and Line to create a powerful & customizable rules engine for risk and compliance teams. Unit21’s highly flexible, customizable, and intelligent cloud-based system provides a configurable engine for transaction monitoring, identity verification, case management, operations management, and analytics and reporting. On October 19th of this year, Unit21 announced a $13 million funding round led by A.Capital Ventures. Additional participation includes investors such as Gradient Ventures (Google’s A.I. venture fund), Core V.C., South Park Commons, Diane Greene (founder of VMWare), William Hockey (founder of Plaid), Chris Britt and Ryan King (founders of Chime), Sumit Agarwal (founder of Shape Security), and Michael Vaughan (former COO of Venmo). Unit21 will use the new capital to grow its product and distribution-focused management team, increase sales and marketing efforts, and sell into new industries.
Bottom Line: Today’s largely-distributed enterprises need to make sure they are putting endpoint security first in 2021– which includes closely managing every stage of the device lifecycle, from deployment to decommission, and ensuring all sensitive data remains protected.
There’s a looming paradox facing nearly every organization today of how they’ll secure thousands of remote endpoints without having physical access to devices, and without disrupting worker productivity. Whether there’s the need to retire hardware as part of down-sizing or cost-cutting measures, or the need to equip virtual teams with newer equipment more suitable for long term work-from-home scenarios, this is one of the most pressing issues facing CISOs and CIOs today.
Wanting to learn more about how their customers are tackling their endpoint security challenges and how their companies are helping to solve it, I sat down (virtually) with Absolute Software’s President and CEO Christy Wyatt and Matthew Zielinski, President of North America Intelligent Devices Group at Lenovo. The following is my interview with both of them:
Louis Columbus:Christy and Matt, thanks so much for your time today. To get started, I would like each of you to share what you’re hearing from your customers regarding their plans to refresh laptops and other endpoint devices in 2021.
Christy Wyatt: We’re seeing a strong desire from organizations to ensure that every individual is digitally enabled, and has access to a screen. In some cases, that means refreshing the hardware they already have in the field, and in other cases, that means buying or adding devices. From the endpoint security standpoint, there’s been a shift in focus around which tools matter the most. When laptops were primarily being used on campus, there was a certain set of solutions to monitor those devices and ensure they remained secure. Now that 90% of devices are out of the building, an entirely different set of capabilities is required – and delivering those has been our focus.
Matt Zielinski: We are seeing historic levels of demand from consumers, as many are transitioning from having maybe one or two devices per household to at least one device per person. We’re also seeing the same levels of demand on both the education and enterprise side. The new dynamic of work-from-anywhere, learn-from-anywhere, collaborate-from-anywhere underscores that the device hardware and software need to be current in order to support both the productivity and security needs of hugely distributed workforces. That’s our highest priority.
Louis: Where are CISOs in their understanding, evaluation, and adoption of endpoint security technologies?
Christy: The journey has been different for the education market than for the enterprise market. Most enterprise organizations were already on the digital path, with some percentage of their population already working remotely. And because of this, they typically have a more complex security stack to manage; our data shows that the total number of unique applications and versions installed on enterprise devices is nearly 1.5 million. What they’ve seen is a trifecta of vulnerabilities: employees taking data home with them, accessing it on unsecured connections, and not being aware of how their devices are protected beyond the WiFi connection and the network traffic.
In the education space, the challenges – and the amount of complexity – are completely different; they’re managing just a small fraction of that total number of apps and versions. That said, as the pandemic unfolded, education was hit harder because they were not yet at a point where every individual was digitally connected. There was a lot of reliance on being on campus, or being in a classroom. So, schools had to tackle digital and mobile transformation at the same time – and to their credit, they made multiple years of progress in a matter of weeks or months. This rapid rate of change will have a profound effect on how schools approach technology deployments going forward.
Matt: Whether in enterprise or education, our customers are looking to protect three things: their assets, their data, and their users’ productivity. It’s a daunting mission. But, the simplest way to accomplish it is to recognize the main control point has changed. It’s no longer the server sitting behind the firewall of your company’s or school’s IT environment. The vulnerability of the endpoint is that the network is now in the user’s hands; the edge is now the primary attack surface. I think CISOs realize this, and they are asking the right questions… I just don’t know if everyone understands the magnitude or the scale of the challenge. Because the problem is so critical, though, people are taking the time to make the right decisions and identify all the various components needed to be successful.
Louis: It seems like completing a laptop refresh during the conditions of a pandemic could be especially challenging, given how entire IT teams are remote. What do you anticipate will be the most challenging aspects of completing a hardware refresh this year (2021)?
Matt: The PC has always been a critical device for productivity. But now, without access to that technology, you are completely paralyzed; you can’t collaborate, you can’t engage, you can’t connect. Lenovo has always been focused on pushing intelligent transformation as far as possible to get the best devices into the hands of our customers. Beyond designing and building the device, we have the ability to distribute asset tags and to provide a 24/7 help desk for our customers whether you’re a consumer, a school, or a large institution. We can also decommission those devices at the end, so we’re able to support the entire journey or lifecycle.
The question has really become, how do you deliver secure devices to the masses? And, we’re fully equipped to do that. For example, every Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop comes out of the box with Lenovo Security Assurance, which is actually powered by Absolute; it is in our hardware. Our customers can open a Lenovo PC, and know that it is completely secure, right out of the box. Every one of our laptops is fortified with Absolute’s Persistence technology and self-healing capabilities that live in the BIOS. It’s that unbreakable, secure connection that makes it possible for us to serve our customers throughout the entire lifecycle of device ownership.
Louis:Why are the legacy approaches to decommissioning assets falling short / failing today? How would you redesign IT asset-decommissioning approaches to make them more automated, less dependent on centralized IT teams?
Christy: There have been a few very visible cases over the past year of highly regulated organizations, experiencing vulnerabilities because of how they decommissioned – or did not properly decommission – their assets. But, I don’t want anyone to believe that that this is a problem that is unique to regulated industries, like financial services. The move to the cloud has given many organizations a false sense of security, and it seems that the more data running in the cloud, the more pronounced this false sense of security becomes. It’s a mistaken assumption to think that when hardware goes missing, the security problem is solved by shutting down password access and that all the data is protected because it is stored in the cloud. That’s just not true. When devices aren’t calling in anymore, it’s a major vulnerability – and the longer the device sits without being properly wiped or decommissioned, the greater the opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of those assets.
The other piece that should be top of mind is that once a device is decommissioned, it’s often sold. We want to ensure that nothing on that device gets passed on to the next owner, especially if it’s going to a service or leasing program. So, we’ve concentrated on making asset decommissioning as precise as possible and something that can be done at scale, anytime and anywhere.
Matt: Historically, reclaiming and decommissioning devices has required physical interaction. The pandemic has limited face-to-face encounters, so , we’re leveraging many different software solutions to give our customers the ability to wipe the device clean if they aren’t able to get the asset back in their possession, so that at least they know it is secure. Since we’re all now distributed, we’re looking at several different solutions that will help with decommissioning, several of which are promising and scale well given today’s constraints. Our goal is to provide our enterprise customers with decommissioning flexibility, from ten units to several thousand.
Louis:Paradoxically, having everyone remote has made the business case for improving endpoint security more compelling too. What do you hear from enterprises about accelerating digital transformation initiatives that include the latest-generation endpoint devices?
Christy: The same acceleration that I spoke about on the education side, we absolutely see on the enterprise side as well, and with rapid transformation comes increased complexity. There has been a lot of conversation about moving to Zero Trust, moving more services to the cloud and putting more controls on the endpoint – and not having these sort of layers in between. Our data tells us that the average enterprise device today has 96 unique applications, and at least 10 of them are security applications. That is a massive amount of complexity to manage. So, we don’t believe that adding more controls to the endpoint is the answer; we believe that what’s most important is knowing the security controls you have are actually working. And we need to help devices and applications become more intelligent, self-aware, and capable of fixing themselves. This concept of resiliency is the cornerstone of effective endpoint security, and a critical part of the shift to a more modern security architecture.
Matt: I think there are two major forcing functions: connection and security. Because we are all now remote, there’s a huge desire to feel connected to one another even though we aren’t sitting in the same room together. We’re modifying our products in real-time with the goal of removing shared pain points and optimizing for the new reality in which we’re all living and working. Things like microphone noise suppression and multiple far field microphones, so that if the dog barks or kids run into a room, the system will mute before you’ve even pressed the mute button. We’re improving camera technology from a processing standpoint to make things look better. Ultimately, our goal is to provide an immersive and connected experience.
Security, however, transcends specific features that deliver customer experiences – security is the experience. The features that make hardware more secure are those that lie beneath the operating system, in the firmware. That is why we have such a deep network of partners, including Absolute. Because you need to have a full ecosystem, and a program that takes advantage of all the best capabilities, in order to deliver the best security solution possible.
Louis:How is Absolute helping enterprise customers ensure greater endpoint security and resiliency in 2021 and beyond?
Christy: We spend a lot of time sitting with customers to understand their needs and how and where we can extend our endpoint security solutions to fit. We believe in taking a layered approach – which is the framework for defense in-depth, and an effective endpoint security strategy. The foundational piece, which we are able to deliver, is a permanent digital tether to every device; this is the lifeline. Not having an undeletable connection to every endpoint means you have a very large security gap, which must be closed fast. A layered, persistence-driven approach ensures our customers know their security controls are actually working and delivering business value. It enables our customers to pinpoint where a vulnerability is and take quick action to mitigate it.
Lenovo’s unique, high value-add approach to integrated security has both helped drive innovation at Absolute, while also providing Lenovo customers the strongest endpoint security possible. Their multilayer approach to their endpoint strategy capitalizes on Absolute’s many BIOS-level strengths to help their customers secure every endpoint they have. As our companies work together, we are both benefitting from a collaboration that seeks to strengthen and enrich all layers of endpoint security. Best of all, our shared customers are the benefactors of this collaboration and the results we are driving at the forefront of endpoint security.
Louis:How has the heightened focus on enterprise cybersecurity in general, and endpoint security specifically, influenced Lenovo’s product strategy in 2021 and beyond?
Matt: We have always been focused on our unique cybersecurity strengths from the device side and making sure we have all of the control points in manufacturing to ensure we build a secure platform. So, we’ve had to be open-minded about endpoint security, and diligent in envisioning how potential vulnerabilities and attack strategies can be thwarted before they impact our customers. Because of this mindset, we’re fortunate to have a very active partner community. We’re always scouring the earth for the next hot cybersecurity technology and potential partner with unique capabilities and the ability to scale with our model. This is a key reason we’ve standardized on Absolute for endpoint security, as it can accommodate a wide breadth of deployment scenarios. It’s a constant and very iterative process with a team of very smart people constantly looking at how we can excel at cybersecurity. It is this strategy that is driving us to fortify our Lenovo Security Assurance architecture over the long-term, while also seeking new ways of providing insights from existing and potentially new security applications.
Louis:What advice are you giving CISOs to strengthen endpoint security in 2021 and beyond?
Christy: One of our advisors is the former Global Head of Information Security at Citi Group, and former CISO of JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. He talks a lot about his shared experiences of enabling business operations, while defending organizations from ever-evolving threats, and the question that more IT and security leaders need to be asking – which is, “Is it working?” Included in his expert opinion is that cybersecurity needs to be integral to business strategy – and endpoint security is essential for creating a broader secure ecosystem that can adapt as a company’s needs change.
I believe there needs to be more boardroom-level conversations around how compliance frameworks can be best used to achieve a balance between cybersecurity and business operations. A big part of that is identifying resiliency as a critical KPI for measuring the strength of endpoint controls.
30% of US and UK remote workers say their organizations don’t require them to use a secure access tool, including VPN, to log into corporate databases and systems, according to Ivanti’s 2021 Secure Consumer Cyber Report.
Plus, 25% of remote workers in the US and UK aren’t required to have specific security software running on their devices to access certain applications while working remotely.
And one in four US remote workers use their work email and passwords to log in to consumer websites and apps.
Cybersecurity gaps have continued to widen during the pandemic. A noteworthy survey by Ivanti illustrates exactly how remote workers are putting organizations at risk and where enterprise security is falling short, making those cybersecurity gaps challenging for CISOs to close. Ivanti’s 2021 Secure Consumer Cyber Report outlines the challenges that cybersecurity and IT teams have faced when securing remote workers in what’s being described as the “Everywhere Workplace.” Based on interviews with more than 2,000 US and UK respondents working from home in November 2020, the survey shows that authentication and endpoint security needs to improve across all devices that employees use.
IT Organizations Need Help Closing Their Cybersecurity Gaps
Of the many lessons learned from 2020, among the most valuable are how virtual workforces need self-diagnosing and self-remediating endpoints, while IT organizations need improved unified endpoint management (UEM) as part of a zero-trust strategy. Bad actors continue to target remote workers’ privileged access credentials to gain access and exfiltrate customer, financial and proprietary data, including intellectual property. Ivanti’s survey provides insights into where cybersecurity gaps need attention first:
The most challenging threat surface to protect is a person’s identity because it’s exposed across so many threat surfaces, including personal and work devices, consumer websites, and IoT devices in homes. The pandemic is proving identities are the new security perimeter. A person’s cell phone, personal tablet, and laptop is a real-time digital definition of a person’s identity. Nearly half (49%) of US remote workers use personal devices for their jobs, often without two-factor authentication enabled. The graphic below shows how organizations can close this cybersecurity gap by adopting UEM as part of their go-forward initiatives in 2021 and beyond:
Lack of consistent security software and password standards is a big contributor to US and UK organizations’ cybersecurity gaps today. One in four remote workers can access enterprise resources without any security software in place. An even more surprising finding is that 30% of remote workers in the US and UK can access corporate data without a secure access tool or VPN connection. If a remote worker’s identity is compromised, there’s a one in three chance that their organization will be breached, enabling cyberattackers to move laterally through the company’s systems:
Protecting remote workers’ identities & devices at scale requires Zero Trust. Automating as many tasks as possible while providing a continuous and seamless user experience is the surest way to close cybersecurity gaps. Getting rid of passwords and automating two-factor authentication using Zero Sign-On (ZSO), a core part of the Ivanti platform, is proving essential today. Zero Sign-On relies on proven biometrics, including Apple’s Face ID, as a secondary authentication factor to gain access to work email, unified communications and collaboration tools, and corporate-shared databases and resources. CISOs and their teams also need to consider how mobile threat defense can better secure personal devices against phishing, device, network, and malicious app threats. Late last year, MobileIron (now part of Ivanti) received its second mention in two years in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q3 2020. The Forrester Wave graphic is shown below:
In conclusion, enterprise cybersecurity gaps are widening due to a combination of risky consumer behavior and a lack of consistent security for mobile workforces. And these gaps will only increase as employees increasingly work from anywhere, using their personal devices to connect to corporate resources. To secure and enable the future of work, organizations need to start implementing and maturing an end-to-end zero trust security model today by leveraging new technologies and protecting their current security technology investments.
The Pharma industry has lost $14 billion through Intellectual Property (IP) cyber theft worldwide, according to the United Kingdom Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance.
53% of pharmaceutical IP thefts and related breaches are carried out by someone with insider access, also according to the United Kingdom Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance.
The pharma industry’s average total cost of a data breach is $5.06 million, with one of the highest costs of remediating the breach at $10.81 million across all industries, according to a recent ProofPoint study.
Over 93% of healthcare organizations experienced a data breach in the past three years, and 57% have had more than five data breaches, according to the Cybersecurity Ventures 2020 Healthcare Cybersecurity Report.
Gartner predicts the privileged access management (PAM) market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7% from 2020 through 2024, reaching $2.9 billion by 2024.
Bottom Line: Having developed COVID-19 vaccines in a fraction of the time it takes to create new treatments, pharmaceutical companies need to protect the priceless IP, supporting data, and supply chains from cyberattacks.
Showing how powerful global collaboration between pharmaceutical industry leaders can be, the world’s leading vaccine producers delivered new vaccines in record time. The IP behind COVID-19 vaccines and their supporting supply chains need state-of-the-art protection comprised of cybersecurity technologies and systems, as the vaccines’ IP is an asset that cyber attackers have already tried to obtain.
Pharmaceutical’s Growing Number of Threat Surfaces Make Cybersecurity a Priority
The report provides specifics about how cyber attackers could impersonate an executive from a Chinese biomedical company known for having end-to-end cold chain expertise, which is essential for delivering vaccines reliably. The cyber attackers conducted spear-phishing attacks against global companies who support the global cold chain needed for distributing vaccines. There were credential harvesting attempts against global organizations in at least six countries known today to access vaccine transport and distribution sensitive information.
Launching a phishing campaign with the goal of harvesting details on key executives and access credentials across the cold chain is just the beginning. According to Lookout’s Pharmaceutical Industry Threat Report, some of the most significant threat surfaces are the most problematic today, including the following:
Research & Development & Clinical Trials
Collaborative research teams across pharmaceutical manufacturers globally
Scientists creating initial compounds and completing primary research to define a vaccine.
Integration of study sites at the test device and reporting system level
Manufacturing and Distribution
Plant workers’ systems, including tablets with build instructions on them
Physician & Pharmacist Networks
Distribution Channels and their supporting IT systems
Cyber attackers are taking a more synchronized, multifaceted approach to attacking Covid-19 supply chains, reiterated in CISA’s report. There’s evidence that state-sponsored cyber attackers attempt to move laterally through networks and remain there in stealth, allowing them to conduct cyber espionage and collect additional confidential information from victim environments for future operations. Cyber attackers are initially focused on phishing, followed by malware distribution, registration of new Covid-specific domain names, and always looking for unprotected threat surfaces.
10 Ways Cybersecurity Can Protect COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Chains
By combining multiple cybersecurity best practices and strategies, pharmaceutical companies stand a better chance of protecting their valuable IP and vaccines. Presented below are ten ways the pharmaceutical industry needs to protect the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain today:
Prioritize Privileged Access Management (PAM) across the vaccine supply chain, ensuring least privilege access to sensitive data starting with IP. CISA’s note finds that there have been multiple attempts at capturing privileged credentials, which often have broad access privileges and are frequently left standing open. PAM is needed immediately to institute greater controls around these privileged accounts across the supply chain and only grant just enough just-in-time access to sensitive IP, shipping and logistics data, vaccination schedules, and more. Leaders include Centrify, which is noteworthy for cloud-based PAM implementations at the enterprise and supply chain levels. Additional vendors in this area include BeyondTrust, CyberArk, Ivanti, Thycotic, Ping Identity, and Senhasegura.
Assess every supplier’s security readiness in vaccine supply chains, defining minimum levels of compliance to security standards that include a single, unified security model across all companies. In creating a secured vaccine supply chain, it’s imperative to have every supplier network member on the same security model. Taking this step ensures accountability, greater clarity of roles and responsibilities, and a common definition of privileged roles and access privileges. Leaders in this area include BeyondTrust, Centrify, CyberArk, Ivanti, and Thycotic.
Taking a Zero Trust-based approach to secure every endpoint across the vaccine manufacturer’s R&D, Clinical Trials, Manufacturing, and Distribution networks is necessary to shut down cyber attackers taking advantage of legacy security weaknesses approaches. The pharmaceutical companies and myriad logistics providers see a much faster than the expected proliferation of endpoints today. Trusted and untrusted domains from legacy server operating systems are a time sink when it comes to securing endpoints – and proving unreliable despite the best efforts that Security Operations teams are putting into them. Worst of all, they leave vaccine supply chains vulnerable because they often take an outdated “trust but verify” cybersecurity approach. Leaders include Illumio, Ivanti (MobileIron), Cisco, Appgate, Palo Alto Networks, and Akamai Technologies.
Extend the Zero Trust framework across the entire supply chain by implementing microsegmentation and endpoint security requirements across all phases of the vaccine’s development cycles. This will ensure cyber attackers don’t have the opportunity to embed code to activate later. The goal is to push Zero Trust principles to all related processes integrating with the vaccines’ pipeline, including all dependencies across the entire development lifecycle.
Incorporating Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across every system in the vaccine supply chain is a given. Usernames and passwords alone are not enough, and MFA is low-hanging fruit to authenticate authorized users. MFA is based on two or more factors that can authenticate who you are based on something you know (passwords, PINs, code works), something you have (a smartphone, tokens devices that produce pins or pre-defined pins), or something you are (biometrics, facial recognition, fingerprints, iris, and face scans). For example, Google provides MFA as part of their account management to every account holder and has a thorough security check-up, which is useful for seeing how many times a given password has been reused.
Alleviate the conflicts of who will pay for increasing cybersecurity measures by making supplier-level security a separate line item in any CISOs and CIO’s budget. Today certain pharma supply chain CISOs are expected to ramp up cybersecurity programs with the same budget before Covid-19. While there are slight increases in cybersecurity budget levels, it’s often not enough to cover the higher costs of securing a broader scope of supply chain operations. CISOs need to have greater control over cybersecurity budgets to protect vaccine IP and distribution. Relying on traditional IT budgets controlled by CIOs isn’t working. There needs to be a new level of financial commitment to securing vaccine supply chains.
Consider using an AIOps platform adept at unifying diverse IT environments into a single, cohesive AI-based intelligence system that can identify anomalous network behavior in real-time and take action to avert breaches. Based on conversations with CIOs across the financial services industry, it is clear they’re leaning in the direction of AIOps platforms that provide real-time integration to cloud platforms combined with greater control over IT infrastructure. LogicMonitor’s prioritizing IT integration as a core strength of their platform shows, as they have over 2,000 integrations available out of the box. Relying on Collectors’ agentless system, LogicMonitor retrieves metrics such as cloud provider health and billing information. This collector then pulls metrics from different devices using various methods, including SNMP, WMI, perf Mon JMX, APIs, and scripts.
Unified Endpoint Security (UES) needs to become a standard across all vaccine supply chains now. Vendors who can rapidly process large amounts of data to detect previously unknown threats are needed today to stop cyberattacks from capturing IP, shipment data, and valuable logistics information. Absolute Software’s approach to leveraging its unique persistence, resilience, and intelligence capabilities is worth watching. Their approach delivers unified endpoint security by relying on their Endpoint Resilience platform, which includes a permanent digital tether to every enterprise’s endpoint. Absolute is enabling self-healing, greater visibility, and control by having an undeletable digital thread to every device. Based on conversations with their customers in Education and Healthcare, Absolute’s unique approach gives IT complete visibility into where every device is at all times and what each device configuration looks like in real-time.
Pharma supply chains need to have a strategy for achieving more consistent Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) across every device and threat surface of the vaccine supply chain. UEM’s many benefits, including streamlining continuous OS updates across multiple mobile platforms, enabling device management regardless of the connection, and having an architecture capable of supporting a wide range of devices and operating systems. Another major benefit enterprises mention is automating Internet-based patching, policy, configuration management. Ivanti is the global market leader in UEM, and their recent acquisition of Cherwell expands the reach of their Neurons platform, providing service and asset management from IT to lines of business and from every endpoint to the IoT edge. Neurons are Ivanti’s AI-based hyper-automation platform that connects Unified Endpoint Management, Security, and Enterprise Service Management. Ivanti is prioritizing its customers’ needs to autonomously self-heal and self-secure devices and self-service end-users.
Track-and-traceability is essential in any vaccine supply chain, making the idea of cyber-physical passports that include serialization for vaccine batches more realistic given how complex supply chains are today. Passports are an advanced labeling technology that provides the benefits of virtual tracking, verification of specific compounds, and yield rates of key materials. Serialization is a must-have for ensuring greater traceability across vaccine supply chains proving effective in stopping counterfeiting. Having digital passports traceable electronically can further help thwart cyber attackers.
Conclusion
By closing the cybersecurity gaps in vaccine supply chains, the world’s nations can find new, leaner, more efficient processes to distribute vaccines and protect their citizens. It’s evident from the results achieved so far in the U.S. alone that relying on traditional supply chains and means of distribution isn’t getting the job done fast enough, and cyber attackers are already looking to take advantage. By combining multiple cybersecurity tactics, techniques, and procedures, the vaccine supply chain stands to improve and be more secure from threats.
Remote working’s rapid growth is making endpoint security an urgent priority for all organizations today.
Cloud-first deployment strategies dominate the innovations on this year’s Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security.
Zero Trust Security (ZTNA) is gaining adoption in enterprises who realize identities are the new security perimeter of their business.
By 2024, at least 40% of enterprises will have strategies for adopting Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) up from less than 1% at year-end 2018.
These and many other new insights are from Gartner Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security, 2020 published earlier this year and the recent announcement, Gartner Says Bring Your Own PC Security Will Transform Businesses within the Next Five Years. Gartner’s definition of Hype Cycles includes five phases of a technology’s lifecycle and is explained here. There are 20 technologies on this year’s Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security. The proliferation of endpoint attacks, the rapid surge in remote working, ransomware, fileless and phishing attacks are together, creating new opportunities for vendors to fast-track innovation. Cloud has become the platform of choice for organizations adopting endpoint security today, as evidenced by the Hype Cycle’s many references to cloud-first deployment strategies. The Gartner Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security, 2020, is shown below:
Details Of What’s New In Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security, 2020
Five technologies are on the Hype Cycle for the first time reflecting remote working’s rapid growth and the growing severity and sophistication of endpoint attacks. Unified Endpoint Security, Extended Detection and Response, Business E-Mail Compromise Protection, BYOPC Security and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are the five technologies added this year. Many organizations are grappling with how to equip their remote workforces with systems, devices and smartphones, with many reverting to have employees use their own. Bring your PC (BYOPC) has become so dominant so fast that Gartner replaced BYOD on this year’s Hype Cycle with the new term. Gartner sees BYOPC as one of the most vulnerable threat surfaces every business has today. Employees’ devices accessing valuable data and applications continues to accelerate without safeguards in place across many organizations.
Extended detection and response (XDR) are on the Hype Cycle for the first time, reflecting the trend of vendor consolidation across cybersecurity spending today. Gartner defines XDR as a vendor-specific, threat detection and incident response tool that unifies multiple security products into a security operations system. XDR and its potential to reduce the total cost and complexity of cybersecurity infrastructures is a dominant theme throughout this year’s Hype Cycle. XDR vendors are claiming that their integrated portfolios of detection and response applications deliver greater accuracy and prevention than stand-alone systems, driving down Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increasing productivity. Key vendors in XDR include Cisco, FireEye, Fortinet, McAfee, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro.
Business email compromise (BEC) protection is on the Hype Cycle for the first time this year. Phishing attacks cost businesses $1.8B in 2019, according to the FBI, underscoring the need for better security in the area of business email. Gartner defines business email compromise (BEC) protection as a series of solutions that detect and filter malicious emails that fraudulently impersonate business associates to misdirect funds or data. There have been many instances of business email compromise attacks focused on C-level executives, hoping that a fraudulent directive from them to subordinates leads to thousands of dollars being transferred to outside accounts or being sent in gift cards. Gartner found that fraudulent invoices accounted for 39% of such attacks in 2018, posing an internal risk to organizations and reputation risk.
Unified Endpoint Security (UES) is being driven by IT organizations’ demand for having a single security console for all security events. Gartner notes that successful vendors in UES will be those that can demonstrate significant productivity gains from the integration of security and operations and those that can rapidly process large amounts of data to detect previously unknown threats. CIOs and CISOs are looking for a way to integrate UES and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), so their teams can have a single, comprehensive real-time console of all devices that provides alerts of any security events. The goal is to adjust security policies across all devices. Absolute’s approach to leveraging their unique persistence, resilience and intelligence capabilities are worth watching. Their approach delivers unified endpoint security by relying on their Endpoint Resilience platform that includes a permanent digital tether to every endpoint in the enterprise. By having an undeletable digital thread to every device, Absolute is enabling self-healing, greater visibility and control. Based on conversations with their customers in Education and Healthcare, Absolute’s unique approach gives IT complete visibility into where every device is at all times and what each device configuration looks like in real-time.
Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) is expanding rapidly beyond managing PCs and mobile devices to provide greater insights from endpoint analytics and deeper integration Identity and Access Management. Gartner notes interest in UEM remains strong and use-case-driven across their client base. UEM’s many benefits, including streamlining continuous OS updates across multiple mobile platforms, enabling device management regardless of the connection and having an architecture capable of supporting a wide range of devices and operating systems are why enterprises are looking to expand their adoption of UEM. Another major benefit enterprises mention is automating Internet-based patching, policy, configuration management. UEM leaders include MobileIron, whose platform reflects industry leadership with its advanced unified endpoint management (UEM) capabilities. MobileIron provides customers with additional security solutions integrated to their UEM platform, including passwordless multi-factor authentication (Zero Sign-On) and mobile threat defense (MTD). MTD is noteworthy for its success at MobileIron customers who need to validate devices at scale, establish user context, verify network connections, then detect and remediate threats.
Gartner says ten technologies were either removed or replaced in the Hype Cycle because they’ve evolved into features of broader technologies or have developed into tools that address more than security. The ten technologies include protected browsers, DLP for mobile devices, managed detection and response, user and entity behavior analytics, IoT security, content collaboration platforms, mobile identity, user authentication, trusted environments and BYOD being replaced by BYOPC.
According to Verizon, over 90% of breaches start with a phishing attack and with more than 60% of emails being read on mobile, mobile phishing is one of the fastest-growing threat categories in 2020.
Mobile devices are popular with hackers because they’re designed for quick responses based on minimal contextual information. Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that hackers are succeeding with integrated email, SMS and link-based attacks across social media aimed at stealing passwords and privileged access credentials. And with a growing number of breaches originating on mobile devices according to Verizon’s Mobile Security Index 2020, combined with 83% of all social media visits in the United States are on mobile devices according to Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report Q4 2019, applying machine learning to harden mobile threat defense deserves to be on any CISOs’ priority list today.
How Machine Learning Is Helping To Thwart Phishing Attacks
42% of the U.S. labor force is now working from home, according to a recent study by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). The majority of those working from home are in professional, technical and managerial roles who rely on multiple mobile devices to get their work done. The proliferating number of threat surfaces all businesses have to contend with today is the perfect use case for thwarting phishing attempts at scale.
What’s needed is a machine learning engine capable of analyzing and interpreting system data in real-time to identify malicious behavior. Using supervised machine learning algorithms that factor in device detection, location, user behavior patterns and more to anticipate and thwart phishing attacks is what’s needed today. It’s a given that any machine learning engine and its supporting platform needs to be cloud-based, capable of scaling to analyze millions of data points. Building the cloud platform on high-performing computing clusters is a must-have, as is the ability to iterative machine learning models on the fly, in milliseconds, to keep learning new patterns of potential phishing breaches. The resulting architecture would be able to learn over time and reside on the device recursively. Protecting every endpoint if it’s connected to WiFi or a network or not is a key design goal that needs to be accomplished as well. MobileIron recently launched one of the most forward-thinking approaches to solving this challenge and its architecture is shown below:
Five Ways Machine Learning Can Thwart Phishing Attacks
The one point of failure machine learning-based anti-phishing apps continue to have is lack of adoption. CIOs and CISOs I’ve spoken with know there is a gap between endpoints secured and the total endpoint population. No one knows for sure how big that gap is because new mobile endpoints get added daily. The best solution to closing the gap is by enabling on-device machine learning protection. The following are five ways machine learning can thwart phishing attacks using an on-device approach:
1. Have machine learning algorithms resident on every mobile device to detect threats in real-time even when a device is offline. Creating mobile apps that include supervised machine learning algorithms that can assess a potential phishing risk in less than a second is what’s needed. Angular, Python, Java, native JavaScript and C++ are efficient programming languages to provide detection and remediation, so ongoing visibility into any malicious threat across all Android and iOS mobile devices can be tracked, providing detailed analyses of phishing patterns. The following is an example of how this could be accomplished:
2. Using machine learning to glean new insights out of the massive amount of data and organizations’ entire population of mobile devices creates a must-have. There are machine learning-based systems capable of scanning across an enterprise of connected endpoints today. What’s needed is an enterprise-level approach to seeing all devices, even those disconnected from the network.
3. Machine learning algorithms can help strengthen the security on every mobile device, making them suitable as employees’ IDs, alleviating the need for easily-hackable passwords. According to Verizon, stolen passwords cause 81% of data breaches and 86% of security leaders would do away with passwords, if they could, according to a recent IDG Research survey. Hardening endpoint security to the mobile device level needs to be part of any organizations’ Zero Trust Security initiative today. The good news is machine learning algorithms can thwart hacking attempts that get in the way making mobile devise employees’ IDs, streamlining system access to the resources they need to get work done while staying secure.
4. Keeping enterprise-wide cybersecurity efforts focused takes more than after-the-fact analytics and metrics; what’s needed is look-ahead predictive modeling based machine learning data captured at the device endpoint. The future of endpoint resiliency and cybersecurity needs to start at the device level. Capturing data at the device level in real-time and using it to train algorithms, combined with phishing URL lookup, and Zero Sign-On (ZSO) and a designed-in Zero Trust approach to security are essential for thwarting the increasingly sophisticated breach attempts happening today.
5. Cybersecurity strategies and the CISOs leading them will increasingly be evaluated on how well they anticipate and excel at compliance and threat deterrence, making machine learning indispensable to accomplishing these tasks. CISOs and their teams say compliance is another area of unknowns they need greater predictive, quantified insights into. No one wants to do a compliance or security audit manually today as the lack of staff due to stay-at-home orders makes it nearly impossible and no one wants to jeopardize employee’s health to get it done. CISOs and teams of security architects also need to put as many impediments in front of threat actors as possible to deter them, because the threat actor only has to be successful one time, while the CISO/security architect have to be correct 100% of the time. The answer is to combine real-time endpoint monitoring and machine learning to thwart threat actors while achieving greater compliance.
Conclusion
For machine learning to reach its full potential at blocking phishing attempts today and more advanced threats tomorrow, every device needs to have the ability to know if an email, text or SMS message, instant message, or social media post is a phishing attempt or not. Achieving this at the device level is possible today, as MobileIron’s recently announced cloud-based Mobile Threat Defense architecture illustrates. What’s needed is a further build-out of machine learning-based platforms that can adapt fast to new threats while protecting devices that are sporadically connected to a company’s network.
Machine learning has long been able to provide threat assessment scores as well. What’s needed today is greater insights into how risk scores relate to compliance. Also, there needs to be a greater focus on how machine learning, risk scores, IT infrastructure and the always-growing base of mobile devices can be audited. A key goal that needs to be achieved is having compliance actions and threat notifications performed on the device to shorten the “kill chain” and improve data loss prevention.
Bottom Line: DevOps and security teams need to leave one-time gating inspections in the past and pursue a more collaborative real-time framework to achieve their shared compliance, security and time-to-market goals.
Shorter product lifecycles the need to out-innovate competitors and exceed customer expectations with each new release are a few of the many reasons why DevOps is so popular today. Traditional approaches to DevOps teams collaborating with security aren’t working today and product releases are falling behind or being rushed to-market leading to security gaps as a result.
Based on conversations with DevOps team leaders and my own experience being on a DevOps team the following are factors driving the urgency to integrate security into DevOps workflows:
Engineering, DevOps and security teams each have their lexicon and way of communicating reinforced by siloed systems.
Time-to-market and launch delays are common when engineering, DevOps and security don’t have a unified system to use that includes automation tools to help scale tasks and updates.
Developers are doing Application Security Testing (AST) with tools that aren’t integrated into their daily development environments, making the process time-consuming and challenging to get done.
Limiting security to the testing and deployment phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is a bottleneck that jeopardizes the critical path, launch date and compliance of any new project.
70% of DevOps team members have not been trained on how to secure software adequately according to a DevSecOps Global Skills survey.
Adding to the urgency is the volume of builds DevOps teams produce in software companies and enterprises daily and the need for having security integrated into DevOps becomes clear. Consider the fact that Facebook on Android alone does 50,000 to 60,000 builds a day according to research cited from Checkmarx who is taking on the challenge of integrating DevOps and security into a unified workflow. Their Software Security Platform unifies DevOps with security and provides static and interactive application security testing, newly launched software composition analysis and developer AppSec awareness and training programs to reduce and remediate risk from software vulnerabilities.
Synchronizing Security Into DevOps Delivers Much Needed Speed & Scale
DevOps teams thrive in organizations built for speed, continuous integration, delivery and improvement. Contrast the high-speed always-on nature of DevOps teams with the one-time gating inspections security teams use to verify regulatory, industry and internal security and compliance standards and it’s clear security’s role in DevOps needs to change. Integrating security into DevOps is proving to be very effective at breaking through the roadblocks that stand in the way of getting projects done on time and launched into the market. Getting the security and DevOps team onto the same development platform is needed to close the gaps between the two teams and accelerate development. Of the many approaches available for accomplishing this Checkmarx’s approach to integrating Application Security Testing into DevOps shown below is among the most comprehensive:
Making DevOps A Core Strength Of An Organization
By 2025 nearly two-thirds of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code deployed daily to meet constant demand and over 90% of new apps will be cloud-native, enabling agility and responsiveness according to IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2020 Predictions. IDC also predicts there will be 1.6 times more developers than now, all working in collaborative systems to enable innovation. The bottom line is that every company will be a technology company in the next five years according to IDC’s predictions.
To capitalize on the pace of change happening today driven by DevOps, organizations need frameworks that deliver the following:
Greater agility and market responsiveness – Organizations need to create operating models that integrate business, operations and technology into stand-alone businesses-within-the-business domains.
Customer Centricity at the core of business models – The best organizations leverage a connected economy to ensure that they can meet and exceed customer expectations. By creating an ecosystem that caters to every touchpoint of the customer journey using technology, these organizations seem to anticipate their customer needs and deliver the goods and services needed at the right time via the customer’s preferred channel. As a result, successful organizations see growth from their existing customer base while they acquire new ones.
Have a DNA the delivers a wealth of actionable Insights – Organizations well-positioned to turn data into insights that drive actions to serve and anticipate customer needs are ahead of competitors today regarding time-to-market. These organizations know how to pull all the relevant information, capabilities and people together so they can act quickly and efficiently in making the right decisions. They are the companies that will know the outcome of their actions before they take them and they will be able to anticipate their success.
BMC’s Autonomous Digital Enterprise framework, shown below highlights how companies that have an innovation mindset and the three common traits of agility, customer centricity and actionable insights at their foundation have greater consistency and technology maturity in their business model characteristics compared to competitors. They also can flex and support fundamental operating model characteristics and key technology-enabled tenets. These tenets include delivering a transcendent customer experience, automating customer transactions and providing automation everywhere seeing enterprise DevOps as a natural evolution of DevOps, enabling a business to be more data-driven and achieving more adaptive cybersecurity in a Zero-Trust framework.
Conclusion
Meeting the challenge of integrating security in DevOps provides every organization with an opportunity to gain greater agility and market responsiveness, become more customer-centric and develop the DNA to be more data-driven. These three goals are achievable when organizations look to how they can build on their existing strengths and reinvent themselves for the future. As DevOps success goes so goes the success of any organization. Checkmarx’s approach to putting security at the center of DevOps is helping to break down the silos that exist between engineering, DevOps and security. To attain greater customer-centricity, become more data-driven and out-innovate competitors, organizations are adopting frameworks including BMC’s Autonomous Digital Enterprise to reinvent themselves and be ready to compete in the future now.
Bottom Line: Existing approaches to securing IT infrastructure are proving unreliable as social engineering and breach attempts succeed in misdirecting human responses to cyber threats, accentuating the need for machines to protect themselves.
Any nations’ digital infrastructure and the businesses it supports are its most vital technology resources, as the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear. Cybercriminal and advanced persistent threat (APT) groups are attempting to capitalize on the disruption that COVID-19 is creating to engage in malicious cyber activity. It’s become so severe that the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued a joint alert, COVID-19 Exploited by Malicious Cyber Actors earlier this month.
In the same keynote, he said that it’s essential that cyber-threats and the actors carrying them out be treated as invading armies and cyber-attacks be considered an act of war. “We self-organize and use business models to guide our self-organization,” General Hayden said. “We will have to rely on ourselves and the private sector in a way that we have not relied on ourselves for security.”
General Hayden’s’ comments are a call to action to the private sector to take the initiative and innovate quickly to secure the cyber-domain. Machines protecting themselves is an area noteworthy for its innovative technologies for securing IT infrastructures and the networks that comprise them.
Exploring An Approach to How Machines Protect Themselves
Wanting to learn more about how machines would be able to protect themselves automatically, I spoke with Centrify’s Chief Strategy Officer, David McNeely. He explained that one of the best ways is to have a client that is an integral part of any operating system act as an intermediary that establishes a trusted identity for each client system on a network. The client would then be able to authenticate every login attempt and request for resources by verifying each login through an authoritive security management platform such as Active Directory (AD).
McNeely explained how Centrify’s approach to having machines protect themselves using clients integrated with operating systems. “The client is designed to enable the computer to authenticate users. It must have a trusted relationship with the authoritative identity service in the organization that manages user accounts, this is usually Active Directory. The computer account and trust relationship is what enables strong authentication of user login requests” he said.
He continued, “Self-defending machines address the paradigm shift occurring in cybersecurity today where protection cannot be enforced at the network boundary. In the past, trusted networks were defined by administrators using network protection tools such as VLANs, firewalls and VPNs in order to protect a group of machines on that network. With self-defending machines, it’s possible to implement a true Zero Trust approach more fully where the network cannot be trusted.”
The following is a graphic of how Centrify is approaching machine-to-machine Zero Trust across distributed environments:
Centrify’s approach is based on servers protecting themselves by enforcing a policy defined by IT administrators as stored in Active Directory (AD) or Centrify’s Privileged Access Service. Clients then carry out the orders, enforcing centrally managed policies for each of the following scenarios:
Define who can login, making sure only authorized personnel are allowed access.
Whether clients should initiate the process of enforcing MFA or not, to make sure the login attempt isn’t a bot, fake ID, or incorrect human.
Whether audit is required or not of the login session and if so, what conditions define if it should be recorded or not.
Which privileges are granted to each user and for how long once they’ve gained access to systems.
Why The NIST 800-207 Standard Matters
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has defined Zero Trust architecture as a set of guiding principles that organizations can use to improve their security posture. You can view the publication online here: NIST Zero Trust Special Publication 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture (PDF, 58 pp., no opt-in).
Organizations need to continually evaluate their existing cybersecurity defenses in light of the Tenets of Zero Trust in order to continually improve their security postures. The NIST standard underscores the importance of how security architecture matters. For example, defenses to protect assets need to be as close to the asset as possible, much like in a war. In this new era of cyberwarfare, soldiers will need their own body armor and tools to defend against an adversary. Similarly, it is important to arm each server with appropriate defenses to protect against cyberthreats.
Conclusion
General Hayden’s challenge to private industry to pick up the pace of innovation so the nations’ cyber-domain is secure resonates with every cybersecurity company I’ve spoken with. One of the most noteworthy is Centrify, who has devised an enterprise-ready approach for machines to protect themselves across infrastructure and network configurations. It’s Identity-Centric approach to authenticating every login attempt and request for resources by verifying each login – through Active Directory (AD) or the cloud-based, FedRAMP-authorized Centrify Privileged Access Service – differentiates its approach from other cybersecurity vendors attempting to empower machine self-defense.
Bottom Line: One of the best New Year’s resolutions anyone can make is to learn new ways to secure their personal and professional lives online, starting with ten proven ways they can take greater control over their own cybersecurity.
For many professionals, their personal and professional lives have blended together thanks to the growing number of connected, IoT-capable devices, including cars, home security systems, smartphones, virtual assistants including Amazon Echo, Google Home, WiFi routers, and more. It’s typical to find homes with two dozen or more connected devices that are relied for everything going on in a person’s life from personal interests, connecting with friends, and getting work done.
It’s Time to Secure Every Area of Your Smart, Connected World
Faced with chronic time shortages, many people rely on smart, connected devices supported by AI and machine learning to get more done in less time. They’re proliferating today because they’ve proven to be very effective at personalizing experiences while providing the added convenience of being always on and available to help. Smart, connected devices are an extension of a person’s identity today as they contain insights into buying behavior and, in some cases, actual conversations. The more these devices are protected, the more a person’s identity and most valuable resource of all – time – is protected too.
Strengthening your own cybersecurity starts by seeing every device and the apps you use as potential attack surfaces that need to be protected. Just as you wouldn’t likely leave any of the physical doors to your home unprotected and locked, you need to secure all the digital entrances to your home and person. Like the CEO and cybersecurity team of any organization who is focusing on how to reduce the risk of a breach, the same level of intensity and vigilance to personal cybersecurity needs to become the new normal.
10 Ways You Can Own Your Cybersecurity
The following are the top ten ways you can take control and own your own security. Several of the ways mentioned below are from the recent Centrify webinar, Cybersecurity Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond:
Replace weak passwords used on multiple accounts with a unique, longer password for each online account. Start by getting away from having the same password for multiple accounts. When a single account gets hacked, it can easily lead to all the others with the same password and comparable user ID. Passwords are proving to be the weakest attack vector there is for personal information today. World Password Day serves as a reminder every May to use stronger, different passwords on each account.
Start researching and choose a Password Manager that is flexible enough to match how you like to work. It’s time to get beyond Post-It notes and paper-based approaches to managing your own passwords now. Dashlane, LastPass, and OneLogin are all excellent password managers worth checking out. If you’re not sure password managers are worth it, I’ve seen them add an additional layer of security to personal and work accounts that would not have otherwise been available. Some will even notify you when an account you have might have been breached, and recommend a new password for you. A screen capture from the webinar illustrates the differences between personal, professional and Privileged Access Management (PAM) levels of password security:
Use single-sign-on (SSO) if available for systems at work, even if you’re logging in at the office. SSO systems use temporary tokens, which have proven to be more reliable than static credentials. One of the primary design goals of SSO is to authenticate your identity once, and give you access to the applications and system resources you need and are entitled to access to get work done.
Vault away passwords to critical systems and data. In the privileged access world of Cybersecurity operations in any organization, password vaults have become commonplace. Password vaults are similar to password managers many people use for their personal devices, web applications, and sites they regularly visit. In the case of a password vault, privileged credentials are checked in and out by admins, with each password automatically rotating to ensure greater randomization.
Enable security on all the devices you received over the holidays, starting with your WiFi router. If you’ve never set an admin password on your WiFi router and the two guest access points they typically have, now is a great time to do that. If you have an Amazon Echo or Google Home, manually disable the microphones. On the Echo, press the microphone button until the external ring turns red. On Google Home, use the small switch on the side to turn off the microphone..On an Amazon Alexa, it’s possible to review voice recordings associated with your account and delete the voice recordings one by one, by date range, by Alexa-enabled device, or all at once by visiting Settings > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app or https://www.amazon.com/alexaprivacysettings. It’s a good idea to use PIN protection to disable voice purchases too. If you have Baby Monitors in your home, connect to them using a secured WiFi connection, not Bluetooth. Have everything behind your home firewall, so there’s a minimal number of threat surfaces in your home.
Take few of the many LinkedIn learning courses on practical cybersecurity to stay current on the latest techniques. LinkedIn Learning has 19 courses available today that are focused on practical cybersecurity steps you can take to protect your company’s systems and your own. You can find all the 19 courses here. LinkedIn Learning has 462 learning resources available today, available here. I’ve taken a few over a lunch break and have found them informative, interesting, and useful.
Realize that you may be getting phishing and spear-phishing e-mails every week. Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of browser plug-ins to pop up messages asking for your login and password information for sites. Combining the latest information from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, hackers often target new employees and with spearfishing campaigns where they impersonate a CEO and other senior-level executives. Spearfishing attempts can be easily thwarted by calling the supposed sender to ask if the request is legitimate. A second way to spot phishing and spear-fishing attempts is they will ask you for one or more of the pieces of information needed for completing a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) login to an account. Misspelled words, questionable e-mail addresses, and unsecured domains and websites are also a sure tip-off of a phishing attempt.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) greatly expands the enterprise attack surface. Define the success of a BYOD security strategy by how well it immediately shuts down access to confidential data and systems first. Being able to immediately block access to confidential systems and data is the most important aspect of securing any BYOD across a network. It’s common for BYOD enablement strategies to include integrations to Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce and Workday, Slack, Salesforce, and others.
Always use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) everywhere it’s offered. MFA is based on three or more factors that can authenticate who you are. Something you know (passwords, PINs, code works), something you have (a smartphone, tokens devices that produce pins or pre-defined pins) or something you are (biometrics, facial recognition, fingerprints, iris, and face scans). Google, for example, provides MFA as part of their account management to every account holder, in addition to a thorough security check-up, which is useful for seeing how many times a given password has been reused.
Determine where you and your company are from a privileged access maturity standpoint. Centrify shared the four stages of privileged access security on the webinar, and each phase is a useful benchmark for anyone or organization looking to improve their cybersecurity effectiveness. Centrify found in a recent survey that 42% of organizations are at the nonexistent phase of the model. As an organization progresses up the model, there’s greater accountability and visibility for each aspect of a cybersecurity strategy. For individuals, the progression is much the same, all leading to a lower risk of a breach and stolen privileged access credentials occurring.
Conclusion
While not every user in an organization is going to have privileged entitlements, it is up to every individual to take ownership of their cybersecurity hygiene to ensure they don’t become the most-easily-exploited employee in the company. That’s what the bad guys are looking for: the easiest way in. Why try to hack in against sophisticated technology when they can just guess your easy password, or get you to hand it over to them by phishing? Be cyber smart in 2020 – these ten tips might save you from being the weakest link that could cost your organization millions.
