Posts tagged ‘cybersecurity’

Mar 14

10 Ways Cybersecurity Can Protect COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Chains

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

In the race to create a COVID-19vaccine by collaborating across the industry, pharmaceutical companies have exposed more threat surfaces than existed before the pandemic. In R&D, Clinical Trials, Manufacturing, and Distribution, there’s a proliferation of new threat surfaces cyber attackers are targeting today, as evidenced by threat analysis reports from the U.S. Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

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.

Feb 28

Securing Machine Identities Needs To Be A Top Cybersecurity Goal In 2021

Bottom Line: Bad actors quickly capitalize on the wide gaps in machine identity security, creating one of the most breachable threat surfaces today.

Why Machines Are the Most Challenging Threat Surface To Protect

Forrester’s recent webinar on the topic, How To Secure And Govern Non-Human Identities, estimates that machine identities (including bots, robots and IoT) are growing twice as fast as human identities on organizational networks. Forrester defines machine, or non-human, identities as robotic process automation (bots), robots (industrial, enterprise, medical, military) and IoT devices.

The webinar points out that one of the fastest-growing automation types is software bots, with 36% used in finance and accounting, 15% used in business line and 15% in IT. The webinar also points out that in 2019, there were 2.25 million robots in the global workforce, twice as many as in 2010 and 32% of global infrastructure decision-makers expect their firms to use robotic process automation (RPA) over the next 12 months.

According to the Forrester Consulting white paper, Securing The Enterprise With Machine Identity Protection, over 50% of organizations find it challenging to protect their machine identities today. Unprotected machine identities are making it easy for bad actors to take control of entire networks of devices. Bad actors rely on organizations’ bots to provide the cover they need to attack networks and devices, often undetected for months or years.

Forrester found that machine identities are left exposed to bad actors because organizations aren’t adopting the tools they need to create and manage a centralized Identity Access Management (IAM) strategy across all machines. This includes defining and enforcing policies, auditing each machine and endpoint and better integrating support across machines and monitoring systems.

Furthermore, by adopting a more modern Privileged Identity Management (PIM) approach, organizations could solve many of these challenges. Leading PIM solutions providers include Centrify, which has succeeded in adapting to the ephemeral nature of securing machine identities by delivering machine identity and credential authentication based on a centralized trust model.

The Forrester report’s bottom line is that machines are isolated, exposed and more vulnerable than any other endpoint on a network. The following graphic compares protection strategies and finds a majority of organizations struggling to deliver them:

Securing Machine Identities Needs To Be a Top Cybersecurity Goal In 2021

Machine Identities Are Networks’ Weakest Security Link

According to a Venafi study, machine identity attacks grew 400% between 2018 and 2019, increasing by over 700% between 2014 and 2019. Malware capable of compromising machine identities continues to gain momentum, doubling between 2018 and 2019 and growing 300% over the five years leading up to 2019. According to Kount’s 2020 Bot Landscape and Impact Report, 81% of enterprises are regularly dealing with malicious bots today and one in four say a single bot attack has cost them $500,000 or more. Furthermore, many organizations may not realize how many bots and machine identities they have – and bad actors capable of creating hundreds using automated scripting tools.

Forrester provided the following data points underscoring how vulnerable machines are to botnet and identity-based attacks today:

The 2017 Mirai botnet attack is a cautionary tale of the dangers of using default security credentials on machines and IoT devices. Using botnets to automate scans of vast blocks of IP addresses for potential telnet ports to log into, the Mirai botnets were programmed to rapidly try a series of basic usernames and passwords to gain access to IoT devices and machines. The Mirai botnets were successful, gaining control of thousands of machines and orchestrating them to deliver one of the largest DDOS attacks in history.
It’s common for enterprises to lose track of how many bots they’ve created, giving malicious actors the perfect cover to mask their movements. Instead of creating their bots, malicious actors look to disguise their movements across a network with a company’s bots. Forrester’s webinar mentioned how a large North American insurance provider deployed 400 software bots for customer-facing digital chatbots and processing claims, among other tasks.
There’s often no oversight of who has the rights to create and launch bots internally, leading to potentially thousands of bots without secured identities. One of the most troubling findings presented during the webinar is how loose the process is to create a bot – with no checks and balances in place or means of achieving consistent identity management.

How To Strengthen Machine Security

The more challenging any machine threat surface is to protect, the more opportunity it provides bad actors to breach them. A good place to start is by clarifying who owns keeping Transport Layer Security (TLS) and previous-generation Secured-Sockets Layer (SSL) client and server certificates, code signing certificates, Secure Shell (SSH) host and cryptographic keys so they are kept up to date. Letting those fall through the cracks will leave thousands of machines exposed and exploitable on networks.

Prioritizing machine identities and securing machine credentials is a must-have in 2021, as botnet attacks are quickly increasing due to bad actors’ being able to spin up thousands of them in days. The following are key steps to get started:

Taking a Zero Trust approach to managing every machine identity authentication on a network now could save thousands of hours and dollars in the future. Taking a least privilege access approach to managing machines now will pay off in the future, as the workloads of machines and non-human entities continue to grow more complex. The Forrester webinar expands on this point by explaining how new, more complex inter-machine relationships are evolving quicker than legacy approaches to endpoint governance and security can keep up.
Privileged access controls need to be more adaptive, secure and scalable than many organizations’ static-based approaches to securing machines are today. Forrester recommends replacing long-standing hardcoded credentials with session-based ones assigned via API calls from a vault. Machines are being used 24/7 and have access patterns completely different from humans using the network, making dynamically-assigned, ephemeral credentials even more important to protect a network. Privileged Identity Management (PIM) proves effective at providing privileged access controls for machine identities, with Forrester mentioning Centrify, HashiCorp and others as leaders in this area. Centrify’s approach is noteworthy in enrolling machines with its platform via a client to establish a trust relationship, so applications running on that machine can also be authenticated using a short-lived, scoped token.
Monitoring more machines on a network often leads to a transition from legacy to integrated log monitoring systems that can capture, analyze and report anomalous activity across a network. Log Monitoring systems are proving invaluable in identifying machine endpoint configuration and performance anomalies in real-time. AIOps is proving effective in identifying anomalies and performance event correlations in real-time, contributing to greater business continuity. One of the leaders in this area is LogicMonitor, whose AIOps-enabled infrastructure monitoring and observability platform have proven successful in troubleshooting infrastructure problems and ensuring business continuity.
Perform periodic audits to track all bots and machines in use across an organization, using Microsoft Active Directory to inventory and manage all of them. One of the most valuable take-aways from the Forrester webinar is the need to manage machine identities and their credentials centrally. Forrester mentions Microsoft Active Directory as one option. The companies providing services in this area include Centrify, which pioneered Active Directory bridging to authenticate human and machine identities based on a centralized model from a single identity repository.

Conclusion

Machines, or as Forrester calls them in their webinar, non-human identities require more precise, adaptive and ephemeral identity structures and access controls. CISOs and CIOs need to take greater ownership of machine identity authentication and provide Identity Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) down to the bot and non-human identity level. With the exponential growth of malicious bots tracking machine identities, now is the time to place machine identities among the highest priority of any cybersecurity strategy in 2021.

Dec 21

12 Cybersecurity CEOs On What Each Learned Leading During The Pandemic

Bottom Line: Cybersecurity CEOs’ lessons learned from navigating the pandemic provide a valuable framework for leading and growing a business through anxious, uncertain times.

How each cybersecurity CEO responds to the challenges of keeping employees safe, customers secure and product release cycles on schedule while still achieving customer success – all virtually – provide valuable insights into leading a company during difficult times. Simon Biddiscombe, former CEO of MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti), exemplifies the empathy all CEOs interviewed have for their employees’ welfare. “My first priority when the pandemic hit was to protect the health and safety of our employees, yet still maintain an “always-on business” for our customers,” Simon mentioned during a recent interview.

What made leading during the pandemic even more difficult was the exponentially increasing number of breaches and cyberattacks their customers are experiencing. McAfee Labs Covid-19 Threats Report found a 630% increase in cloud services cyberattacks between January and April of this year alone. The FBI estimates cyberattacks are up 400% due to the pandemic. As DevOps teams fast-track new features and releases, CEOs keep their virtual organizations cohesive and focused on the same goals.

The following cybersecurity CEOs provide their most valuable lessons learned leading through the pandemic:

Christy Wyatt, CEO of Absolute Software

About Absolute

Absolute is a leader in Endpoint Resilience solutions and the industry’s only undeletable defense platform embedded in over a half-billion devices. Enabling a permanent digital tether between the endpoint and the enterprise who distributed it, Absolute provides IT and Security organizations with always-connected visibility and Self-Healing Endpoint security.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

There was a clear moment for us where we said, “What is our objective? What is the best response to this?” And the phrase that came out was, “How can we help?” We knew our primary focus needed to be helping our customers solve a massive problem, instead of monetizing this opportunity. Making this decision to come together as a mission-driven organization… that was so incredibly powerful.

Even as life was changing drastically between breakfast and dinner every single day and employees were navigating their own work-from-home journeys and trying to care for their families, what we heard was that this ability to contribute was the thing that they were hanging onto. They were able to say, “Listen, I’m getting up every morning and I’m helping organizations with something that’s really scary and unfamiliar.” And, they did remarkable things… these teams put themselves through so much to help our customers stand up remote work and learning environments essentially overnight.

I always say you don’t win the race when you’re in the race. It’s the training and the practice, and the talking,and the drills and the teamwork… which we had been working on long before the pandemic hit. So I think my biggest takeaway is that if you put in the training upfront and you focus on doing the right things, the right things will happen. And you really can achieve more than you thought you could.

Flint Brenton – President and CEO of Centrify

About Centrify

Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management by delivering multi-cloud-architected Identity-Centric PAM to enable digital transformation at scale. Centrify Identity-Centric PAM establishes trust and then grants least privilege access just-in-time based on verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request and the risk of the access environment. Centrify centralizes and orchestrates fragmented identities, improves audit and compliance visibility and reduces risk, complexity and costs for the modern, hybrid enterprise.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

“Our customers and the people they serve are all going through rapid change. When you look at the concept of digital transformation, a lot of companies were struggling with that before the pandemic. Now we know that we can’t live without it. The role of the developer is more important than ever and they are driving innovation in a very different environment than they’ve ever experienced.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned during the pandemic is that no matter what the obstacles are, people need connection. For a company like Centrify, that means we need to be connected to our customers intellectually, strategically, virtually and – eventually – physically.

An example of this was very clear recently, as we engaged in discussions with one of the world’s largest financial institutions to replace their existing password vaulting solution. They have a vision for where they want to be, how they are going to get there and how they are going to secure that transformation. But they need the right partner who not only has the technology capabilities and architecture for a cloud-focused, DevOps-drive, digitally-enabled enterprise, but also to understand their vision and be invested in their success.

So the CIO asked me to personally track the rollout of our product against their product enablement success and he was very interested in how our vision of Privileged Access Management will converge with cloud security, DevOps and other modern technologies and empower their vision and plan. Ultimately, he wanted connectedness. He wants a personal relationship built on understanding, honesty and accountability, even if that relationship can’t be forged and nurtured over a dinner or meeting in a conference room.

That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned leading this year: that customers, employees, partners and peers want to be connected any way possible, even if they can’t do so in close physical proximity yet.”

Steve Havas, CEO of Evernym

About Evernym

Evernym is a pioneer in the field of verifiable credential technology, which gives individuals control over their digital identity and organizations the ability to trust and verify their data. Evernym builds and deploys self-sovereign identity solutions, with the technology and go-to-market resources powering the largest implementations of digital credentials in production.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

The pandemic has been, to say the least, impactful on society and our business. The market changes have required ruthless listening to customer needs and absolute focus on delivering what’s needed today.

We’ve all anticipated a gradual convergence of the digital and physical worlds, but that timeline has been accelerated by the sudden rise in remote work/education and contactless identity verification. We’re fortunate that this is the future we’ve been building toward, although we would have never imagined many of the COVID-19 credential use cases that are now mission-critical for our customers. It’s certainly been a lesson in adaptability and prioritization.

Benji Markoff, CEO of Founder Shield

About Founder Shield

Founder Shield is a tech-enabled insurance brokerage, focusing on rapidly growing businesses that operate in emerging industries. As a broker, we have a unique perspective of protecting our clients against cyber threats and guiding them to recovery should their fall victim. We work with forward-thinking insurers using proprietary cyber risk management tools, while also offering the most innovative insurance coverage possible.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

People say that fortunes are won and lost in times like these and it certainly appears that hackers & social engineering fraudsters have gotten that memo. Over the past 6 months, we’ve seen an increase in both hacking and social engineering attacks on clients of all shape and size $5M Revenue to $500M revenue. The reports suggest that working from home has only increased vulnerabilities of company networks (or lack thereof as employees use home networks) and the ability to induce fraudulent payments from employees who might not be able to lean over to a coworker to fact check a fishy invoice. The valuable lesson? Do a cyber audit and make sure you’re training your team on spotting social engineering and phishing scams.

Anand S – CEO at Gramener: Insights as Data Stories

About Gramener: Insights as Data Stories

Gramener is a data science company that helps solve complex business problems with compelling data stories using insights and a low-code analytics platform. We help enterprises large and small with data insights and storytelling by leveraging Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Automated Analysis and Visual Intelligence using modern charts and narratives (NLG). Our Gramex platform is a low-code framework to rapidly build engaging data solutions across multiple business verticals and use cases. Our products have empowered CXOs, Chief Data Officers, Scientists, Business Analysts and others save millions of dollars by making an impact on revenue and decision making. Gramener was founded in 2010 and has over 325+ clients worldwide, 200+ employees and 5 offices globally including the United States and Singapore.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

As an SMB we leaned more towards cost optimization over premium cybersecurity tools and services, resulting in ring-fencing our office infrastructure more. Due to COVID-19, when we moved 100% remote, our cybersecurity controls fell short to defend us against external threats. We had to extend the security protocols like moving all work to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), strengthen VPN tunnel security, implement 2FA for all logins, opt for more security services from our Cloud service provider.

We accelerated digitization across operations and increased spending in Cloud security and production application security. We are revisiting our current approach and playbooks for cybersecurity.

– We are evaluating the current 3rd party service providers offering and reevaluating if they still have same level security controls in place at their end

We are conducting an accelerated implementation of Data Security protocols across the organization and not just on client specific projects. This includes updates to Information Security Policy around Data classification, Data tracking and protection.
With 100% remote operations, we are moving to VDI for all production and critical services. This means access to all data is through dedicated VPN Tunnels only. This is to mitigate any exposure to data from folks working at home.

– Our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure allows our IT teams to protect client sensitive data to a restricted cloud environment. All the tools and 3rd party cloud services required by our team members to perform their tasks are provided in the VDI. No data can be extracted or moved from VDI instances.

– All internal company data around operations, team members, Intellectual Property are a prime target for cyberattacks and ransomware. We have moved to a secure VPN tunnel architecture for all our team members to access company internal systems. Earlier this was restricted to a small group of functions. By mandating access via secure VPN tunnel our IT team has centralized visibility of all traffic across the network and can intervene quickly against any potential threats.

We are mandating 2FA. Earlier employee convenience led to not mandating 2FA for all our services. Now 2FA has been made mandatory across all services.
In order to optimize costs, we are consolidating tools used in the organization to identify overlapping functionalities and getting rid of those which are no longer required.

Apu Pavithran, founder and CEO of Hexnode

About Hexnode

Hexnode MDM is the award-winning Unified Endpoint Management platform from Mitsogo Inc. The company has been helping organizations in over 100 countries to stay agile and competitive in an increasingly mobile world. Mitsogo Inc. is a leading provider of Endpoint Management and security solutions. From SMBs to Fortune 500s, enterprises of all sizes have leveraged Mitsogo’s prowess in device management to drive business productivity and compliance. Mitsogo’s solutions adapt to the most complex of business environments.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

Navigate the path, trust your crew

Being a CEO, as lucrative as it may seem has its own little big challenges, for example, they don’t tell you that there are no off days. There are always thousands of choices to be made and tons of pathways to be chosen, but the absolute worst thing comes when we face an uncertainty that was never on the radar.

And when the pandemic hit, the team needed support more than ever, I had to switch through the roles of commander in chief, therapist, cheerleader and even at times a babysitter. After all, you have to be the rock for your employees, or else it shows. But fortunately, I was so lucky to be surrounded by like-minded people who are as passionate as the founder about our business and customers.

We had to establish a fully remote work landscape and it was not what we would have expected, it was at a time when everyone was very insecure about COVID-19. People were worried about their safety, the safety of their families and work started to slip into second gear, some of us were even having mental breakdowns. It was time to be the person that the team could look up to.

“Customer is king”, is a tired old saying but that is what Hexnode live by, we had a commitment towards our clients, so we had to provide uninterrupted service for them rain or shine. So, we made a decision that would be deemed “mad “from a financial standpoint.

We rented out hotel rooms and made guesthouses for each of our employees around the globe and ran security and screening protocols equivalent to that of hospitals. Soon the stress levels were back to normal and the team started to enjoy the atmosphere. Productivity became better than pre-COVID levels.

As a leader, your team should be able to trust that you’re going to do everything in your power to navigate them through this tough time. The greatest asset for every business is said to be “finding the right staff”, but I would say it is “how you create the right staff”. The most valuable lesson l learned during this pandemic is “When the crew is great you just have to navigate, they will pull through all the tides and storms coming your way. They always do”.

Brad Wiskirchen, CEO, Kount

About Kount

Kount’s Identity Trust Global Network delivers real-time fraud prevention and account protection and enables personalized customer experiences for more than 9,000 leading brands and payment providers. Linked by Kount’s award-winning AI, the Identity Trust Global Network analyzes signals from 32 billion annual interactions to personalize user experiences across the spectrum of trust—from frictionless experiences to blocking fraud. Quick and accurate identity trust decisions deliver safe payment, account creation and login events while reducing digital fraud, chargebacks, false positives and manual reviews.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

Open, honest, fearless communication. The Kount team has lived by this motto for more than a decade and never before has it been more tested and more relevant than in navigating the events of 2020. From moving our entire team to remote work to quickly pivoting to help our eCommerce businesses handle dramatic changes in transaction volume, it’s essential that our team communicate at the highest levels. As the impacts of the pandemic are often deeply personal, open, honest, fearless communication has empowered us to balance individual needs, customer needs and company needs while uniting us in our mission to do whatever it takes to stop digital fraud for our customers.

Simon Biddiscombe, former CEO of MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti)

About MobileIron

MobileIron is redefining enterprise security with the industry’s first mobile-centric security platform for the Everywhere Enterprise. MobileIron’s platform combines award-winning and industry-leading unified endpoint management (UEM) capabilities with passwordless MFA (Zero Sign-On) and mobile threat defense (MTD) to validate the device, establish user context, verify the network and detect and remediate threats to ensure that only authorized users, devices, apps and services can access business resources in a “work from everywhere” world.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

As a leader during a pandemic, you must go above and beyond to provide your employees and customers with world-class service and support. My first priority when the pandemic hit was to protect the health and safety of our employees, yet still maintain an “always on business” for our customers. At MobileIron, we quickly enabled our employees around the world to work remotely. We also made it as easy as possible for our customers to issue more corporate-owned devices or enable a BYOD program to keep their employees secure and connected – whether they were working on the frontlines or at home. And we continued to innovate to meet the changing security needs of our customers and communities.

Overall, the pandemic has crammed years’ worth of change into a few short months and it will have long-lasting effects on how, when and where we work in the future. Work in the future will be very different to work in the past, which will present leaders with some challenges. However, it will also offer some significant opportunities to overhaul working practices and support employees who work from home with better collaboration and more intuitive access. The “Everywhere Enterprise” is not a passing phase, it’s the current reality and will continue to grow and expand as workers find new ways to be productive from anywhere.

Ward Osborne, CEO of Osborne Global Security

About Osborne Global Security

Osborne Global Security is a new player in the security space. They are challenging the stereotypes that come to mind when you originally think of security and replacing them with the ideas of trust, care and a shift in general security culture. This is a fascinating company to watch in the future.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

As CISO’s for multiple companies through this pandemic, we have seen so much shift and change. There’s been borderline chaos in many companies – and chaos ALWAYS brings opportunity. For our clients, the ones we’ve worked with and developed mature, risk and capabilities based models for just this situation, they are thriving.

It’s interesting to see the world adapt to a virtual delivery model which we’ve been creating, living, evangelizing for 25 years. Our clients who may not have had the time or prioritization to develop those models and capabilities have taken a hit, but we continue to do what we do, which is develop and provide resilience and growth to our customers.

In a virtual and distributed world, Trust becomes a major factor in every conversation. If a customer can’t Trust that we are there to solve problems when things get tough, then they aren’t able to operate effectively knowing that someone has their back.

Our world has become physically disconnected, but the people and companies that deal with that challenge in a proactive and positive way will always thrive. We are here. Growing our tribe. Doing the next right thing and leading customers to success in the midst of all of this chaos and challenge.

Rodrigo Tumaián, CEO and Co-Founder of Prometeo

About Prometeo

Prometeo provides a single point of access to banking information, transactions and payments across multiple financial institutions in Latam. Inspired by PSD2 and with high security standards, Prometeo brings easy plug & play access to open banking, the future of financial services. Currently, Prometeo is connected with more than 30 financial institutions across 9 countries of Latam (including México & Brazil) and provides access to more than 45 APIs.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

Prometeo was born with a very strong focus on cyber-security, so the pandemic had no effect on our operation. Our company grew up with the foundation of mobility and work flexibility, this forced us from the beginning to think about the best way to transmit data and protect mobile assets. So when the pandemic arrived, we were already providing remote access (VPN) to all our employees, limiting access by profile. We were already using two-factor authentication to access our services. We already had user nomination and record of the operations generated by our employees on our assets. I think if I had to mention what was the most valuable thing we learned from the pandemic, it’s that the direction we took from the beginning was worth it. We didn’t have to deal with operational issues to handle the high demand for digital products from customers, we just did it. So the pandemic for us strengthened another of our fundamental values, not to make security to be compliance, but to make integral security, both within our company and for our customers.

Jean Le Bouthillier, CEO of Qohash

About Qohash:

Qohash delivers advanced data classification and monitoring capabilities to protect your personal, health, corporate and financial data using transformational technologies such as machine learning and analytics.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

2020 has accelerated digital transformation efforts and highlighted the need for advanced, lightweight data security capabilities. With enterprise employees working increasingly remote, data is flowing faster and in previously unimagined ways. Businesses realize that to keep up with the demands of clients and a digital workforce, data risk models need an update or risk jeopardizing the enterprise.

Qohash clients recognize that the employee Risk Score, a quantifiable measure of trust, mitigates the impact both of bad actors as well as busy, distracted employees.

Remote, digital work will be a part of enterprise operations for the foreseeable future. Organizations need to enable governance risk and compliance teams to better support this transition to Work From Anywhere [WFA] models where talent and business thrive.

Jean-Paul Smets, Founder and CEO RapidSpace

About RapidSpace

Rapid.Space is a cloud provider whose “approach is based exclusively on the use of free, fully auditable and reversible software, hardware and management procedures under open licenses. Thanks to a network of 228 points of presence, Rapid.Space has global presence including in mainland China. It covers similar features as the most sophisticated public cloud provider and introduces exclusive innovations such as industrial edge computing and private 4G/5G vRAN.

“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”

“Rapid.Space learned during the pandemic how to formalize its management procedures and remotely setup points of presence. Thanks to Augmented Reality and smart glasses, Rapid.Space team in Europe and Americas could setup remotely its points of presence in mainland China and Taiwan without having to travel by air plane”.

Dec 15

Software Dominates Deloitte’s 2020 Tech Fast 500 With 71% Of All Companies

Software companies continue to deliver the highest growth rates for the 25th straight year, representing 71% of the entire list, the highest-ever percentage in the history of the rankings.
353 of the 500 fastest-growing companies in North America are in the software industry according to Deloitte’s 2020 Tech Fast 500, the most ever in the history of their rankings and a 3% increase over last year.
Two of the ten fastest-growing companies over the last three years specialize in cybersecurity, OneTrust and Transmit Security.
Notable software companies ranked in Deloitte’s 2020 Tech Fast 500 include Bolt, Illumio, LogicMonitor and Seeq.
Biotechnology/pharmaceutical companies are the second most prevalent sector, comprising 14% of all companies, followed by digital content/media/entertainment (5%) and medical devices (4%).

It’s fascinating to look at the emerging trends in Deloitte’s 2020 North America Technology Fast 500 Rankings as leading predictors of innovation. This year’s report is a quick read and provides a glimpse into the fastest-growing companies between 2016 and 2019. Deloitte chooses Technology Fast 500 awardees based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2016 to 2019. Overall, the 2020 Technology Fast 500 companies achieved revenue growth ranging from 175% to 106,508% over the three-year time frame, with a median growth rate of 450%.

Key insights from the rankings include the following:

Five of the top ten winners are software companies, including Branch Metrics, OneTrust, Transmit Security, Drift and CharterUP. It’s noteworthy that cybersecurity is well-represented in the top ten fastest-growing companies between 2016 and 2019. OneTrust and Transmit Security is in the top five fastest-growing companies between 2016 and 2019, accentuating how critical cybersecurity is becoming in all businesses. The following graphic lists the top ten Deloitte 2020 North America Technology Fast 500 winners.

Software Dominates Deloitte's 2020 Tech Fast 500 With 71% Of All Companies — Deloitte’s 2020 North America Technology Fast 500 Rankings

Digital platform and enterprise infrastructure & productivity dominate software companies are dominating software sub-sectors with 56% of all companies. Deloitte’s ranking reflects the increasing urgency all organizations have to launch, scale and excel at new digital selling channels. The pandemic accelerated the urgency faster than the most compelling business case ever could. Having over 50% of all software companies in these categories quantifies the cloud as the platform of choice across enterprises.

Electronic devices/hardware, energy tech and software & SaaS are the three sectors generating the fastest growing businesses over the last three years. Edge computing and the quick pace of innovation in intelligent sensor development and adoption for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) use cases are catalysts driving the 683% growth rate. Sustainability’s bottom-line benefits, including its positive impact on lean manufacturing, help drive to 525% growth rate in energy tech. Software and SaaS median growth rate of 465% shows enterprise software’s evolution is nascent and just getting started.

62% of the fastest-growing companies of the last three years say the Covid-19 pandemic has a low- to moderate impact on their business. It’s understandable how most high-growth companies are seeing a moderate impact of the pandemic as entire industries rely on their software, services and products to survive. Take software, for example. Manufacturers producing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) need ERP and MES systems to get healthcare workers much-needed supplies. Retailers need e-commerce software to drive sales online. Bolt’s success with its Checkout Experience Platform and it now being the platform of choice for Authentic Brands Group’s Forever 21 e-commerce relaunch are a case in point.

Nov 27

What Are The Fastest Growing Cybersecurity Skills In 2021?

Cybersecurity professionals with cloud security skills can gain a $15,025 salary premium by capitalizing on strong market demand for their skills in 2021.
DevOps and Application Development Security professionals can expect to earn a $12,266 salary premium based on their unique, in-demand skills.
413,687 job postings for Health Information Security professionals were posted between October 2019 to September 2020, leading all skill areas in demand.

Cybersecurity’s fastest-growing skill areas reflect the high priority organizations place on building secure digital infrastructures that can scale. Application Development Security and Cloud Security are far and away from the fastest-growing skill areas in cybersecurity, with projected 5-year growth of 164% and 115%, respectively. This underscores the shift from retroactive security strategies to proactive security strategies. According to The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Information Security Analyst’s Outlook, cybersecurity jobs are among the fastest-growing career areas nationally. The BLS predicts cybersecurity jobs will grow 31% through 2029, over seven times faster than the national average job growth of 4%.

Burning Glass, a leading labor market analytics firm, has been tracking demand for cybersecurity skills based on its database of more than one billion current and historical job postings. This week they published the results of their analysis of the top 10 cybersecurity skills for 2021. Their report of the 10 cybersecurity skills for 2021 can be downloaded here.

What Are The Fastest Growing Cybersecurity Skills In 2021?

Key takeaways from their analysis include the following:

Cloud Security skills are the most lucrative of all, predicted to deliver a $15,008 salary boost in 2021. Demand for specific Cloud Security skills is far outpacing the broader demand for cybersecurity skills in the labor market. Burning Glass predicts the fastest-growing skills over the next five years include Azure Security (+164%), Cloud Security Infrastructure (+144%), Google Cloud Security (+135%), Public Cloud Security (+121%), Cloud Security Architecture (+103%). There are 19,477 positions available for cybersecurity professionals with Cloud Security skills.

The fastest-growing cybersecurity skill is Application Development Security, predicted to see a 164% increase in available positions over five years. Cybersecurity professionals with Application Development Security, DevSecOps, Container Security, Microservices Security, Application Security Code Review are predicted to see an average $12,266 salary boost starting next year given the strong marketability of their skills. Like Cloud Security, market demand for Application Development Security professionals’ skillsets far outpaces average cybersecirty jobs growth over five years.

Knowing where the most cybersecurity job postings are by metro area and state provides job seekers with the insights they need to narrow their job search. Cyberseek partnered with Burning Glass to create an interactive U.S.-based heat map that shows cybersecurity positions by state or metro area. The heat map can be configured to show total job openings, supply of workers, supply/demand ratio,and location quotients. You can access the heat map here.

Nov 1

83% Of Enterprises Transformed Their Cybersecurity In 2020

73% of enterprises (over 500 employees) accelerated their cloud migration plans to support the shift to remote working across their organizations due to the pandemic.
81% of enterprises accelerated their IT modernization processes due to the pandemic.
48% of all companies surveyed have accelerated their cloud migration plans, 49% have sped up their IT modernization plans because of Covid-19.
32% of large-scale enterprises, over 500 employees, are implementing more automation using artificial intelligence-based tools this year.

These and many other insights are from a recent survey of IT leaders completed by CensusWide and sponsored by Centrify. The survey’s objectives on understanding how the dynamics of IT investments, operations and spending have shifted over the last six months. The study finds that the larger the enterprise, the more important it is to secure remote access to critical infrastructure to IT admin teams. Remote access and updating privacy policies and notices are two of the highest priorities for mid-size organizations to enterprises today. The methodology is based on interviews with 215 IT leaders located in the U.S.

Key insights from the survey include the following:

The overwhelming majority of enterprises have transformed their cybersecurity approach over the last six months, with 83% of large-scale enterprises leading all organizations. It’s encouraging to see small and medium-sized businesses adjusting and improving their approach to cybersecurity. Reflecting how digitally-driven many small and medium businesses are, cybersecurity adjustments begin in organizations with 10 to 49 employees. 60% adjusted their cloud security postures as a result of distributed workforces.

48% of all organizations had to accelerate cloud migration due to the pandemic, with larger enterprises leading the way. Enterprises with over 500 employees are the most likely to accelerate cloud migration plans due to the pandemic. 73.5% of enterprises with more than 500 employees accelerated cloud migration plans to support their employees’ remote working arrangements, leading all organization categories. This finding reflects how cloud-first the largest enterprises have become this year. It’s also consistent with many other surveys completed in 2020, reflecting how much the cloud has solidly won the enterprise.

83% Of Enterprises Transformed Their Cybersecurity In 2020

49% of all organizations and 81% of large-scale enterprises had to accelerate their IT modernization process due to the pandemic. For the largest enterprises, IT modernization equates to digitizing more processes using cloud-native services (59%), maintaining flexibility and security for a partially remote workforce (57%) and revisiting and adjusting their cybersecurity stacks (40%).

51% of enterprises with 500 employees or more are making remote, secure access their highest internal priority. In contrast, 27% of all organizations’ IT leaders say that providing secure, granular access to IT admin teams, outsourced IT and third-party vendors is a leading priority. The larger the enterprise, the more important remote access becomes. The survey also found organizations with 250 – 500 employees are most likely to purchase specific cybersecurity tools and applications to meet compliance requirements.

Conclusion & Wrap-Up

IT leaders are quickly using the lessons learned from the pandemic as a crucible to strengthen cloud transformation and IT modernization strategies. One of every three IT leaders interviewed, 34%, say their budgets have increased during the pandemic. In large-scale enterprises with over 500 employees, 59% of IT leaders have seen their budgets increase.

All organizations are also keeping their IT staff in place. 63% saw little to no impact on their teams, indicating that the majority of organizations will have both the budget and resources to maintain or grow their cybersecurity programs. 25% of IT leaders indicated that their company plans to keep their entire workforce 100% remote.

It’s encouraging to see IT leaders getting the support they need to achieve their cloud transformation and IT modernization initiatives going into next year. With every size of organization spending on cybersecurity tools, protecting cloud infrastructures needs to be a priority. Controlling administrative access risk in the cloud and DevOps is an excellent place to start with a comprehensive, modern Privileged Access Management solution. Leaders in this field, including Centrify, whose cloud-native architecture and flexible deployment and management options, deliver deep expertise in securing cloud environments.

Oct 26

Absolute’s CEO Christy Wyatt On The Future Of Endpoint Security

Removing any doubt endpoints are resilient, self-healing and secure is what matters most to cybersecurity leaders today. It has become the highest priority across education, enterprise, financial services and government organizations in 2020 and beyond. At the same time, CIOs and CISOs are recognizing that endpoint complexity itself is a vulnerability. Absolute’s 2020 State of Endpoint Resilience Report finds there are now 10.2 agents per endpoint installed, up from 9.8. Add to this how quickly software agents degrade across thousands of remote devices and the size of the challenge becomes clear.

Absolute’s approach to delivering unified endpoint security using their Endpoint Resilience platform that creates a permanent digital tether to every endpoint in the enterprise is getting noticed by CIOs and CISOs. IT leaders say Absolute’s ability to provide greater visibility and control is what they need. Interested in learning more about how Absolute is helping customers taking on the many challenges of protecting the proliferating number of endpoints today and how the company sees the future, I recently spoke with Christy Wyatt, CEO. (You can see my discussion with her last year here.)

Under her leadership, Absolute’s revenues, customer retention and Net Income continue to grow. Total revenue in Q4-FY2020 was $27.2M, representing a year-over-year increase of 7%. Annual revenue in FY2020 was $104.7M, representing an increase of 6% over F2019. Absolute also attained a 14% year-over-year increase in Enterprise and Government revenue making this segment 68% of Total ARR on June 30, 2020.

Christy is one of the most brilliant, insightful leaders in cybersecurity today and her perspective on the future of endpoint security makes for a fascinating discussion. The following is my interview with her:

Louis: When you look back over the last eight months, which decisions and strategies do you see as being pivotal to Absolute’s growth and the fact that you accomplished so much, so quickly?

Christy: That’s a great question and the first thing that jumps to mind is our decision that Endpoint Resilience needs to be its own category. This was kind of a new thing. Many people talk about finding bad guys and the need for identity and access management.. there is a lot of use of the fear factor. And as an industry, we kept thinking of different ways devices could be compromised and we kept adding more security controls to solve those problems.

The thesis we arrived at, here at Absolute, is, “Listen, more isn’t always better. Making sure that things are actually working in there when you need them, that’s what is more important.” Because when you spend a lot of money on solutions, or when you tell your board or your CEO that you have a particular control and are now safe from a specific kind of risk… you need to go to sleep at night knowing that that’s in fact true. There needs to be a foundational belief that there is something solid to stand on when bad things happen.

And so, much of what we did this past year was really focused on quantifying that rate of decay because we believe that it is a painful problem organizations are having. I think that we are making traction and the insights we continue to publish on the state of Endpoint Resilience is really helping with that.

Louis: On your last earnings call, you talked about undeletable endpoint security and how it caught on in the education market. Did you change your go-to-market strategy this quarter to show you could scale an enterprise-wide deployment with teachers and administrators?

Christy: What’s important to remember is that we’ve been in business 20 years and that we started in education – as the one-to-one laptop initiatives for school kids were just getting underway. Those devices were very expensive and so that is the first problem we worked to solve. If somebody got their hands on a student’s device, how do you build a security platform that can survive anything that happens to that device? That was the original design premise all those years ago. And so, we have deep experience in things like scalability and solving problems for the education market.

What we’ve been seeing n the education market over the last couple of years has really been that, while technology has been an enabler for students, they weren’t necessarily thinking about teachers and administrators. So the challenge that they’ve grappled with over the last few months, notably with the accelerated shift to remote learning, is figuring out how to be both a digital and remote organization all at once. A lot of their processes were not yet online and not every single individual was connected.

Because we have a long-standing relationship with this community, we have a lot of expertise in the providing the scale and stability that they need. It was relatively intuitive for us to step and say, “Listen, these are things we can help you with. Here’s the bigger picture of things we could be helping you with, as you’re still figuring out distance learning and how to mobilize students.” Because we’ve also while serving education, we’ve also been serving banks and governments – and our enterprise business has been growing quite nicely over the years as well.

And I think we’re going to see that continue, because even as schools are contemplating sending children back to school, nobody knows whether this is a long-term or short-term. The new term I’ve started using is operational agility… and I think it applies to enterprise as well as it goes to education. I don’t think we ever again get to take for granted location and physical proximity to employees or students or devices. It has become a critical KPI for most organizations going forward.

Louis: Excellent point. And with regard to enterprise and government sectors growing 14% annually, what did you see in the eight months of this year that led to the double-digit growth in those markets?

Christy: Very few organizations had ever really contemplated the question, “What would happen if everybody had to be remote at a moment’s notice?” While our enterprise business has been experiencing double-digit growth for quite a while now, the onset of the pandemic really accelerated that growth. There has been a shift in thinking, that working remotely is not just for a smaller population of road warriors and sales reps and executives. I’ve spoken with many organizations that would say having a permanent digital connection to a device is really important for the people who are on airplanes and in a taxi cabs. But, I have a large percentage of my population that has a device that really they only use at work. Maybe it’s a laptop, maybe it’s a desktop – but either way, 99% of the time they are here. Or the times that they’re not here, they can VPN in. And I think that’s really become the challenge, that we can’t make that assumption anymore.

A lot of customers are rethinking all of that right now, as they’re seeing that being a remote, digitally-led organization can actually fit within their business model. If they give employees the flexibility to do what they love, where they want to do it, they’ll have an edge. While this is something that’s been forced on us, as with many things, the more you practice, the better you get… and then at some point, it becomes a part of the company’s DNA. And you learn to trust that you’re going to be safe and secure, your data and your employees are going to be just fine, because you don’t lose connection with them just because you can’t see them.

Louis: I think trust is an accelerator and Absolute’s success with endpoint security shows how to enable it at scale across organizations. Now with 13,000 customers, Absolute’s approach to building trust is working well.

On the earnings call you gave guidance of $112M to $118M with between 7% to 13% growth defined by how accounting transactions are handled. Underneath those figures, what’s the customer segment or what’s the geographic segment that you believe will be the primary catalyst for that revenue growth?

Christy: Perhaps a bit unusually for company our size, a large percentage of our revenue is actually North America-based. Our international markets have been some of the fastest growing segments for us. Our ecosystem of partners that we support – notably, the large PC and device manufacturers and their indirect channels – most of those are global entities and would like to support their customers in the same way internationally that they support them in North America. So one big focus for us is doing more selling and marketing globally, to meet this need.

I think the other big catalyst is going to be this shift to Resilience. We have a lot of customers who still rely on us for making sure they’re always connected to their devices and able to take preventative action – such as selectively wiping images or freezing a device, or geo-fencing a device from specific locations. While that’s certainly a critical set of capabilities, because we’re sitting in the hardware and sort of looking up at the software, we can help with this concept of self-healing. We can make sure that the critical controls you care about are truly working and protecting your employees.

A lot of the conversations we’re having, especially with new customers, are really focused on these capabilities. It’s not just, “How do I make sure I always know where my things are and that I can take action on them no matter where they are?” Instead, it’s “how do I use automated workflows to remediate risk? How do I have devices fix themselves so that my IT people don’t have to drown and help those calls?”

This concept of persistence and true self-healing that’s rooted in the hardware, I think is really, really powerful.. and the value of that really starts to become apparent when we’re in a world that looks like this. So I think those are some big focus areas for us as we go in the next year.

Louis: I like that one point you made on the earnings call about intelligence efforts, providing more data in a more interactive way for customers. I thought that that was really insightful and I think relevant to what you’ve been saying throughout our discussion. How do you help customers see themselves in a new way with new metrics, more interactively, more intuitively with greater insight?

Christy: It’s a different view for us and it’s something I’m very excited about. When it comes to a new product, I focus on, “What’s the question the customer’s going to be asking? What’s the problem they’re trying to solve?” And from there, “How do I package that up neatly so that they click on a button and get a report and it solves all of their problems?” But that’s not the world we live in today, especially when you have so many moving parts and things are continuously changing.

So it’s a different design philosophy when we say to the team, “You actually have no idea what question the customer is going to ask. Your job is to create tools that allow them to ask any question they have and then help them define the answer, either using our tool or using our data in some other tool.” At the end of the day, that’s how they get closer to the truth about what’s going on within their organization… and how they gain the ability to make better decisions.

Louis: Absolutely, that’s key to creating a culture that can continues to innovate and with Absolute’s focus on helping customers attain greater autonomous endpoint resiliency, it’s proving to be a strong catalyst for future growth too.

Sep 12

What’s New In Gartner’s Hype Cycle For Endpoint Security, 2020

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.

Aug 23

5 Ways Machine Learning Can Thwart Phishing Attacks

Global mobile phishing attempts surged by 37% amid shift to work-from-home for the thousands of businesses needing to adhere to shelter-in-place directives.
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.
60% of IT leaders believe that phishing is the most significant mobile security threat faced by their organization, according to MobileIron’s recent study, Trouble at the Top: Why the C-Suite is the weakest link when it comes to cybersecurity.

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

Google’s use of machine learning to thwart the skyrocketing number of phishing attacks occurring during the Covid-19 pandemic provides insights into the scale of these threats. On a typical day, G-Mail blocks 100 million phishing emails. During a typical week in April of this year, Google’s G-Mail Security team saw 18M daily malware and phishing emails related to Covid-19. Google’s machine learning models are evolving to understand and filter phishing threats, successfully blocking more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching G-Mail users. Microsoft thwarts billions of phishing attempts a year on Office365 alone by relying on heuristics, detonation and machine learning strengthened by Microsoft Threat Protection Services.

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.

Aug 14

Answers To Today’s Toughest Endpoint Security Questions In The Enterprise

Enterprises who are increasing the average number of endpoint security agents from 9.8 last year to 10.2 today aren’t achieving the endpoint resilience they need because more software agents create more conflicts, leaving each endpoint exposed to a potential breach.
1 in 3 enterprise devices is being used with a non-compliant VPN, further increasing the risk of a breach.
60% of breaches can be linked to a vulnerability where a patch was available, but not applied. Windows 10 devices in enterprises are, on average, 95 days behind on patches.

CIOs, CISOs and cybersecurity teams say autonomous endpoint security is the most challenging area they need to strengthen in their cybersecurity strategy today. Software agents degrade faster than expected and conflict with each other, leaving endpoints exposed. Absolute’s 2020 State of Endpoint Resilience Report quantifies the current state of autonomous endpoint security, the scope of challenges CISOs face today and how elusive endpoint resiliency is to achieve with software agents. It’s an insightful read if you’re interested in autonomous endpoint security.

Endpoint Security Leads CISOs’ Priorities In 2020

With their entire companies working remotely, CIOs and CISOs I’ve spoken with say autonomous endpoint security is now among their top three priorities today. Cutting through the endpoint software clutter and turning autonomous endpoint security into a strength is the goal. CISOs are getting frustrated with spending millions of dollars among themselves only to find out their endpoints are unprotected due to software conflicts and degradation. Interested in learning more, I spoke with Steven Spadaccini, Vice President, Sales Engineering at Absolute Software and one of the most knowledgeable autonomous endpoint cybersecurity experts I’ve ever met. Our conversation delved into numerous cybersecurity challenges enterprise CIOs and CISOs are facing today. My interview with him is below:

The Seven Toughest Questions the C-Suite Is Asking About Endpoint Security

Louis: Thank you for your time today. I have seven questions from CIOs, CISOs and their teams regarding endpoint security. Let’s get started with their first one. What happens if an endpoint is compromised, how do you recover, encrypt, or delete its data?

Steven: It’s a challenge using software agents, both security and/or management, to do this as each agents’ tools and features often conflict with each other, making a comprised endpoints’ condition worse while making it virtually impossible to recover, encrypt, delete and replace data. The most proven approach working for enterprises today is to pursue an endpoint resilience strategy. At the center of this strategy is creating a root of trust in the hardware and re-establishes communication and control of a device through an unbreakable digital tether. I’m defining Endpoint Resilience as an autonomous endpoint security strategy that ensures connectivity, visibility and control are achieved and maintained no matter what is happening at the OS or application level. Taking this approach empowers devices to recover automatically from any state to a secure operational state without user intervention. Trust is at the center of every endpoint discussion today as CIOs, CISOs and their teams want the assurance every endpoint will be able to heal itself and keep functioning

Louis: Do endpoint software security solutions fail when you lose access to the endpoint, or is the device still protected at the local level?

Steven: When they’re only protected by software agents, they fail all the time. What’s important for CISOs to think about today is how they can lead their organizations to excel at automated endpoint hygiene. It’s about achieving a stronger endpoint security posture in the face of growing threats. Losing access to an endpoint doesn’t have to end badly; you can still have options to protect every device. It’s time for enterprises to start taking a more resilient-driven mindset and strategy to protecting every endpoint – focus on eliminating dark endpoints. One of the most proven ways to do that is to have endpoint security embedded to the BIOS level every day. That way, each device is still protected to the local level. Using geolocation, it’s possible to “see” a device when it comes online and promptly brick it if it’s been lost or stolen.

Louis: How can our cybersecurity team ensure compliance that all cybersecurity software is active and running on all endpoints?

Steven: Compliance is an area where having an undeletable tether pays off in a big way. Knowing what’s going on from a software configuration and endpoint security agent standpoint – basically the entire software build of a given endpoint – is the most proven way I’ve seen CISOs keep their inventory of devices in compliance. What CISOs and their teams need is the ability to see endpoints in near real-time and predict which ones are most likely to fail at compliance. Using a cloud-based or SaaS console to track compliance down to the BIOS level removes all uncertainty of compliance. Enterprises doing this today stay in compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, SOX and other compliance requirements at scale. It’s important also to consider how security automation and orchestration kicks on to instantly resolve violations by revising security controls and configurations, restoring anti-malware, or even freezing the device or isolating it from data access. Persistent visibility and control give organizations what they need to be audit-ready at every moment.

Having that level of visibility makes it easy to brick a device. Cybersecurity teams using Absolute’s Persistence platform can lead to humorous results for IT teams, who call the bricking option a “fun button as they watch hackers continually try to reload new images and right after they’re done, re-brick the device again. One CIO told the story of how their laptops had been given to a service provider who was supposed to destroy them to stay in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and one had been resold on the black market, ending up in a 3^rd world nation. As the hacker attempted to rebuild the machine, the security team watched as each new image was loaded at which time they would promptly brick the machine. After 19 tries, the hacker gave up and called the image rebuild “brick me.”

Louis: With everyone working remote today, how can we know, with confidence where a given endpoint device is at a moments’ notice?

Steven: That’s another use case where having an undeletable tether pays off in two powerful ways: enabling autonomous endpoint security and real-time asset management. You can know with 100% confidence where a given endpoint device is in real-time so long as the device is connected to a permanent digital tether . Even if the device isn’t reachable by your own corporate network it’s possible to locate it using the technologies and techniques mentioned earlier. CIOs sleep better at night knowing every device is accounted for and if one gets lost or stolen, their teams can brick it in seconds.

Louis: How can our IT and cybersecurity teams know all cybersecurity applications are active and protecting the endpoint?

Steven: By taking a more aggressive approach to endpoint hygiene, it’s possible to know every application, system configuration and attributes of user data on the device. It’s important not to grow complacent and assume the gold image IT uses to configure every new or recycled laptop is accurate. One CIO was adamant they had nine software agents on every endpoint, but Absolute’s Resilience platform found 16, saving the enterprise from potential security gaps. The gold image is an enterprise IT team was using had inadvertently captured only a subset of the total number of software endpoints active on their networks. Absolute’s Resilience offering and Persistence technology enabled the CIO to discover gaps in endpoint security the team didn’t know existed before.

Louis: How can we restrict the geolocations of every endpoint?

Steven: This is an area that’s innovating quickly in response to the needs enterprises have to track and manage assets across countries and regions. IP tracking alone isn’t as effective as the newer techniques, including GPS tracking, Wi-Fi triangulation, with both integrated into the Google Maps API. Enterprises whose business relies on Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is especially interested in and adopting these technologies today. Apria Healthcare is currently using geofencing for endpoint security and asset management. They have laptops in use today across Indonesia, the Philippines and India. Given the confidential nature of the data on those devices and compliance with local government data protection laws, each laptop needs to stay in the country they’re assigned to. Geofencing gives Apria the power to freeze any device that gets outside of its region within seconds, averting costly fines and potential breaches.

Louis: How can our IT team immediately validate an endpoint for vulnerabilities in software and hardware?

Steven: The quickest way is to design in audit-ready compliance as a core part of any endpoint resilience initiative. Endpoint resilience to the BIOS level makes it possible to audit devices and find vulnerabilities in real-time, enabling self-healing of mission-critical security applications regardless of complexity. The goal of immediately validating endpoints for current security posture needs to be a core part of any automated endpoint hygiene strategy. It’s possible to do this across platforms while being OS-agnostic yet still accessible to over 500M endpoint devices, deployed across Microsoft Windows, macOS via a Mac Agent and Chrome platforms.

Conclusion

Knowing if their autonomous endpoint security and enterprise-wide cybersecurity strategies are working or not is what keeps CIOs up the most at night. One CISO confided to me that 70% of the attempted breaches to his organization are happening in areas he and his team already knew were vulnerable to attack. Bad actors are getting very good at finding the weakest links of an enterprises’ cyber defenses fast. They’re able to look at the configuration of endpoints, see which software agents are installed, research known conflicts and exploit them to gain access to corporate networks. All this is happening 24/7 to enterprises today. Needing greater resilient, persistent connections to every device, CISOs are looking at how they can achieve greater resilience on every endpoint. Capitalizing on an undeletable tether to track the location of the device, ensure the device and the apps on that device have self-healing capabilities and gain valuable asset management data – these are a few of the many benefits they’re after.

Researching the intersection of AI, machine learning and cybersecurity in the enterprise

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