Inside IT Security & Privileged Users Management

Contrary to popular belief, cyberattacks are not (always) a massive attempt to take over or disable your infrastructure. While a wide DDOS attack can be used as a decoy, the real work is more subtle, more elaborate. Consider a James Bond film, for example. The bad guy would try to infiltrate your organization quietly, identify its weaknesses, and attempt to gain power gradually in order to fulfill his villainous plan.

Just as in those Bond movies, broad, external defenses are not enough, and usually countermeasures come too late to stop the infiltration. This is especially true for fragmented organizations and enterprises relying heavily on external contractors and employees working remotely. Once an enemy has found his way in, the whole organization falls. With 69% of breaches perpetrated by outsiders like organized criminal groups and nation-states, it takes a special problem-solver like 007 to save the day.

You may be familiar with Privileged Access management – PAM – because of its capabilities as part of a comprehensive defense against cyberthreats. In a strong PAM solution those capabilities are many and varied, and allow network security teams to design a defense-in-depth strategy that adheres to security-first, Zero Trust principles to secure their organizations' most sensitive assets. Yet as important as it is to protect against cyberthreats, there is another key aspect of cybersecurity with which organizations need to concern themselves: Compliance with regulatory and industry standards.

2020 is the Year of the Rat, so we're kicking the year off with everything you need to know about the nefarious RATs... Remote Access Trojans. In the first post, we described a RAT's capabilities and the necessary steps to take in order to protect your infrastructure against this type of cyberattack. In this second installment, we're taking a look at just how much of a threat a RAT is to your system.

The elements of effective cybersecurity are both a broad and a deep subject for discussion, and the details of any one particular element bears in-depth discussion of its own. That said, such details are often best left to companies' cybersecurity teams to investigate and implement – but in no regard should executive teams remain completely uninformed of the high-level elements that should comprise proper, well-rounded cybersecurity within their organizations.

Chinese New Year 2020: The Year of the RAT

The year of the rat is going to be a strong, prosperous and lucky year, for those that carefully plan their objectives.