IT security practitioners spend a lot of time strategizing ransomware defense, but many know little about the criminals plotting attacks. Who is the person behind a devastating ransomware campaign? Why did they choose a specific target? What about cybercrime appeals to them? To better understand the attacker’s perspective, Cisco Talos researchers interviewed a LockBit ransomware…

8 top open source intelligence tools

OSINT, or open source intelligence, is the practice of collecting information from published or otherwise publicly available sources. OSINT operations, whether practiced by IT security pros, malicious hackers, or state-sanctioned intelligence operatives, use advanced techniques to search through the vast haystack of visible data to find the needles they’re looking for to achieve their goals—and…

Because IT security and the C-suite are misaligned, digital transformation increases cyber risk

While digital transformation is understood to be critical, its rapid adoption, as seen with cloud providers, IoT and shadow IT, is creating significant cyber risk for most organizations. Today, these vulnerabilities are only exacerbated by misalignment between IT security professionals and the C-suite. The research by CyberGRX and Ponemon Institute surveyed 900 IT security professionals…

The majority of companies (77 percent) continue to use or plan to use automation in the next three years, according to a Ponemon Institute and DomainTools survey. The biggest takeaway in this year’s study is that 51 percent of respondents now believe that automation will decrease headcount in the IT security function, an increase from…

83% of IT security professionals feel more overworked going into 2020 than they were at the beginning of 2019, and 82% said their teams were understaffed, according to a Tripwire survey. Hard to find skilled security staff The strain on cybersecurity teams is exacerbated by the inability to find experienced staff, and 85% acknowledged it…

Ransomware attacks on organizations are likely to continue unabated in the near term if the results of a new survey by Proofpoint are any indication. The security vendor recently polled 600 IT security professionals from around the world on trends related to phishing and other email-borne threats. The results showed that 33% — or nearly…

Sisyphus could be the official mascot of security operations. Sixty-three percent of respondents to a recent ESG survey of 406 IT and cybersecurity professionals say that security operations is more difficult today than it was 2 years ago. Why? 41% of survey respondents point to the rapidly evolving and changing threat landscape, which is forcing…