Bad bot traffic up 50 percent as fraudsters target Black Friday
New research from Kasada shows a 50 percent jump in bad bot activity during Black Friday week, with bot operators using customized open-source development tools, headless browsers, and new Solver Services to conduct their attacks at scale.
The report also shows a six times spike in automated gift card lookups this holiday shopping season, a key indicator that fraudsters are using bots to identify and steal gift card balances.
Would you bet your chocolate on preventing a breach?
While 97 percent of business leaders and security professionals say their organization is as prepared or more prepared to defend against cybersecurity attacks than they were a year ago, one in five wouldn't bet a chocolate bar that they could prevent a damaging breach.
Ivanti surveyed 6,500 executive leaders, cybersecurity professionals, and office workers to understand their perception of today's cybersecurity threats and find out how companies are preparing for future threats.
The opportunities and risks of the metaverse
We know that not many consumers actually care about the metaverse, but that hasn't stopped tech giants investing heavily in preparing for it.
A new report from Tenable, based on a study of 1,500 professionals representing roles in cybersecurity, DevOps and IT engineering, shows 68 percent of respondents plan to do business in the metaverse within the next three years, with 23 percent having already begun initiatives in the past six months.
Why your security strategy needs to be pre-emptive [Q&A]
As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, so traditional security techniques may no longer be up to the task of protecting systems.
What's needed is an approach that can spot the routes an attacker may use and help close them down. We spoke to Todd Carroll, CISO at CybelAngel and with over 20 years previous experience in the FBI's cyber, counter intelligence, and counter terrorism branches, to discuss the need for a pre-emptive attitude to cybersecurity and how such an approach can work.
Number of vulnerable Log4j downloads remains high one year on
This week marks the first anniversary of the Log4j/Log4Shell vulnerability affecting the Java logging library and as we noted recently many organizations are still vulnerable even though patched versions were quickly available.
Sonatype has produced a resource center to show the current state of the vulnerability, along with a tool to help businesses scan their open source code to see if it's affected.
Why cross-platform capability is vital to the future of development [Q&A]
Increasingly consumers and businesses alike are relying on portable devices, and that means it's important that apps are available across several different systems.
We spoke to Jerome Laban, CTO of Uno Platform -- which allows Microsoft developers, using traditional C# and XAML, to take their apps to iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and the web -- to find out more about cross-platform development and how it can future-proof applications.
Big but not so clever -- ID fraudsters go for quantity over quality
A new report reveals that 'less sophisticated' fraud -- in which doctored identity documents are readily spotted -- has jumped 37 percent in 2022.
The report from Onfido also shows that while in 2019 fraudsters tended to keep regular office hours, in 2022, fraud levels were consistent across 24 hours, seven days a week. Thanks to technology, fraudsters are more connected across the globe and are able to traverse regions and time zones, and can easily take advantage of businesses’ closed hours when staff are likely offline.
Why air-gapping may not be enough to protect your critical systems
The classic way of preventing critical systems, such as industrial controls, from attack is to air-gap them. That is to say ensure they don't have a connection to the internet.
But while they may not have a web connection they still often require DNS services in order to resolve a company's internal DNS records. New research from Pentera shows that this can provide a weak point to be exploited by attackers.
67 percent of companies lose business deals over security strategy concerns
New research from LogRhythm shows 67 percent of respondents say their company had lost a business deal due to the customer's lack of confidence in their security strategy.
The survey of 1,175 security professionals and executives across five continents, conducted by Dimensional Research, finds 91 percent report that their company's security strategy and practices must now align to customers' security policies and standards.
62 percent of companies say cybersecurity incidents have impacted their operations
Cybersecurity resilience is a top priority for companies as they look to defend against a rapidly evolving threat landscape, according to the latest annual Security Outcomes Report from Cisco.
The report reveals that 62 percent of organizations surveyed say they have experienced a security event that impacted business in the past two years. The leading types of incidents are network or data breaches (51.5 percent), network or system outages (51.1 percent), ransomware events (46.7 percent) and distributed denial of service attacks (46.4 percent).
Fraud and ransomware dominate cyber insurance claims
Ransomware accounts for 23 percent of cyber insurance claims, while while fraudulent funds transfer (FFT) accounts for 28 percent according to insurance specialist Corvus, which has released its latest Risk Insights Index.
The impact and consistency of FFT is growing, accounting for 36 percent of all claims in the last quarter (Q3 2022), an all-time high. Indeed this metric has not dropped below 25 percent for the past six quarters.
Health workers kept from patient care by tech
An overwhelming 99 percent of healthcare professionals want to be free to focus on patient care, but an abundance of technology is taking time and energy away from their core tasks.
This startling statistic is from a new study by Zivver which interviewed over 6,000 employees across the US and Europe, more than 400 of them in healthcare organizations, about their digital communications and workplace productivity.
Security and access are top issues for data engineers
More than half (54 percent) of respondents to a new survey say securing data with appropriate access rights is one of their biggest hurdles. While almost 60 percent believe their organizations should be placing extra emphasis on data security.
The third annual State of Data Engineering Survey from Immuta also finds that that 89 percent of organizations report missing business opportunities because of data access bottlenecks.
AI-powered gardening app wins IBM Call for Code
This year's annual Call for Code Global Challenge, backed by IBM and the Linux Foundation, invited innovators across the world to help accelerate sustainability and combat climate change with open source-powered technology.
It's been won by GardenMate for creating an app that uses the IBM Watson AI platform to connect gardeners with excess produce to people in need.
Why SaaS needs a holistic approach to security [Q&A]
As organizations move more of their systems to the cloud they face a new range of threats. This combined with a shortage of cybersecurity skills makes securing SaaS systems a challenge.
Galit Lubetzky Sharon, co-founder and CTO of Wing Security, believes that a new more holistic approach, involving employees across the organization, is needed. We spoke to her to learn more.
Ian's Bio
Ian spent almost 20 years working with computers before he discovered that writing about them was easier than fixing them. Since then he's written for a number of computer magazines and is a former editor of PC Utilities. Follow him on Mastodon
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