Read about the latest cybersecurity news and get advice on third-party vendor risk management, reporting cybersecurity to the Board, managing cyber risks, benchmarking security performance, and more.
Insights blog.
Read about the latest cybersecurity news and get advice on third-party vendor risk management, reporting cybersecurity to the Board, managing cyber risks, benchmarking security performance, and more.
Bitsight and Google collaborate to reveal global cybersecurity performance
Bitsight and Google collaborate to reveal global cybersecurity performance
This joint study between Bitsight and Google arms organizations with actionable insights, providing the current status of global cybersecurity performance by analyzing nearly 100,000 global organizations across 16 cybersecurity controls and nine industries amid heightened stakeholder demands on cybersecurity strategy.
Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on mergers and acquisitions. (The value of worldwide M&A deals in 2014 totaled $3.5 trillion.) Managing risk throughout the process is an important element of any merger, but there's one area of risk management that hasn't had the attention it deserves.
During last month's SANS webinar, Quantifying Security Performance: The What, Why and How of Security Ratings, Bitsight CTO and Co-Founder Stephen Boyer answered questions from attendees. Here are some of the most interesting questions people posed, and our answers for each one. There are also two clips from the webinar recording.
The last couple of years have been tough on higher education systems in terms of cyber security. In 2012, in particular, there was a near-record-high number of data breaches, with nearly two million exposed records reported. The following year saw Maricopa Community College in Arizona experience a data breach that affected 2.4 million people. In 2014, there have already been several high-profile .EDU data breaches. In our latest Bitsight Insights report, we found that many universities are struggling to secure their networks due to unique IT infrastructure requirements and persistent security problems.
On July 21, 2014, Brian Krebs (once again) broke the news of a potentially major retail breach. Goodwill Industries and its 165 independent agencies across North America appear to be the most recent victims in the seemingly plagued retail industry.
In a previous blog post, we outlined federal initiatives to pass a data breach notification law that would simplify the current myriad of state regulations. In the wake of the Target and Neiman Marcus data breaches, legislators and government officials called for a national data breach notification standard. While bills have been introduced, little action has been taken beyond Senate or House subcommittee hearings. While high-profile breaches that brought this issue into the conciousness of the American public and government, the need for transparency is even more pressing due to the high volume of unreported breaches: Our own analysis found that just in our home state of Massachusetts, 1 million residents had their PII compromised from healthcare breaches during 2007-2011. Yet, just because there has been little movement in the US federal government does not mean data breach notification has been a stagnant issue in other countries and on the state level. In this post, we are going to round up some interesting legislative initiatives happening around the globe and in US state governments.
As a result of their major data breach late last year, Target has undergone a major house-cleaning to signify to the market just how seriously they are taking cyber security.
Originating from the French proclamations of Charles VII’s ascension to the throne after the death of Charles VI, “The King is dead, long live the King” speaks to the inevitability of succession. It is now not a stretch to think about the inevitability of future CEOs leaving power and ascending to power as a result of cyber breaches.
Since California became the first state to enact a security breach notification law in 2001, 46 states and the District of Columbia have enacted similar disclosure laws. These laws follow similar basic tenets that “companies must immediately disclose a data breach,” a burden most stringent when the data compromised could be classified as personally identifiable information (PII), such as name, social security number, date of birth, mothers maiden name, etc.
Unfortunately, something ugly has tarnished the canvases of the artists and crafters who used their debit or credit cards to shop at Michaels from May 8, 2013 to January 24, 2014. In late January 2014, Michaels announced that it was investigating a potential security breach involving customers’ credit card information. After weeks of analysis, Michaels finally confirmed yesterday that a targeted attack did indeed occur on some of their point of sales systems and that approximately 2.6 million cards may have been compromised.
At Bitsight, we have observed significant botnet activity on Michael’s network over the past year. In particular, we observed multiple instances of Conficker, a botnet that can comp
At Bitsight, we have observed significant botnet activity on Michael’s network over the past year. In particular, we observed multiple instances of Conficker, a botnet that can comp
On April 7, the open-source OpenSSL project issued an advisory regarding a critical vulnerability identified as CVE-2014-0160 and called “Heartbleed.” This flaw, which takes advantage of OpenSSL’s heartbeat feature, has been present in OpenSSL for over two years, but was only recently discovered. It allows an attacker to trick systems running any version of OpenSSL 1.0.1. from the past two years into revealing 64 KB of data sitting in its system memory per request. There is no limit to the number of requests an attacker can make. Attackers can gain access to private keys, user names, passwords, credit card data, and other sensitive information. They can spoof a website by launching a more effective man-in-the-middle attack. What is both scary and brilliant about attacks exploiting this vulnerability is that they leave no trace in the server logs.
This post is part of the Risk 101 series.
When third party vendors, partners, processors and contractors find out about a breach of your customers' data, do you know what their notification practices are? Would you be surprised to know that almost a full third of them probably won't ever let you know that they've put your data at risk?
In February, Bitsight released a new Bitsight Insight examining the cyber health of the U.S. economy and found that 82% of the 460 companies assessed had an externally observable security compromise in 2013. Examples of security events observed by Bitsight include communications between compromised computers inside an organization and external computers known to be under the control of an attacker, distribution of malware, and propagation of malicious email. Although these security events do not necessarily equate to data loss, each one is an indication that the organization has been compromised in some manner.
The threat from malicious email represents one of the greatest risks to IT security. That threat continued unabated in 2020, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research indicated that in 2020 the number of nefarious emails increased dramatically, reaching about 1.5 million malicious emails per day during one particularly intense three month period.
Many of the facts surrounding the Target breach still remain unclear, even as details continue to emerge publicly. We still don’t know what the final tally of breached organizations will be, but the list keeps growing. In addition to who else has been breached and the impact on their customers, another factor we need to consider is how Target's business partners may be impacted. In a data breach on any retailer, card issuers, payment processors, insurers, suppliers and other parties may face substantial loss as the investigation and recovery costs ripple through these networks.