Posted by Tom on February 3, 2018 – 4:58 pm
As many of you may know, I’ve been co-hosting the Shared Security Podcast (formally known as the Social Media Security Podcast) with my fabulous co-host Scott Wright from Security Perspectives Inc. We’ve been recording this podcast every month (mostly) since 2009 and over the years we’ve had feedback from many of our listeners that they’ve always wanted us to offer a weekly podcast. So this year we’ve decided to step up our podcasting game and release a weekly episode with a brand new format.
This new weekly podcast is called the Shared Security Weekly Blaze. In this podcast we’ll be covering the top 3 privacy and security news topics from the previous week. This new format is designed to give you fast and consumable security and privacy “news that you can use”. In addition, we’ve added transcripts to the weekly podcast, available with each episode blog post, as this was also another listener request we’ve had in the past. The weekly podcasts are in addition to our traditional monthly podcast which will continue to cover security and privacy topics in more detail. We’ll also be booking more frequent interviews and guests for the monthly podcasts in 2018.
You can listen to the first episode of the Weekly Blaze right now from our regular podcast feed or directly from our website. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast yet, you can do so through your favorite podcast listening application: iTunes, Android, Google Play, Stitcher or on your Amazon Echo device via TuneIn. You can also listen directly from our website where we post all past episodes of the podcast.
Lastly, you can now follow our podcast on Instagram where we’ll be posting additional content including videos, stories and more to supplement the podcast. A huge thanks to all of you for listening and supporting the podcast over the years. 2018 looks to be our best year yet!
Posted by Tom on December 20, 2017 – 2:00 pm
Posted by Tom on July 30, 2014 – 5:24 pm
Each year my team conducts hundreds of Penetration Tests in a wide variety of industries, ranging from Healthcare to Retail, Finance to Manufacturing, and many more. The team analyzed data collected from each of our penetration tests at SecureState since 2011 and found common themes in the methods of compromise utilized to break into organizations and compromise sensitive information. As a result, SecureState has issued a new report that expands on the attack vectors identified and suggests ways organizations can defend themselves against such attack vectors. SecureState’s 2014 Attack Vectors Report revealed the following Top 5 methods of compromise:
- Weak Passwords
- Web Management Consoles
- Missing Patches and System Misconfigurations
- Application Vulnerabilities
- Social Engineering
The full report is available for download on the SecureState website. I also presented a webinar (watch the replay here) with Defense team lead Robert Miller, expanding on the report’s findings and offering additional advice to organizations on how to defend against these attack vectors. I highly recommend you download this report to see where your organization stands in regards to these attack vectors.
What’s the bottom line?
The current mindset of many organizations is to only react after an attack or breach has already occurred. However, based on our findings and what the current onslaught of recent breaches have shown us, it’s clear that organizations face the same attacks month after month. Rather than be reactive, the defensive mindset needs to change to a proactive one. Consider focusing time, money and resources on your defensive controls before a penetration test occurs.
A penetration test should be your final step to ensure your defense can withstand an attack and to adjust your defenses if necessary. We’ve seen it time and time again where organizations only conduct an annual penetration test and expect that remediating tactical issues from the penetration test will improve their security posture. This needs to stop! Build and test your defensive controls first, then test to see how these controls hold up. Most of these controls are a mix of tactical and strategic, but reactively focused. By taking a proactive stance on defense, your organization will become much more secure and the time, money and resources spent will provide much more value to the business.
Defend it before you hack it.
Cross-posted from the SecureState Blog