Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is probably this year’s second-most anticipated report after the one from Robert Mueller. In its 12th edition, it contains details on more than 2,000 confirmed data breaches in 2018, taken from more than 70 different reporting sources and analyzing more than 40,000 separate security incidents.

What sets the DBIR apart is that it combines breach data from multiple sources using the common industry collection called VERIS – a third-party repository where threat data is uploaded and made anonymous. This gives it a solid authoritative voice, and one reason why it’s frequently quoted.

I describe six megatrends from the report, including:

1. The C-suite has become the weakest link in enterprise security.
2. The rise of the nation state actors.
3. Careless cloud users continue to thwart even the best laid security plans.
4. Whether insider or outsider threats are more important.
5. The rate of ransomware attacks isn’t clear. 
6. Hackers are still living inside our networks for a lot longer than we’d like.

I’ve broken these trends into two distinct groups — the first three are where there is general agreement between the DBIR and other sources, and last ones . are where this agreement isn’t as apparent. Read the report to determine what applies to your specific situation. In the meantime, here is my analysis for HPE’s Enterprise.nxt blog.

As your workforce spreads across the planet, you must now support a completely new collection of networks, apps and endpoints. We all know this increased attack surface is more difficult to manage. Part of the challenge is having to create new standards and policies to protect your enterprise and reduce risk as you make the transformation to become a more distributed company. In this blog post for RSA, I examine some of the things to look out for. My thesis is that you’ll want to match the risks with the approaches, so that you focus on the optimal security improvements to make the transition to a distributed staffing model.

Not every organization that needs a security operations center can afford to equip and staff one. If you don’t currently have your own SOC, you are probably thinking of ways you can obtain one without building it from scratch. The on-premises version can be pricey, more so once you factor in the staffing costs to man it 24/7. In the past few years, managed security service providers (MSSPs) have come up with cloud-based SOCs that they use to monitor your networks and computing infrastructure and provide a wide range of services such as patching and malware remediation. For my latest article fo CSOonline, I look at how this SOC-as-a-service (SOCaaS) industry has grown up, what they offer and how to pick the right supplier for your particular needs.

Above you can see some of the vendors that I looked at for this story.

And to help you evaluate your own SOCaaS providers, I wrote a follow-up article that outlines what you should have in your RFPs.

The threat of fileless malware and its potential to harm enterprises is growing. Fileless malware leverages what threat actors call “living off the land,” meaning the malware uses code that already exists on the average Windows computer. When you think about the modern Windows setup, this is a lot of code: PowerShell, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Visual Basic (VB), Windows Registry keys that have actionable data, the .NET framework, etc. Malware doesn’t have to drop a file to use these programs for bad intentions.

Given this growing threat, I provide several tips on what can security teams can do to help defend their organizations against these attacks in my latest post for IBM’s Security Intelligence blog.

Gartner has named container security one of its top ten concerns for this year, so it might be time to take a closer look at this issue and figure out a solid security implementation plan. While containers have been around for a decade, they are becoming increasingly popular because of their lightweight and reusable code, flexible features and lower development cost. In this post for CSOonline, I’ll look at the kinds of tools needed to secure the devops/build environment, tools for the containers themselves, and tools for monitoring/auditing/compliance purposes. Naturally, no single tool will do everything.

Earlier this month, president of RSA, Rohit Ghai, opened the RSA Conference in San Francisco with some stirring words about understanding the trust landscape. The talk is both encouraging and depressing, for what it offers and for how far we have yet to go to realize this vision completely.

Back in the day, we had the now-naïve notion that defending a perimeter was sufficient. If you were “inside” (however defined), you were automatically trusted. Or once you authenticated yourself, you were then trusted. It was a binary decision: in or out. Today, there is nothing completely inside and trusted anymore.

I go into more detail in my blog post, Understanding the trust landscape here. I had an opportunity to  spend some time with Rohit at a presentation we both did in London earlier this year and enjoyed exchanging many ideas with him.

The news in January about Michael Cohen’s indictments covers some interesting ground for IT managers and gives security teams something else to worry about: He allegedly paid a big data firm Redfinch Solutions to rig two online polls in then-candidate Donald Trump’s favor. To those of us who have worked with online polls and surveys, this comes as no surprise.

Researchers at RiskIQ found another survey-based scam that involves a complex series of steps that use cloned YouTube identities to eventually get marks to take surveys to redeem their “free” iPhones. Instead, the respondents get malware installed on their computers or phones. Security managers need to up their game and understand both the financial and reputational risks of rigged polls and the exploits that are delivered through them. Then they can improve their protective tools to keep hackers away from their networks and users. In this story for CSOonline, I talk about some of these issues and explain why businesses should use online polls and how to keep your networks safe from bad ones. 

A solid toolset is at the core of any successful digital forensics program, an earlier article that I wrote for CSOonline. Although every toolset is different depending on an organization’s needs, some categories should be in all forensics toolkits. In this roundup for CSOonline, I describe some of the more popular tools, many of which are free to download. I have partitioned them into five categories: overall analysis suites (such as the SANS workstation shown here), disk imagers, live CDs, network analysis tools, e-discovery and specialized tools for email and mobile analysis.

If you run a WordPress blog, you need to get serious about keeping it as secure as possible. WordPress is a very attractive target for hackers for several reasons that I’ll get to in a moment. To help you, I have put together my recommendations for the best ways to secure your site, and many of them won’t cost you much beyond your time to configure them properly. My concern for WordPress security isn’t general paranoia; my own website has been attacked on numerous occasions, including a series of DDoS attacks on Christmas day. I describe how to deploy various tools such as WordFence, shown below and you can read more on CSOonline.