The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) organization has made a series of updates to its standards with its latest version 4.0. It contains several important improvements, perhaps the most important change is the expansion of encryption and MFA requirements to protect all accounts that have access to cardholder data. I describe these developments in my post for Avast’s blog here.

Malware group FIN7 is once again on the move, leveraging software supply chains, remote program execution methods, and stolen credentials to deliver ransomware to enterprise networks. The group goes by several different names and is adept at using various backdoor tools to worm their way into corporate networks. You can see the various malware programs that have been attributed to FIN7 over the past two years in the diagram below from Mandiant.

You can read more about their exploits in my latest blog for Avast here.

Security researchers have uncovered a new series of threats that are targeting uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units. These threats can result in malware attacking the computers connected to the same networks through a variety of clever mechanisms.

The three threats affect most of the Smart UPS line of APC backup power supplies that are widely used by larger enterprise customers. I write about this for Avast’s blog here.

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.

Since I first wrote this piece back in 2019, the SOC-as-a-service (SOCaaS) industry has matured to the point now where the term is falling into disfavor as managed services vendors have become more integral to the practice. As cloud-based security tools have gotten better, data centers and applications have migrated there as well. Some of the services I discuss in this updated article fo CSOonline call themselves SOCaaS, while others use other managed services designations. I cover what they offer and how to pick the right supplier for your particular needs.

And to help you evaluate your own SOCaaS providers, I wrote this 2019 article that outlines what you should have in your RFPs.

A marketing firm asked 1,250 small business owners (with fewer than 500 employees) about their cybersecurity practice, and the results are pretty staggering. They largely show that most aren’t doing much to prepare for potential attacks, and for those that have done some work, it often falls far short.

Nearly half of the business owners surveyed don’t have any defensive measures in place, and a third have no protection whatsoever against cyberattacks. And less than a third have implemented regular data backups or made use of secured networks, two of the reasons why ransomware continues to be effective. You can read my analysis in Avast’s blog here.