The average time taken to fix high severity application security flaws has increased by ten days in just a month, according to the latest data from NTT Application Security. The security vendor’s AppSec Stats Flash report for August offers a broad view of the current state of application security across various verticals. Most important is the data that details how quickly or otherwise organizations are at closing the window of exposure (WoE) between a patch…

More than a third (35%) of connected device owners in the UK do not take additional security measures to protect their smart home devices and rely solely on inbuilt security features. This is according to findings from the 2021 Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report: Special Release – Home & Safety, which examined consumers’ at-home online behaviors. The UK portion of the study revealed a worrying lack of security hygiene for smart devices among British consumers. Only…

A configuration issue with a popular Microsoft development platform has exposed tens of millions of sensitive customer records, including those containing COVID-19 information, according to researchers. Microsoft Power Apps enables “citizen developers” to create mobile and web-based apps for their businesses. However, a team from UpGuard found that the portal for the platform was configured to allow public access in many cases, exposing at least 38 million records. The issue stems from the Open Data…

Introduction In 2020 Microsoft reported over 258 million monthly commercial users of its Office 365 productivity suite. For decades Microsoft has been powering business with software like Outlook, Word, and Excel. As technology and connectivity have improved, so has functionality and user requirements. Now, over 75 million people use Microsoft Teams every month for virtual meeting experiences. Consumers of Microsoft technology have moved away from self-managed instances of services like Microsoft Exchange for email communication,…

Information security is an exciting and rapidly growing field for individuals who are interested in protecting users and their data. In an effort to map out the industry as a possible career choice, we recently conducted research into the top 10 infosec jobs based on overall pay grade. We now continue with the second part of our two-part series. A Security Engineer is a mid-level employee who builds and maintains an organization’s IT security solutions. In this capacity, Security Engineers…

By Olivia Gallucci, Cybersecurity Reporter, Cyber Defense Magazine I interviewed approximately sixty industry leaders from over forty companies who attended Black Hat. Although this article series—The Optis—can be read as a traditional Black Hat recap, I specifically highlight twenty-one companies that stand out and whose growth I recommend watching. Rochester Institute of Technology’s Cybersecurity Club, RITSEC, inspired the metrics I used to analyze and rank companies. Specifically, I adopted RITSEC’s motto, “Security Through Community,” while…