There needs to be a transformation in identity access management (IAM) as a result of digital acceleration during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Tricia Phillips, sr director analyst, Gartner, speaking during the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit – EMEA. Phillips firstly highlighted how lockdown restrictions had disrupted our everyday lives, including the way we work, parent, bank and socialize. This distributed world has had a major impact on cybersecurity, where “control and access has…

Cybersecurity spending across the US and Europe has surged over the past year, but so too have security breaches, from 38% to 43% of businesses surveyed by Hiscox. The insurer’s annual Hiscox Cyber Readiness report has become a useful gauge of how mature and effective organizations’ cybersecurity strategies are. This year the firm engaged Forrester Consulting to poll over 6000 such companies across the US, UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Ireland. It…

The average payment to ransomware groups has surged by 43% over the past quarter, driven by the threat actors behind the Accellion attacks, according to Coveware. The security vendor’s quarterly report for Q1 2021 revealed that the average ransom was $220,298 during the period, with data exfiltration now a major extortion tactic present in the vast majority (77%) of attacks, up 10% from the previous quarter. Yet while most ransomware groups simply steal data for…

Financial institutions in the US and UK cut security budgets by a quarter last year and saw cybercrime and fraud activity rise by about the same amount during the pandemic, according to new research from BAE Systems Applied Intelligence. The British cybersecurity and risk management firm engaged Atomik Research to poll nearly 1000 banks and insurers and 2000 consumers in the US and UK back in March, in order to better understand the impact of…

There’s a common misconception that cloud providers handle security, a relic leftover from hosting providers of previous decades. The truth is, cloud providers use a shared responsibility model, leaving a lot of security up to the customer. Stories of AWS compromise are widespread, with attackers often costing organizations many thousands of dollars in damages. Luckily, The Center for Internet Security has created the CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations benchmark policy, which provides guidance on best practice security configuration…

Welcome to our first quarterly review of cyber attacks and data breaches. For several years, we’ve produced a monthly list of security incidents, comprised of publicly disclosed breaches from mainstream publications. At the start of 2021, we decided to expand our research to learn more about the organisations that are being breached and how they were falling victim. We’ll present our findings at the end of each quarter, providing key statistics and observations. This includes…