2021 in Review, Part 3: 5 Things Security Professionals Were Discussing this Year

Today, everyone is talking about CVE-2021-44228, and with good reason. But before that, here were five of the issues that dominated virtual “water cooler talk” in 2021:

5. Data security in the cloud

Champion heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” For many security practitioners, their digital transformation plan went out the window when the pandemic punched them in the face. The orderly migration of workloads to a private, public, or hybrid cloud was accelerated but data security in many instances didn’t come along for the ride.

When organizations move workloads quickly, they often lose track of where their sensitive data resides. They should create a foundation layer of visibility into the data because doing so addresses most compliance requirements and enables security risk mitigation. To establish some level of baseline behavior, you must know the “6 Ws” of your data. Who’s accessing it, what they’re doing with it, why they need it, where they’re accessing it from, when they’re accessing it, and which servers they’re using.

This is an ambitious plan, but more straightforward than you might think. Learn more.

4. Reprioritizing security requirements

Accelerating cloud migration in the middle of a pandemic compelled many cybersecurity professionals to think critically about recalibrating and reprioritizing their organizations’ security requirements. Here are three imperatives:

• Shift to a zero-trust model where the data resides and around the identity of users. In this model, the telemetry of tracing where users go, where they’re coming from, and how they’re interfacing and interacting with data becomes the new target for how to secure the assets in your environment.
• Get in front of security requirements for cloud-based assets. Most organizations don’t have a long-standing, solid security posture to go with cloud environments. The “[blank] as a service” approach is introducing ever more risk into the software supply chain and third-party services. Security people need to help business leaders understand the risks of these environments and help manage them.
• Manage threat fatigue as you struggle to stay on top of the cyber threat landscape changes. Learn to identify where the risk is and filter out events with which there is no risk associated. Ultimately, you should have a dashboard that tells you “this is an event that matters, here is all the other information you need that goes along with this event.”

3. Imperva’s acquisition of CloudVector

Our customers depend on Imperva to be on top of the next big thing. The future of applications and the ways they are compromised start with APIs. They empower businesses to develop applications in new microservice architectures, automate business-to-business processes and provide a back-end for mobile applications. This reality has not been lost on cybercriminals, who have taken notice of the shift towards an API economy and are discovering new attack vectors targeting them. Imperva is set to meet the critical need for organizations to adopt new security measures that can better protect their APIs.

2. Imperva’s recognition as a ‘Leader’ in The Forrester Wave: DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Q1 2021 Report

In the report, which evaluates DDoS mitigation solution providers to identify and analyze the most significant among them, Forrester describes Imperva as “an application security specialist vendor that fields a distributed global network to manage DDoS attacks combined with its own custom appliances (Behemoths) in its data centers to handle the heavy lifting of fighting DDoS attacks”. The report ranks Imperva in the top two in the Current Offering category and we achieved the highest score available in thirteen of the criteria in the Forrester Wave DDoS Mitigation Solutions Scorecard. You can see the report here.

1. FireEye and SolarWinds breaches

While these events occurred in 2020, their repercussions were felt and talked about well into 2021. FireEye’s breach included a leak of its red team tools arsenal, and while all of Imperva’s Web Application Firewall customers were protected from malicious usage of these tools, we saw a rise in attacks based on these tools and vulnerabilities – and we detected and blocked them all.

The late 2020 SolarWinds supply chain attack and the subsequent breach had a huge impact. For Imperva customers, we added security controls against two attack vectors – SUPERNOVA .NET webshell access and SolarWinds Orion API authentication bypass. For several months, we saw massive scanning attempts across Imperva’s customer base, with hackers trying to find systems with vulnerable SolarWinds to exploit.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog authored by Bruce Lynch. Read the original post at: https://www.imperva.com/blog/2021-in-review-part-3-5-things-security-professionals-were-discussing-this-year/