Careful monitoring and attention to endpoints are just two elements of a strong cybersecurity strategy for K-12 districts. Cybersecurity must be a top priority for K-12 schools. Schools need to prioritize thwarting industrious hackers who are intent on getting to the treasure trove of information and personally identifiable information (PII) schools manage.

There are three basic types of activity in information security – those that should be performed periodically to reduce possible risks to minimum. Periodic updates is one of them: as software pieces are being developed and enhanced, it is required to update them for many reasons, one of them being possible vulnerabilities.

This blog will brief on how to encrypt a text file using Azure Logic App out of the box. In this blog, we will use keys from the Azure Key Vault to encrypt the file. Consider a scenario in which I receive an e-mail with high importance along with the attachments. When it happens, I wish to back up those attachments carrying sensitive information in Azure Storage blobs in an encrypted format. As mentioned above I will use keys from Azure Key Vault to encrypt the files.

While keeping data safe from modern cyberthreats is difficult enough, you also have to keep in mind compliance with common regulations, i.e., ensuring your company’s compliance to SOX, which deals with transparency in disclosures from public companies. Nowadays, it’s not enough for businesses to rely on dismissive financial documents that satisfy the intermittent audit; you need to level up your game, and create detailed day-to-day records of activities.

When we discuss Splunk Phantom with customers here at Splunk, we end up talking about phishing pretty frequently. As discussed in a recent blog post, "Phishing Emails — Don’t Get Reeled In!," phishing is a super common issue that almost everyone deals with ad nauseum. It’s also a nuisance to investigate. The good news is that automation excels at dealing with repetitive, mind-numbing workflows like phishing investigations.

A friend that can’t keep a secret isn’t one you’ll rely on. The same is true for your mission critical CI/CD tool that you have to entrust with credentials for each integrated component. Keeping your secrets safe can be a challenge for CI/CD tools, since they need to connect to such a variety of other services. Each one needs its own password or token that must be kept hidden from prying eyes.

A new kind of spam is being observed in the field that uses the browser notification feature to trick users into subscribing to sites that will in turn bombard users with notifications usually related to click or add profit schemes. Subscription notification request seen below: Browser notification subscription requests are a legitimate feature that allows visitors of a site to be notified when there is new content available. It saves users the need to constantly refresh or keep open browser tabs.

In Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the OpenSSL 1.1.1f library has been modified to use Security Level 2 by default (previous versions of Ubuntu use Security Level 1). Security Level 2 guarantees that protocols, key exchange mechanisms, cipher suites, signature algorithms, certificates and key sizes provide a minimum of 112 bits of message secrecy. In practice, it means that RSA keys are required to be at least 2048 bits long and ECC keys at least 224 bits using the SHA256 certificate signature algorithm.

When it comes to cybersecurity, the landscape is constantly changing: the number of cyberattacks is always on the rise, the attacks themselves are becoming more sophisticated, and there’s a serious skills shortage in the industry. There’s a lot to learn about cybersecurity if you want to keep up and keep your users protected.

Everyone at Splunk is very proud of the amazing things that our customers and partners do with their data. It is always extra special when one of those organisations is really doing good and looking after us all in our daily lives. I’m delighted to share one of those stories from the Derbyshire Fire & Rescue Service (DFRS) who is using Splunk as its data-driven SIEM.