It’s never been more critical to protect your data infrastructure against malicious actors, with organizations dealing with an ever-expanding number of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Monitoring solutions represent part of your infrastructure’s attack surface area – they enjoy highly privileged access to the systems they help manage, and store sensitive information about the workloads running on them.

The GroundWork team has reviewed industry analysis of the recent Kaseya VSA incident, and while details are still being revealed, there are some useful take-aways we want to share. In particular, certain aspects of preparedness and indicators of active compromise can be monitored. We also want to talk a little bit about where GroundWork Monitor fits into security monitoring as a whole.

My colleague Lewis Pope, our head security herd, wrote an excellent blog last week about hardening N-able™ RMM. I thought it prudent, in light of recent developments, to do the same for the N-able N-central® product. A lot of it is common knowledge, but I wanted to put together a checklist so you can review the security of your N-central platform and ensure you’re meeting some of these best practices.

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are major inhibitors for organizations moving to the cloud—and for good reason. Cloud environments are complex, and even a single misconfigured security group can result in a serious data breach. In fact, misconfigurations were the leading cause of cloud security breaches in 2020. This puts a lot of pressure on developer and operations teams to properly secure their services and maintain regulatory compliance.

When considering the fact that 2020 was a record breaker in the number of cyberattacks that occurred and the resulting cost to organizations that was incurred, it is clear that the state of cybersecurity readiness is not very encouraging, to say the least.

Since last week, I’ve been speaking with Splunk customers and our own team about the cyberattacks impacting the Kaseya software platform. While Splunk was not impacted by the ransomware attack, as a security leader we want to help the industry by providing tools, guidance and support. It’s critical that we work together as a community to counter cybersecurity threats and share information about events like these.

For many businesses today, security automation is something of a paradox. It’s no secret that automation is important, and a large number of businesses have invested in security automation solutions. Yet the never-ending stream of headlines about major cybersecurity attacks suggests that, for most of these companies, security automation doesn’t end up delivering the intended results.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week let’s go back to security basics with password hygiene—the simplest, and yet often overlooked step in account security. Passwords have been the bane of many internet users since the inception of the world wide web.

Summer safety is usually all about life jackets, pool floaties, outfitting your boat with a carbon monoxide detector and slathering on plenty of SPF. I have one more thing to add to your list this summer: Security to protect your people, your brand and your data. In 2020, the business world struggled with the abrupt shift to remote work. Corners were cut. Compromises were made. Business leaders, IT staff and employees alike did the best they could with what they had.