It’s now day 3 since UK PM Boris Johnson instructed the nation to stay at home and begin self-isolating and remote working to limit the spread of Covid-19. We’re all starting to realise life may not be going back to ‘normal’ anytime soon. Aside from our nation’s unsung heroes (the NHS, Supermarket Staff, Teachers, Postal Workers, Waste Collectors, the list goes on – thank you!), many are now turning to remote working.

We are thrilled to let you know that Uptrends is now certified ISO 27001 compliant. The ISO (International Organization Standardization) sets security requirements that a company must meet before an accredited auditor can grant the certification. If you’re familiar with the certification process, you know that it takes a considerable amount of time and work; however, the benefits that it brings for our company and our clients are worth the effort. Let’s take a look.

Uh oh, the site’s certificate has expired. How do we generate a new one? Where’s the private key? Which servers need the new cert? What even goes in the cert? If this sounds all too familiar, rest assured you’re not alone. Outages due to expired certs are far too common and it happens to sites of all sizes (one recent example includes Microsoft Teams going down for several hours due to an expired cert). Disruptions like this are entirely preventable with proper monitoring in place.

Security information and event management, or SIEM, has become part of the vocabulary of every organization. SIEM solutions gather events from multiple systems and analyze them—both in real time and through historical data. SIEM costs—as cyber security costs in general—can be high, but there is a tradeoff if you opt for the FOSS route (free and open source solutions).

Container use continues to grow, and Kubernetes is the most widely adopted container orchestration system, managing nearly half of all container deployments.1 Successful integration of container services within the enterprise depends heavily on access to external resources such as databases, cloud services, third-party application programming interfaces (APIs), and other applications. All this egress activity must be controlled for security and compliance reasons.

Last month, we hosted a webinar, Hunting for persistence using Elastic Security, where we examined some techniques that attackers use in the wild to maintain presence in their victim’s environment. In this two-part blog series, we’ll share the details of what was covered during our webinar with the goal of helping security practitioners improve their visibility of these offensive persistence techniques and help to undermine the efficacy of these attacks against their organization.

The global corporate landscape is on the brink of a complete premises lockdown in light of the COVID-19 crisis. Service disruption is inevitable, and enterprises’ business continuity plans are being put to the test. Despite this challenge, it’s heartening to see companies across nations take quick steps to ensure the health and safety of their employees during these trying times.

Like many of my peers, my role as a Chief Security Officer (CSO) has dramatically changed as we work to understand and adapt to COVID-19. It’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, my mind was focused on things such as FedRamp and the California Privacy Act (CCPA), now the majority of my time is focused on ensuring our employees safety and productivity, so they can continue to deliver products and support our customers and partners.

Employee monitoring has become a standard practice across different industry verticals to examine productivity and ensure that company resources are being used in the right manner. In addition to keeping a track of the manner in which employees are working, it also allows preventing theft and serves as evidence in litigation. Employee monitoring applications offer a means of tracking the activities of employees and remove any guesswork about what employees are doing throughout the day.

In 2019 multiple cities, hospitals and educational institutions in the U.S. were crippled by ransomware, including Baltimore, Atlanta, New York City, Regis University in Denver and Monroe University in New York. In the the last 12 months, the infosec community has seen these ransomware operators seriously upping their game (see Ryuk ransomware).