Technically Speaking

On September 30, Congress and the White House passed a Continuing Resolution (CR), which funds the government through December 16, 2022. At this point, anyone keenly watching the budget process every year can tell you the likelihood of a CR being passed as opposed to a new budget by Oct 1st is all but guaranteed. CRs function as a temporary stopgap designed to avoid a government shutdown. However, it also locks funding to the previous fiscal year’s level and prevents new projects from beginning.

Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0 is here. If your company is not prepared, the time to get ready is now, or your company may risk losing business with the Department of Defense (DoD). The CMMC program requires cyber protection standards for companies in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and aims to protect sensitive unclassified information that the DoD shares with contractors and subcontractors.

Every year, there are more and more security breaches, and it gets harder and harder to spot them. According to a leading cybersecurity vendor1, it takes almost seven months for organizations to find breaches, which gives malicious attackers plenty of time to get what they want. Most often, system misconfigurations like default settings or credentials leave the door wide open for exploitation, resulting in these breaches. As organizations grow, this problem only gets worse because quick changes frequently result in skipped steps.

Security is paramount in the digital age, especially when it comes to keeping networks secure. Having network security monitoring services stand between your organization and malicious attackers is crucial. Still, the volume of alerts and issues that come with them can easily overwhelm your team. The volume of these alerts is rising every year too. According to a report by TrendMicro, 54% of teams surveyed felt like they were drowning in alerts, and 27% said they spent most of their time dealing with false positives.

The U.S. electric grid is critical infrastructure consisting of an ecosystem of communities, stakeholders, governments and economies. Most of the grid infrastructure was built decades ago and is unreliable. Bad actors know it. In 2015, Russian hackers carried out the first successful cyberattack on the nation's electricity grid, which was just one of an ongoing series of security breaches and attacks on US infrastructure and utilities.

Implementing zero trust may seem daunting, but it is also an opportunity to integrate more secure coding practices into your software applications from the start. Zero-trust security assumes that all traffic on your internal network is potentially malicious. Consequently, it requires taking measures to: