The latest News and Information on CyberSecurity for Applications, Services and Infrastructure, and related technologies.
For today’s software organizations security has never been more top of mind. On one side there is the present and growing threat of being hacked by malicious actors, set out in Crowdstrike’s recent Global threat report. And, on the other, there is a wave of cybersecurity regulation from the government to mitigate such cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
This week I’ve been reading through the recent judgment from the Swedish FSA on the Swedbank outage. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, Swedbank had a major outage in April 2022 that was caused by an unapproved change to their IT systems. It temporarily left nearly a million customers with incorrect balances, many of whom were unable to meet payments.
Observability of an SAP environment is critical. Whether you have a large complex and hybrid environment or a small set of simply architected systems, the importance of these systems is probably crucial to your business. Just thinking about system outages keeps us up at night, let alone the pressure of system performance, cross system communication and proper backend processing.
Generative AI projects like ChatGPT have motivated enterprises to rethink their AI strategy and make it a priority. In a report published by PwC, 72% of respondents said they were confident in the ROI of artificial intelligence. More than half of respondents also state that their AI projects are compliant with applicable regulations (57%) and protect systems from cyber attacks, threats or manipulations (55%). Production-grade AI initiatives are not an easy task.
Patrick DeVivo is a software engineer and founder of MergeStat, an open source project that makes it possible to query the contents, history, and metadata of source code with SQL. The security posture of software supply chains has been a significant topic lately. Recent high-profile breaches have shown the importance of managing risks from third party code. Take, for example, the Log4Shell vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2021-44228 — Grafana Labs was not affected).
Static application security testing (SAST) involves analyzing source code to identify and address potential security vulnerabilities. Using SAST early in development identifies threats before they can affect a live environment. SAST is particularly important for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. These pipelines automate the integration of new code changes into the main codebase and deploy applications to production environments.
Navigating compliance requirements can be complex because there are so many of them, and there is a good chance that at least one set of standards applies to you. Standards can be for specific sectors, like The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for healthcare, or may apply more generally to organizations across industries, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
