In response to the coronavirus ("COVID-19") pandemic, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) made an unprecedented call for agencies to maximize telework flexibilities, resulting in 78 percent of the federal workforce working remotely. This abrupt and wide-scale shift to a remote work environment required agency security teams to adjust with little to no planning, placed a tremendous strain on...

In information security, it’s often said, “It’s not a matter of if, but when” an organization will be hit by a breach—it's an accepted fact that preventative controls will eventually fail to keep attackers out. And now, with high-impact vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Shellshock being discovered with some regularity, the likelihood of a serious breach is greater than ever. In this paper, we highlight how the tactics and strategies to respond to high-impact vulnerabilities differ from those used in other security events, outline the steps you can take to prepare for these vulnerabilities before they hit, and provide insight into incident response strategies.

The retail industry always has to make special preparations for the holiday season. That was especially the case this year. With Covid-19 disrupting shopping behaviors and creating a surge in online shopping, security teams at these retail organizations have had to make adjustments as well. Tripwire partnered with Dimensional Research to understand how retail organizations are adapting their...

As an organization’s infrastructure becomes more and more connected and complicated, it becomes more important than ever to have a safe and protected way for employees to access systems remotely. This is not just a challenge for IT environments, but OT environments as well. Nearly half of the Fortune 2000 organizations consider OT networks to be critical components of their business1. It’s...

The premise of a January 27, 2015, article by CNBC is that there is good evidence that a cyber attack against nearly any country’s critical infrastructure could be imminent. This kind of reporting has become so commonplace, but this doesn’t seem like just more FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) journalism. ...

Every organization wants to be secure in the long term, but compliance might order them to focus on implementing certain safeguards within a short period. Given this situation, some organizations might elect to focus on compliance now and look at security later. This might involve designating budget for compliance before allocating additional funds for security at some point in the future. This...

The CIS Controls are a set of recommendations comprised of controls and benchmarks. They are intended to serve as a cybersecurity “best practice” for preventing damaging attacks. The recommendations are meant to provide a holistic approach to cybersecurity and to be effective across all industries. Adhering to them serves as an effective foundation for any organization’s security and compliance...

The task of building and running an effective cybersecurity program is a major challenge for any complex organization, but those in charge of industrial control systems (ICS) have even more to figure out than their strictly-IT counterparts. How can industrial organizations overcome the cybersecurity skills gap? What about the increasingly-difficult endeavor of bringing the IT and OT sides of the...

Digital attacks are a growing concern for industrial control system (ICS) security professionals. In a 2019 survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 88 percent of respondents told Tripwire that they were concerned about the threat of a digital attack. An even greater percentage (93 percent) attributed their concerns to the possibility of an attack producing a shutdown or downtime. Other survey...

The rapid convergence of IT and OT systems can leave even the most cybersecurity-mature organizations exposed. Industrial security teams are under-reacting to new cyberthreats, and legacy operational technology simply wasn’t built to handle the risks incurred by connecting to IT systems. The main issue is visibility: You can’t secure what you can’t see. Safety, productivity, and uptime are...