Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On Dec 8, 2020, the cybersecurity company FireEye reported that there had been a cyber attack on their systems. As part of this attack, their inventory of Red Team tools was stolen. These tools could potentially be used by a threat actor against unsuspecting victims. On Dec 13, 2020, after further investigation of this attack, FireEye reported that the initial vector came through SolarWinds, an upstream vendor, as a malicious trojanized update of SolarWinds’ Orion IT platform.

Moving to the cloud means a lot more than just moving your servers and applications to the cloud; it’s also about the data – and data always has a target on it. A lot of IT departments are finding that it’s easier to meet the “five nines” (99.999%) of uptime and availability by going outside their organization and letting AWS, Microsoft, or Google handle the infrastructure and personnel needed to meet those requirements.

In the recently released 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Secure Web Gateways (SWG) report, Netskope was recognized as a visionary, entering a decades-old legacy security solution area first defined by proxy cache appliances. Times have changed since human rating labs, regional web filtering lists, the use of ICAP for threat and data protection of files, web object caching, bandwidth management, and scripting policies to filter out undesired web objects.

The maturation of software development has been driven by the increasing segmentation of functions into their own portable environments. Infrastructure is splintered into dozens of computing resources, physical servers, containers, databases, Kubernetes pods, dashboards, etc. Such compartmentalization has made it incredibly simple for developers to enter their desired environments with minimal disruption to other working parts.

We at Netskope Threat Labs have published a series of blogs detailing the misconfigurations in cloud apps causing data exposure. Misconfiguration and sensitive data exposure have been listed as predominant top 10 OWASP security risks for years, and are now also the predominant cause of cloud data breaches.