Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Databases are the Holy Grail for hackers, and as such, must be protected with utmost care. This is the first in a series of articles in which we’ll give an overview of best practices for securing your databases. We’re starting with one of the most popular open-source databases, PostgreSQL, and will go over several levels of security you’d need to think about.

With the onset of the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic, cybercriminals started looking for opportunities to threaten the already suffering businesses through malware, ransomware, and social engineering attacks. Amidst this public health crisis, a new remote working culture evolved as remotely connected workplaces had to adapt rapidly to a greater digital threat emerging online.

In January and February of 2021, the threat actor called Hafnium used a number of post-exploitation tools after gaining access to Exchange servers through a zero-day exploit. One of their persistence methods was creating new user accounts in the domain, giving them the ability to log back into the network using normal authentication rather than use a web shell or continue to re-exploit the vulnerability (which has since been patched).

The biggest fundamental shift in the era of digital transformation is that data is no longer on a CPU that the enterprise owns. Security teams focused on cloud must invest in the right technology to achieve more complete data protection, and we all need to ensure Zero Trust principles are applied everywhere data needs protection. At Netskope, we describe this as Zero Trust Data Protection. In its simplest form, Zero Trust means: Don’t trust the things you do not need to trust.