As I sat down to write this post, I couldn’t help amusing myself with yet another corny “cloud” analogy: The potential for lateral movement between different parts of the extended corporate ecosystem is a bit like all the different types of lightening there are. If, besides being a tech geek, you are also a weather geek, you can read about lighting here. Among other things, this site explains that “Anvil Crawlers are horizontal tree-like, in-cloud lightning discharges whose leader propagation is slow enough… that a human observer… can see its rapid motion across the sky.” Where cloud security is concerned, Illusive’s aim is to make malicious lateral movement to, from, and between clouds slow and visible to the human eye—so that security teams can stop cyberattacks before a successful strike.

It's no secret that SOCs are overwhelmed. Many organizations are under constant attack, but SOC teams are so barraged by alerts that they can’t discern real from noise. If you missed our webinar with Forrester, Improving SOC Efficiency with Deception, watch it here. Learn how a deception technology approach can end the nonstop "hamster wheel" reaction cycle—and significantly boost both incident response (IR) capabilities and the overall productivity of security operations teams.

On February 13th, we broke out the hats and balloons (read: hummus and beer) to celebrate Illusive’s 100th software sprint. For 100 releases now, we’ve been helping our customers—hundreds of organizations across industries—revolutionize their ability to stop advanced cyberattackers.

HIPAA Compliance—Cyberattackers Aren’t Fazed

In spite of longstanding HIPAA compliance requirements, and the billions of dollars being invested to ensure HIPAA compliance, it seems that cyberthreats and attackers aren't fazed. Healthcare suffered from some of the largest breaches ever reported in 2015. The breach at Anthem compromised 78.8 million records, and two additional breaches exposed more than 10 million records each¹. The following year, 2016, saw the highest number of breaches with 327 reported. The number of breaches in 2017 surpassed 2016, with more than 342 reported. While the number of breaches grew, the number of compromised records dropped from 112 million in 2016 to a little more than 14 million in 2017.

My phone’s been ringing this morning from people wanting to talk about the massive Marriott breach — the revelation that private data associated with up to 500 million people may have been compromised. I’m sure there’s a lot more to learn from the details, but in the meantime, I’ll take a quick minute to jot down some initial thoughts:

In 2004, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) became a fact of life for organizations that accept payment via credit or debit cards. In that year, the leading card issuers rolled out the first iteration of its security standard, designed to improve protection of payment systems as credit card data became a prime target for cyberattackers. Today, even as organizations have entire teams dedicated to PCI compliance, one consumer business after another—including Macy’s, Adidas, Panera Bread and Chili’s—have been breached, resulting in exposure of cardholder data.