Another Crazy Week in Cybersecurity

Ever since the SolarWinds hack in December, the pace of cybersecurity attacks seems to have picked up, but lately the revelations have been coming at least daily.

This week alone we’ve seen:

• More news on Russian hacks, this time a brute force campaign using Kubernetes clusters
• A LinkedIn data scraping attack that likely will be used to target phishing campaigns
• News that virtual machines (VMs) are increasingly becoming an attack vector
• A Windows print spooler vulnerability flagged by CISA

And that’s not even a complete list of all the cybersecurity vulnerabilities revealed this week.

On the plus side, at least CISA released a tool helping companies assess their ransomware defenses and global law enforcement authorities banded together to take down the DoubleVPN service favored by cyber criminals.

As I noted after the Colonial Pipeline attack in May, there are steps enterprises and users can take that offer protection against a range of threats, including proper endpoint security, encryption, firewalls, multi-factor authentication, patching, and backup. And train your employees not to do dumb things. We also favor a zero trust framework on top of it all: the more cybercriminals’ movements can be restricted, the less damage they can do.

It may be hard to make the case for adequate cybersecurity protections in the boardroom, but maybe that’s another bright spot here: The problem is becoming so obvious that it’s increasingly difficult to sit by and do nothing.

Paul Shread has been a technology writer and editor for more than 20 years. His security and data center writing have won awards, and he wrote a small business technology column for Time.com. He is presently editor of eSecurityPlanet.com.