Detecting changes from a baseline established for files and file paths and receiving instant alerts about them is crucial to ensure security within a monitored environment. File tampering is an indicator of illicit activity, and authorized users must be alerted whenever changes in a critical file or file path occur. Hence, organizations must integrate file change monitoring into their continuous efforts towards maintaining safety and hygiene in the cyber security space, especially in environments where their IT systems contain highly sensitive data.

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There are seemingly countless regulatory and industry frameworks out there that organizations have to navigate and comply with. SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and many others that require maintaining a specified baseline of security. Compliance is a challenge in and of itself, but it is increasingly difficult to maintain compliance with accelerated DevOps lifecycles and complex, hybrid cloud environments.

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Are you a FedRamp-certified organization looking to more effectively maintain your FedRAMP status? There are tools available to help simplify the process and while the process involves some terminology, it is easily understood as outlined below. Additionally, it is supported by pre-built dashboards in the Qualys Cloud Platform that help organizations meet SLAs for required remediations.

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Black Hat USA 2019 is just weeks away, and with scores of training courses and research briefings to choose from, planning your schedule can be a challenge. To help you, we’re posting a weekly recommendation on our blog, and explaining why we think Qualys customers could find it useful and relevant. This week’s choice is the presentation Trust and Transformation — The Post Breach Journey. 

In this talk, Jamil Farshchi, Equifax’s Chief Information Security Officer, will share experiences, best practices and insights about responding to a headline-grabbing data breach. In this 25-minute session, he’ll focus on how a business can regain the trust of customers, partners, investors, regulators and other stakeholders after suffering a significant data breach.

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Enterprises are moving full steam ahead when it comes to their digital transformation efforts. They’ve aggressively adopted cloud infrastructure and other cloud services, IoT, application containers, serverless functionality, and other technologies that are helping their organization to drive forward.

Those organizations that are way down the road in their digital transformation efforts say that they’ve witnessed improved business decision-making – both when it comes to making better decisions and when it comes to making those decisions more rapidly. They also say that they’ve improved their customer relationships by delivering an improved customer digital experience.

So it’s time to celebrate and declare digital victory, right?

Hold off before we book the band and order the champagne for the big party. In fact, those who want to move forward securely and confidently in their risk and regulatory compliance postures have some challenges ahead.

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Most discussions about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have naturally focused on best practices for achieving compliance and avoiding penalties.  

With GDPR now a reality for all companies that store and process personal data of EU residents, an often overlooked aspect has been the overall business advantage of GDPR preparedness.

In this GDPR blog series’ last installment, Hariom Singh, Director of Policy Compliance at Qualys, delves into this topic.  Later, we round up major areas covered in previous posts, and summarize how Qualys can help with GDPR compliance.

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To provide the level of data protection required by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), your organization must continuously detect vulnerabilities, and prioritize their remediation.

Why? An InfoSec team that’s chronically overwhelmed by its IT environment’s vulnerabilities and unable to pinpoint the critical ones that must be remediated immediately is at a high risk for data breaches, and, consequently, for GDPR non-compliance.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) ranks “Continuous Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation” as the fourth most important practice in its 20 Critical Security Controls. “Organizations that do not scan for vulnerabilities and proactively address discovered flaws face a significant likelihood of having their computer systems compromised,” CIS states.

In fact, hackers constantly exploit common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) for which patches have been available for weeks, months and even years. The reason: Many organizations fail to detect and remediate critical bugs on a timely basis, leaving them like low-hanging fruit for cyber data thieves to feast on.

In this second installment of our GDPR compliance blog series, we’ll explain the importance of vulnerability management and threat prioritization, and how Qualys can help you solidify these practices so you can slash your risk of data breaches.

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Turned into law in 2016, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) finally goes into effect this week, slapping strict requirements on millions of businesses and subjecting violators to severe penalties. The complex regulation applies to any organization worldwide — not just in Europe — that controls and processes personal data of EU residents, whose security and privacy GDPR fiercely protects.

GDPR calls this data’s protection a “fundamental right” essential for “freedom, security and justice” and for creating the “trust” needed for the “digital economy” to flourish. Its requirements amount to what some have called zero-tolerance on mishandling EU residents’ personal data.

A PwC survey found that more than half of U.S. multinationals say GDPR is their main data-protection priority, with 77% planning to spend $1 million or more on GDPR readiness. “Data protection has been a thing organizations know about, but GDPR has brought it all to the forefront,” Richard Sisson, Senior Policy Officer at the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said during a recent GDPR roundtable.

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In this ongoing blog series on preparing for complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we’ve explained the importance of having solid, foundational security practices like asset management and threat prioritization. Today, we’ll discuss how another such practice can help organizations stay on the right side of GDPR: Indication of Compromise (IOC).

In a nutshell, IOC can help customers who are dealing with unauthorized access to customer personal data by an external threat actor or adversary. This makes IOC particularly relevant to GDPR’s stringent requirements for data integrity, control, accountability and protection.

To comply with GDPR, which goes into effect on May 25, companies worldwide — not just in the EU — must know what personal data of EU residents they have, where it’s stored, with whom they’re sharing it, how they’re protecting it, and what they’re using it for.

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The EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) demands that organizations stringently protect EU residents’ data they hold, share and process, which requires having solid InfoSec practices, including threat prioritization.

No, there is no specific mention of prioritization of vulnerability remediation in the regulation’s text. In fact, only a few InfoSec technologies and practices are mentioned by name.

What is stressed throughout the 88-page document is the call for both data “controllers” and data “processors” to protect this customer information by implementing “appropriate technical and organisational measures”, a phrase repeated multiple times.

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