A major challenge for enterprise InfoSec teams is keeping their finger on the pulse of two constantly changing elements: external cyber threats and internal technology needs.

Staying a step ahead and proactively adjusting their organization’s security posture accordingly is a must in order to keep attack risks as low as possible. So what are the major shifts in threats and business technology use that CISOs and their staff face in 2017? And how should they respond to these changes?

You will find comprehensive answers to those and other critical InfoSec questions in a new SANS Institute whitepaper written by security analyst John Pescatore.

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Considering that database systems hold extremely valuable and sensitive information, one would assume that most organizations would fiercely protect these “crown jewels” with great care. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Throngs of databases in organizations worldwide are unsafe, at high risk of being breached by malicious hackers, rogue employees and crooked partners. This sorry state of database security puts financial data, customer information, health records, intellectual property treasures and more in grave danger.

Below we’ll discuss the two main causes for database security breakdowns — unpatched vulnerabilities and configuration errors — along with helpful tips for reducing the risk of database breaches.

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In the first installment of this blog series on automated asset inventorying, we met Max, the CISO of a large manufacturer whose InfoSec team lost full visibility of the company’s hardware and software.

Dangerous blind spots appeared progressively over time as Max’s company adopted more and more digital transformation technologies, such as cloud computing, mobility, IoT, and virtualization.

Eventually, Max and his team became alarmed at the inability of their legacy on-premises security products to account for the new cloud instances, virtualized environments, mobile endpoints and other assets outside of the traditional, tightly-controlled network perimeter.

They were concerned that this lack of visibility could lead to an increase in employee use of unapproved personal devices and unauthorized software, as well as to data breaches.

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With 2017 still in its infancy, plenty of time remains for InfoSec practitioners to make concrete strides toward better security and compliance in their organizations. That’s why to help you start off the year on the right foot, we’ve shared best practices, ideas and recommendations in our Qualys Top 10 Tips for a Secure & Compliant 2017 blog series.

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As we continue our Qualys Top 10 Tips for a Secure & Compliant 2017 blog series, we zoom in on the all important area of compliance and risk monitoring, a key element of any comprehensive security program.

IT compliance and risk managers don’t have it easy. You face an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, constantly evolving industry standards and a technology environment that’s changing at a dizzying pace. It falls on your shoulders to make sure your organizations follow rules, regulations, laws, standards and practices in areas of IT across all business functions.

In this post, we’ll offer tips 5 – 7 on our list, to help you:

• Ensure internal and external IT compliance

• Assess procedural and technical controls among vendors to reduce the risk of doing business with them

• Comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

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In our second installment of the Qualys Top 10 Tips for a Secure & Compliant 2017 blog series, we tackle the bane of many InfoSec teams: Deciding which vulnerabilities to remediate first.

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A new year has started, giving InfoSec professionals the perfect opportunity to evaluate what’s working and what’s not in their organizations, and, filled with that early-January optimism, set out to do better.

In that spirit of improvement and renewal, Qualys is kicking off today a blog series that outlines helpful tips — not just flimsy resolutions — for ensuring data security and compliance throughout the year.

In this initial post, we’ll discuss the first three of the Qualys Top 10 Tips for a Secure & Compliant 2017, addressing the importance of IT asset visibility, proper management of vulnerabilities, and continuous monitoring.

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When Office Depot went looking for a new vulnerability management system, it picked Qualys’ for several reasons, including the variety and capabilities of its application programming interfaces (APIs). This was the topic of a recent talk by Office Depot Director of Global Information Security Jon Scheidell.

Since deploying Qualys Vulnerability Management (VM) about three years ago, the office supply chain has made ample and effective use of Qualys APIs in ways that have helped improve its overall security posture and its business operations.

“They’re one of the security vendors that does a better job of not only creating APIs for different features but also documenting them very, very well,” Scheidell said during a recent presentation at the Black Hat USA 2016 conference.

Qualys has always prioritized the extensibility of its platform via APIs, starting in the early 2000s with the release of its first product, and it has intensified its API efforts in the last four or five years.

Today, almost all of the major functions of the Qualys Cloud Platform are accessible to third party developers via APIs. In addition to Vulnerability Management, Qualys offers complete API sets for Web Application Scanning, Web Application Firewall, Policy Compliance, Continuous Monitoring, Malware Detection and the platform’s underlying asset management and tagging functionality.

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Organizations worldwide have expanded and sharpened their continuous monitoring (CM) programs over the past year, but their adoption of this key set of security practices remains far from perfect.

That’s the main finding from the SANS Institute’s second annual survey on CM programs titled “Reducing Attack Surface” and published Nov. 2016.

Despite tangible improvements, CM “still has a way to go to attain the maturity needed to become a critical part of an organization’s business strategy,” reads the study, which polled almost 300 Infosec and IT pros actively involved in vulnerability assessment and remediation.

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Today in London, to kick off the week of Infosecurity Europe, Qualys and FireMon announced the integration of QualysGuard Vulnerability Management (VM) and FireMon Security Manager with Risk Analyzer in FireMon’s upcoming Version 7.0 release. The integration enables customers to analyze their security postures across large network security infrastructures, evaluate remediation efforts through attack simulation, and see the impact of their actions to reduce risk and meet compliance regulations.

With the integration, FireMon Security Manager with Risk Analyzer is automatically updated with the latest QualysGuard VM scan results, and combined with Security Manager’s real-time network configuration and topology knowledge, identifies exactly what assets on the network are at truly at risk and which should be remediated first to reduce the greatest amount of risk.

Jody Brazil, President and CTO of FireMon commented: “The integrated FireMon Security Manager with Risk Analyzer and QualysGuard Vulnerability Management solution empowers IT Security organizations to automate the identification of assets that are truly at risk, and to know their network risk posture is always updated in real-time. This enables customers to move to a risk-centric security operations model that enables them to proactively identify and patch or make unreachable important assets  that could be exploited before attackers do."

Read the full announcement.