In a recent presentation to business leaders, Kent Goodrow, a Systems Engineering client Account Manager, spoke about the evolution of identity and access management (IAM). He noted the increasing business exposure to modern threats due to work-from-anywhere, cloud-first environments. Kent detailed how IAM has evolved over the last few years and how it now works to protect access to corporate resources. Below is an outline of his presentation on implementing IAM as your organization's first line of defense.

On April 13, Microsoft released its monthly patches for vulnerabilities found within their products. In their release announcement, Microsoft strongly recommends prioritizing the CVE 2021 28481 security update which affects Exchange servers 2013, 2016, and 2019. This vulnerability allows hackers access to mailboxes to read or even exfiltrate sensitive information.

Systems Engineering is aware of the FBI and CISA joint security advisory indicating threat actors are potentially using multiple Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) to exploit Fortinet operating systems, known as FortiOS. The advisory calls out three vulnerabilities that may be used to gain access to business networks to begin data exfiltration or data encryption attacks. Vulnerabilities include;

Systems Engineering is aware of multiple vulnerabilities within Cisco Jabber Client software. These vulnerabilities affect Cisco Jabber for Windows, Cisco Jabber for MacOS, and Cisco Jabber for Mobile platforms. Vulnerabilities include:

Five years ago, I wrote a blog post that summarized the risks of unmanaged data within IT environments. As a specialist working with Systems Engineering's FileProtect (cloud backup service), I’ve only seen this problem compound. The problem lies in the fact that the majority of businesses haven’t taken on the challenge of cleaning out their proverbial digital junk drawers.

In 1970, around the same time David Bowie was writing “Changes”, Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote a book entitled “Future Shock,” arguing that the ever-accelerating rate of technological and social change would create fear, confusion, and tension across the globe. In the last 50 years, their predictions have been largely prescient. While cloud technologies keep getting better and have improved our lives in a myriad of ways, there is no doubt that it leaves some people’s heads spinning. So how do you keep up with the cloud?

Qualys Cloud Platform is the incident response and breach prevention vendor used at Systems Engineering to perform monthly external vulnerability scan for our customers. Recently, Qualys released a statement relating to a previously identified zero-day exploit in one of their third-party solutions (Accellion FTA).