partnership lets users access one-click ScreenMeet sessions from the Tanium platform.

**KIRKLAND, Wash., and SAN FRANCISCO, June 22, 2022** – Tanium, the industry’s only provider of converged endpoint management (XEM), and ScreenMeet, the only cloud-native, remote support solution that’s fully integrated with leading ITSM service providers, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver one-click ScreenMeet sessions from the Tanium platform.

Tanium will resell ScreenMeet’s software as an add-on capability to the robust Tanium XEM platform, offering 99 percent cloud reliability and a seamless remote-desktop experience that doesn’t require toggling between multiple solutions. Tanium architecture makes ScreenMeet software available on demand from every endpoint.

“ScreenMeet takes advantage of the Tanium platform to deliver an instant remote-desktop solution without adding another agent to the customer environment,” said Rob Jenks, SVP of corporate strategy at Tanium. “And because Tanium has complete control over the endpoint, ScreenMeet can be launched securely with elevated privileges, improving security and help desk time-to-resolution simultaneously.”

The integrated solution will offer customers attended (user-approved) and unattended (no user present) remote desktop capabilities. Many vendors require additional centralized infrastructure for unattended remote desktop capabilities, but the Tanium + ScreenMeet partnership enables unattended capabilities that do not need additional technology investments to work.

"The continued rise in distributed workforces makes providing efficient remote-desktop support to all endpoints critical to IT operations and security success,” said Lou Guercia, COO at ScreenMeet. "Partnering with Tanium enables us to offer seamless service and secure access anywhere for our customers.”

Joint Tanium and ScreenMeet customers can expect to see significant productivity gains in their help desk processes. Early adopters have already experienced:

*   A 30 percent increase in level one first‐call resolutions
*   Reductions in case handling time from one or more days to less than half a day
*   Significant operational cost reduction
*   A simplified experience for both the agent and the employee being supported

“Tanium and ScreenMeet have created the best remote desktop experience I’ve ever seen,” said a desktop administrator at IT and cloud solutions provider AHEAD. Existing Tanium customers can find out why by contacting their account teams to learn more and new ones can test drive the solution at https://try.tanium.com.

**About Tanium**  
Tanium, the industry’s only provider of converged endpoint management (XEM), leads the paradigm shift in legacy approaches to managing complex security and technology environments. Only Tanium protects every team, endpoint, and workflow from cyber threats by integrating IT, Compliance, Security, and Risk into a single platform that delivers comprehensive visibility across devices, a unified set of controls, and a common taxonomy for a single shared purpose: to protect critical information and infrastructure at scale. Tanium is included among the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For and has been named to the Forbes Cloud 100 list for six consecutive years. In fact, more than half of the Fortune 100 and the U.S. Armed Forces trust Tanium to protect people, defend data, secure systems, and see and control every endpoint everywhere. That’s the power of certainty. Visit www.tanium.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

**About ScreenMeet**  
ScreenMeet was founded in 2015 by online meeting and customer support veterans to build a new generation of cloud-based, enterprise tools for customer support and IT help desk for industry-leading, globally recognized brands. For enterprises seeking to deliver exceptional person-to-person customer support experiences, ScreenMeet provides purpose-built support software that integrates with CRM and ITSM platforms made with the latest cloud technologies. For more information, please visit www.screenmeet.com.

Tanium Partners With ScreenMeet to Enable Employees to Securely Connect to Their Remote Desktops

Zscaler also announced innovations built on Zscaler’s Zero Trust architecture and AWS.

San Jose, California, June 22, 2022 / Las Vegas, Nevada, June 22, 2022

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS) today announced an extension to its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a preferred cloud provider. In addition, Zscaler announced innovations built on Zscaler’s Zero Trust architecture and AWS to help enterprises securely accelerate their transition to the cloud. Working together, the companies will deliver customers a unified solution to consolidate and simplify cloud security operations while helping organizations advance their security architecture from ineffective legacy models to a modern Zero Trust approach designed for the cloud.

Today, enterprises are often left to purchase, implement, and manage dozens of disparate point products, which has resulted in operational complexity and higher overhead costs. As the cloud continues to mature, enterprises are looking for a holistic cloud-based platform with integrated services, including, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP), Data Loss Protection (DLP), Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) scanning, to protect their globally distributed workloads.

To help enterprises advance their deployment of Zero Trust to secure their cloud applications and improve the security of their 5G connections, Zscaler and AWS have extended their relationship to deliver simple, yet powerful, solutions built on AWS. These solutions are designed to help identify, prioritize, mitigate, and remediate cloud workload risks for the applications and the cloud infrastructure, while also extending Zero Trust to Private 5G connections. In cooperation with AWS, Zscaler's three innovations designed to advance cloud security and cloud connections include:

1.  **Delivering Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), Built on AWS**: Built and operated on AWS, Zscaler’s new Posture Control™ solution helps DevOps and security teams accelerate cloud adoption by efficiently implementing their portion of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. The platform reduces operational complexity and overhead by replacing multiple point security products–CSPM, CIEM, CWPP, IaC scanning, DLP, CMDB – with a single, unified platform that analyzes millions of attributes to prioritize the critical issues that the security team should focus on first. AWS was chosen for its breadth of services, scale, reliability, and prevalence as a primary cloud provider in a large portion of Zscaler’s customer base.
2.  **Extending Zero Trust Security to Workloads on AWS**: In cooperation with AWS, Zscaler is extending the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™cloud security platform to protect cloud workloads against malware and data breaches as enterprises continue to migrate and refactor their applications and workloads on AWS. Zscaler delivers customers the benefits of inline inspection for internet traffic from cloud workloads at a carrier-grade scale using deep integration with AWS native technologies, such as Gateway Load Balancer, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Auto Scaling. It also extends the app-to-app segmentation capabilities of the platform, significantly reducing the enterprise attack surface and risk associated with lateral threat movement.
3.  **Enabling Zero Trust for Private 5G with AWS Wavelength -** The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange protects workloads running on AWS Wavelength by providing user-granular, Zero Trust access directly to the devices connected to the mobile network. The service is delivered using Zscaler Private Access™ (ZPA)–a Zero Trust architecture built on AWS that supports both cloud and hybrid infrastructure control and deployment.

“Zscaler, in collaboration with AWS, provides an innovative and highly-scalable solution for securing cloud workloads,” said Rui Cabeço, IT Service Group Manager & Global Outbound Connectivity Lead at Siemens. “We look forward to leveraging the powerful capabilities of Zscaler and the AWS Marketplace to drive business agility as we continue our cloud transformation.”

“Many organizations struggle with the notion of Zero Trust for cloud security,” said Punit Minocha, Executive Vice President, Business and Corporate Development at Zscaler. “Zscaler’s latest innovations– our Posture Control solution and new cloud workload protection services–built on AWS as a preferred cloud provider, offer our joint customers simplified and efficient solutions to effectively remediate cloud workload risk, delivered via the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange cloud security platform.”

**“**Zscaler and AWS share a common vision to deliver the highest quality security solutions to our joint customers and help them navigate the latest cloud security requirements,” said Chris Grusz, Director, ISV Partner and AWS Marketplace Business Development. “This expanded relationship will offer organizations across the world simple yet powerful solutions built on and tightly integrated with AWS security, observability and data protection services.”

About Zscaler

Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Distributed across more than 150 data centers globally, the SSE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform.

Zscaler and AWS Expand Relationship

Enables DevOps and security teams to prioritize and remediate risks in cloud-native applications earlier in the development life cycle.

San Jose, California, June 22, 2022 / Las Vegas, Nevada, June 22, 2022

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), the leader in cloud security, today announced its new Posture Control™ solution, designed to give organizations unified Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) functionality tailor-made to secure cloud workloads. Integrated into the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™, the Posture Control solution enables DevOps and security teams to efficiently prioritize and remediate risks in cloud-native applications earlier in the development lifecycle. The completely agentless solution correlates and prioritizes risks, such as unpatched vulnerabilities in containers and VMs, excessive entitlements and permissions, and cloud service misconfigurations.

“The cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve as more applications reside across multi-cloud footprints, making it more difficult than ever for security, IT, and DevOps teams to keep up with new types of attacks and efficiently prioritize and then remediate cloud risks,” said Amit Sinha, President, Zscaler. “Unlike point cloud security tools, which lack context and overburden operators with alerts while missing the full picture, Zscaler’s new Posture Control solution correlates signals across several cloud security disciplines to identify and prioritize real risk drivers and high priority security incidents. Also, by extending security directly into developer workflows, infosec teams can collaborate more effectively with DevOps teams to proactively secure applications earlier in the development lifecycle.”

Today, most enterprises are forced to implement and manage dozens of point security tools to achieve complete security coverage. These tools operate in silos and are not integrated, leading to visibility challenges, security gaps, and friction among cross-functional teams. However, due to the dynamic nature of the cloud, security risks are made up of a combination of several complex issues that are interconnected across multiple layers. To address them, security teams need a consolidated platform that prioritizes risk across all their cloud environments.

To meet the scale and speed required for cloud-native application development, organizations need a unified approach that envelops the entire Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) lifecycle, integrating seamlessly with developer and DevOps workflows. They also need a simplified architecture that correlates issues across multi-cloud environments to better identify high priority security risks and deliver remediation via each stakeholder’s preferred workflows earlier in the development process.

“As organizations increasingly move their applications to the cloud, security teams struggle to keep up with cloud-native development because multiple siloed tools create too many alerts that are difficult to manage and prioritize,” said Melinda Marks, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “With its integrated approach, Zscaler’s Posture Control solution can help security and DevOps teams better identify, prioritize, and remediate risks. With solutions like this, organizations can focus on the top issues to greatly reduce their overall risk.”

Zscaler’s new Posture Control solution builds on the security capabilities of Zscaler’s proven Workload Communications solution, which is designed to secure cloud applications at runtime. Integrated with the Zscaler for Workloads service, the Posture Control solution and Workload Communications are combined to unify development and runtime security of cloud-native and VM-based applications running on any service in any cloud. The Posture Control solution delivers comprehensive coverage of all cloud environments in a singular view and a unified data model to enable security, IT, and DevOps teams to secure cloud apps without disrupting the development processes. Following are key features of the Posture Control solution:

*   **Advanced Threat and Risk Correlation:** Identify and assess the combination of multiple security issues that may appear to be low-risk individually, but have the potential to create larger, more malicious risks across cloud environments when combined. These correlated risks are unified in a singular view, giving security teams the context they need to properly explore and prioritize risks in the cloud.
*   **Agentless Workload Scanning:** Avoid developer friction and eliminate blind spots due to incomplete coverage of security tools with a 100% agentless, API-based approach. VMs and containers are scanned in both registries and in production environments, correlating vulnerabilities with other cloud weaknesses to prioritize actions based on risk rather than on CVSS score alone.
*   **Full Lifecycle Cloud Security:** Detect and resolve security issues early in the development phase before they become production incidents with “shift left” security. Zscaler monitors automated deployment processes and sends alerts when critical security issues are found.
*   **Risk and Compliance Visualizations Across the Entire Cloud:** Gain 360-degree visibility into risks across the entire multi-cloud footprint, including VMs, containers, and serverless workloads. Zscaler integrates with development platforms like VS Code, DevOps tools such as GitHub and Jenkins, and all major cloud providers to enable visibility and control “from build to run.”
*   **Simplified, Fast Deployment** **and Operations** - Zscaler and HashiCorp, a leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation, have extended their integrations to secure cloud-native workloads in multi-cloud environments. The Posture Control solution can now easily scan infrastructure-as-a-code templates written in Terraform in the development environment. This shift-left approach provides the ability to build security in the CI/CD process, thereby reducing friction between development and security teams, and providing rapid application deployment and better security posture of cloud workloads.

For more details about Zscaler’s Posture Control solution, please see here.

About Zscaler  

Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Distributed across more than 150 data centers globally, the SSE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform.

Zscaler Launches Posture Control Solution

Organizations can strengthen their network defense with a number of intelligent security innovations.

San Jose, California, June 22, 2022 / Las Vegas, Nevada, June 22, 2022

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), the leader in cloud security, today announced newly advanced AI/ML innovations powered by the largest security cloud in the world for unparalleled user protection and digital experience monitoring. The new capabilities further enhance Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange™ security platform to enable organizations to implement a Security Service Edge (SSE) that protects against the most advanced cyberattacks, while delivering an exceptional digital experience to users, and simplifying adoption of a zero trust architecture.

Organizations are facing a 314 percent increase in cyberattacks on encrypted internet traffic and an 80 percent increase in ransomware with nearly a 120 percent increase in double extortion attacks. Phishing is also on the rise with industries like financial services, government and retail seeing annual increases in attacks of over 100 percent in 2021. To combat advancing threats, organizations need to adapt their defenses to real-time changes in risk. However, lean-running IT and security teams are experiencing security alert fatigue with increasing exposure to real-time threats and often don’t have the resources or skills to effectively investigate and respond to the mounting volume of threats. Zscaler is addressing these challenges by providing one-click root cause analysis to instantly identify the issues behind poor digital experience, freeing up IT and security teams from troubleshooting to focus on preventing attacks. AI-powered security helps IT professionals by automating threat detection to deliver better and faster protection.

Zscaler operates the largest in-line security cloud, which inspects over 240 billion data transactions daily and blocks 150 million daily attacks across the globe to dramatically expedite investigation, response and resolution times, and pinpoint potential malware to stop breaches and data loss. Zscaler is uniquely equipped to train its AI/ML models for superior accuracy in automating threat responses and making policy recommendations to security teams. From faster threat detection to freeing up resources, Zscaler’s Zero Trust platform enables IT and security teams to reduce the constant fire drill of manually chasing alerts and trying to identify new threats.

“Cybercriminals are using AI, automation, and advanced techniques to train machines to hack or socially engineer victims faster than ever before,” said Amit Sinha, President, Zscaler. “To help our customers combat these escalating techniques, we’ve dramatically advanced AI and machine learning in our cloud to take advantage of our massive data pool, giving our customers granular real-time risk visibility and a solution to combat attackers that no other security vendor can provide.”

Utilizing Zscaler’s AI-powered Zero Trust platform, organizations can now strengthen their network defense with the following intelligent security innovations:

*   **AI-powered phishing prevention:** Detect and stop credential theft and browser exploitation from phishing pages with real-time analytics on threat intelligence from 300 trillion daily signals, expert ThreatLabz research, and dynamic browser isolation.
*   **AI-powered segmentation:** Simplify user-to-app segmentation to minimize the attack surface and stop lateral movement with AI-based policy recommendations trained by millions of cross-customer signals across private app telemetry, user context, behavior, and location.
*   **Autonomous risk-based policy engine:** Dynamically adapt security and access policies in real-time across the Zscaler™ Zero Trust Exchange to maintain network integrity against rapidly-evolving cyber threats. The new capabilities also allow security teams to customize policies based on risk scoring for users, devices, apps, and content.
*   **AI-powered root cause analysis:** Accelerate mean time to resolution putting impacted end users back to work in a matter of seconds by identifying root causes of poor user experiences 180 times faster, freeing IT from time-consuming troubleshooting and analysis.

“Delivering seamless digital experiences, from employee devices to the applications they need, goes hand in hand with securing our sensitive business applications and data, no matter where it resides,” said Darren Beattie, Modern Workplace and Security Operations Manager at Auckland New Zealand-headquartered Tower Limited. “Zscaler’s integrated cloud platform helped us effortlessly adopt a zero trust architecture, reduce risk, accelerate our digital transformation, and achieve business goals.”

“With Zscaler’s AI-powered Zero Trust platform based on a SSE framework, we are able to augment and expand the reach of our IT and security team to stop the growing frequency of advanced cyberattacks,” said Stephen Bailey, Vice President of Information Technology at Cache Creek Casino Resort. “The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and these new AI capabilities will effectively enable us to see real-time changes in risk, automate our response process, and stay ahead of the attackers.”

For more details about Zscaler’s AI-powered Security Service Edge (SSE) platform, please see here.

About Zscaler

Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Distributed across more than 150 data centers globally, the SSE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform.

Zscaler Adds New AI/ML Capabilities for the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange

Using WebAuthn, physical keys, and biometrics, organizations can adopt more advanced passwordless MFA and true passwordless systems. (Part 2 of 2)

_The first article of this two-part series examined ways to improve multifactor authentication (MFA) and boost adoption. This story takes a look at how organizations can adopt more advanced passwordless MFA and true passwordless systems._

Getting to passwordless won't be easy, but the concept is finally gaining momentum. Although several vendors have offered passwordless MFA and true passwordless technology for a few years — mostly relegated to enterprise use — a more comprehensive framework is now taking shape. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have jointly agreed to adopt passwordless in earnest.

For example, Apple will be introducing Passkeys, which completely replace passwords used to log into websites, in a few months. The framework, based on the FIDO Alliance standard, uses biometrics such as Face ID to generate a unique, encrypted digital key that resides only on the device and within an encrypted keychain used for other Apple devices, including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. This makes it impervious to phishing and other forms of data extraction.

In 2020, Microsoft turned to biometrics for authentication in Windows 10 and Windows 365 — and the company is also expanding passwordless to websites. In addition, all three companies are adding the ability to transfer this identity data across authenticated devices and systems. In the past, changing phones or other devices typically meant reinstalling credentials — a time-consuming and irritating task.

In addition to building biometrics and other security mechanisms into their operating systems, the Big Three are introducing software development kits (SDKs) that companies can use to build passwordless websites. As a result, it will soon be possible for consumers to begin ditching passwords for compliant sites and services. Like Apple's Passkey, a mobile phone or other registered device authenticates the person and then sends the request to the server without sending the biometric data.

"Where the big vendors lead, everyone else follows," says Don Tait, a senior analyst for Omdia.

At the heart of this transformation is the FIDO Alliance. "It is a classic example of the impact of consumerization on technology," adds Rik Turner, a senior analyst at Omdia. "As people begin to use tools in their private lives, they begin to seep into the workplace."

**A Matter of Identity**

Security experts say that the first step in building a better authentication framework is to stop using outdated methods like secret words and one-time codes to verify users. Even push apps are vulnerable to exploits. For example, crooks who gain access to a company's network or an MFA system can generate fake authentication requests that someone might authorize in a moment of distraction or inattentiveness.

Even highly secure YubiKeys and other U2F tokens aren't exempt from vulnerabilities and workarounds. For example, if a user forgets the key or can't use it for some reason, the typical workaround is to revert to a text code or less secure form of MFA as the backup. At that point, even an ultra-secure digital token can't provide protection.

A deeper and broader use of biometrics and user verification methods, including presence-based authentication and behavioral or activity-based models, is key. This includes the use of the FIDO protocol WebAuthn, which delivers an API that supports strong, public-key cryptography registration and authentication. It can be combined with a continuous authentication method that reverifies the identity of the session through a persistent token.

Several companies, including Beyond Identity, Veriff, 1Kosmos, and Jumio, have adopted this type of approach. They rely on FIDO standards that tie into biometrics, along with a highly secure identity proofing method. Typically, they ask users to provide a document such as a driver's license or a passport, which is securely stored in an app on the device. A selfie or face scan ensures that everything matches and authenticates the user.

For example, Veriff, which works in 190 countries, in 35 languages, and with 8,000 IDs, runs an online blockchain-based identity verification within a few seconds. It uses an AI-supported decision engine that incorporates real-time feedback through a document check, biometric scan, face comparison, background video, and device and network analytics. Financial institutions, healthcare providers, and others that use the technology can also reduce fake accounts and fraud.

"This creates a barrier that is much more difficult for an intelligent and determined bad actor to bypass," says Kalev Rundu, senior product manager at Veriff. "People today are much more willing to use biometrics for authentication, but they are only ready to do it if they receive real value in return and they can maintain control over how and where their data is used."

**Forward Thinking**

The move to passwordless MFA and true passwordless remains a slow march. For now, advanced authentication is more viable within the enterprise, where it's a closed and controlled environment. Michael Engle, co-founder and CSO at passwordless MFA solutions vendor 1kosmos, estimates that 80% of passwords can be eliminated almost immediately with the right strategy and tools.

For now, Omdia analysts Tait and Turner recommend migrating to passwordless MFA without delay. Not only does the framework deliver a better and safer customer experience, but it can also drive revenue growth, they argue. In addition, it's wise to phase in true passwordless systems and build on them through the FIDO Alliance, as well through Apple Passkeys and the equivalent passwordless systems at Google and Microsoft.

Along the way, it's also essential to educate customers and employees about passwordless authentication and ensure that people understand that their biometric data is being used as their gateway to apps and the Internet. The combination of better UX, incentives, and more streamlined processes can, over the long term, boost security, improve trust, and trim security costs.

Says Jasson Casey, CTO for Beyond Identity: "In the end, the objective isn't to eliminate passwords, though that's a noble cause. It's to create better security and a safer computing environment for everyone."

Evolving Beyond the Password: Vanquishing the Password

The cybersecurity community is buzzing with concerns of multichannel phishing attacks, particularly on smishing and business text compromise, as hackers turn to mobile to launch attacks.

As security conferences return to in-person venues, the cybersecurity community is buzzing with concerns over multichannel phishing attacks, with mobile phishing the biggest concern as hackers turn to mobile to launch smishing and business text compromise attacks.

By moving completely to the cloud, apps and browsers are all we need to communicate with work, family, and friends. While most of us are aware of the cybersecurity guardrails, we are not infallible. We can be lured into providing personal information and credentials or installing malicious apps that can undermine even the most sophisticated cybersecurity defenses. Our reliance on mobile devices with little or no protection from malicious attacks leaves personal and company data at risk.

Multichannel phishing attacks are on the rise, and more breaches are successful because hackers are delivering very targeted attacks on massive scales — powered by automation technology, taking advantage of human psychology, and exploiting our use of apps, browsers, and multiple communications channels.

Humans are the most strategic cybersecurity entry points into an organization because criminals can use psychology to fool us into overriding or undermining even the most sophisticated cybersecurity protection setups. And today's sophisticated attacks are essentially invisible to the human eye. Gone are the poorly spelled phishing emails of yesterday. Today's human hacking can fool even the most security-aware professional to follow a malicious URL or log in to an illegitimate site and expose data and a network. For the attacker, it's much more straightforward and a lower cost to attack a human than a network or a well-defended machine.

'Furthermore, our world — and the way we use technology — has been dramatically altered. This has further increased the danger of human hacking attacks. Post-pandemic, a large percentage of the workforce will continue to have some hybrid remote/office working arrangements — meaning that we're mixing our personal and professional worlds online more than ever. That opens us to more threats, especially when human hacking attacks are coming from legitimate infrastructure. We've turned to interacting through apps and working on browsers. Using collaboration channels like Zoom and Slack and doing nearly everything through our smartphones has opened more attack vectors.

Gone are the days when phishing emails were easily spotted due to low-quality logos, poor grammar, or just the totally unbelievable nature of the email. Now, attackers are well-equipped and very strategic about their attacks, and the believable SMS text or social media invite from a cybercriminal is far more dangerous.

Then, the sheer number of these channel users multiplies the risk equation for enterprises. Add to this the fact that attacks have evolved to the point where a single attack will use multiple channels to convince the users that they are legitimate. There is also the major issue of underestimating the risk of the human factor — today's attacks are simply impossible to detect with human-only views, assessments, and forensics.

**What to Watch For**

Now, especially as the browser is becoming the operating system of the enterprise, the number of channels for attack has increased. Browser extensions and plug-ins are available through very respected big brands, including Android and Apple, but they are not always safe. Also, browser search results can become embedded with attacks, attracting the attention of the user with something that they care about and are more likely to click on. And of course, common Microsoft 365 apps and enterprise productivity apps such as LinkedIn, Dropbox, and WhatsApp are open to phishing abuse.

Since human hacking is a unique problem, we need to focus on people in order to resolve it. Training people to recognize threats is important, but the attacks are too hard to spot by users for training employees to be cautious to be enough security. Asking people to forward suspicious requests to IT is a help but not a cure. There are simply too many convincing attacks coming in on all channels for IT to keep up with those that are forwarded.

There are better ways. One, recognize that cybercriminals are pointing attacks at the people inside organizations and then defend them — on every single digital channel. Two, take advantage of AI and machine learning to identify threats and then use that protection on endpoints in an organization's network — from employee smartphones to Zoom accounts.

In a world where we're trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers, it's time to adequately recognize the magnitude of the multichannel challenge on the horizon — and a new approach that bolsters the people who are under attack.  
**  
About the Author**

    

Patrick Harr is CEO of SlashNext, the authority in multichannel phishing and human hacking protection across email, Web, and mobile.

The Risk of Multichannel Phishing Is on the Horizon

We as industry leaders should be building on what individual platforms like GitHub are doing in two critical ways: demanding third parties improve security and creating more interoperable architectures.

GitHub recently made security news by announcing plans to implement default multifactor authentication (MFA) across its repositories. The company deserves credit for recognizing its gravitational pull within the software ecosystem and acting accordingly, but it shouldn't be alone. We as industry leaders should be building on what individual platforms like GitHub are doing in two critical ways: demanding our own ecosystems of providers raise the bar of their security practices, and creating more interoperable architectures and blueprints to make better security postures more accessible for organizations that rely on our critical platforms.

**Our Interconnected Tech Stack**

Enterprises today rely on a whole ecosystem to run their tech stacks. They rely on cloud services for their infrastructure, including Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. They rely on companies like Okta for their identity solutions, and they rely on a whole host of technologies to help them build or sell products faster, including collaboration and CRM apps as well as repositories like GitHub.

They also rely on a broad set of third-party providers to deliver services such as customer support, or to manage some aspects of their infrastructure. We know the long chain of software cooks in the kitchen has created access nightmares and breaches. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with other international government security organizations recently released guidance for managed service providers, and third-party risk is something we at Okta know better than most. In January of this year, we experienced the compromise of a provider that ultimately resulted in a threat actor briefly gaining access to an Okta support tool via a thin client. While the threat actor never directly accessed the Okta service through an Okta account, Okta's own security posture was threatened as a result of our interconnected ecosystem.

**The Path Forward**

The first step toward resolution is technology leaders looking internally to recognize and take stock of our own service supply chain and the third-party providers we rely on. In Okta's case, we took a hard look at how Okta provides access to our providers and the security expectations we have for third-party providers that have access to customer data. While security practitioners understand the need to implement systems of least privilege that limit lateral movement, it's critical to ask whether those same principles are being applied by the third-party providers you rely on. Movement within their environments can become movement in yours.

The second area is looking outward toward the customers and partners who rely on our platforms. In the case of GitHub, the attack surface is massive and the user base is broad. In an age where everyone acknowledges the need to implement MFA, its adoption levels are still quite low. Look no further than Microsoft Azure Active Directory, where more than three-quarters (78%) of organizations currently don't employ MFA for their user accounts according to Microsoft's "Cyber Signals Report."

For something like identity and access management, it's easy to see just how broad the identity and access management attack surface can be. According to Verizon's "Data Breach Investigations Report," 89% of Web app attacks are caused by credential abuse. While standards help a lot in access management, they are not foolproof. Leading identity solutions have largely eliminated the need for individual configurations to apps and services through prebuilt, self-service integrations that rely on standards and protocols like SAML and OpenID Connect.

But that ability to ensure secure interoperability can and should go further.

Organizations rely on multiple solutions that co-exist, feeding logs, risk signals, and other valuable insights into one another. We often think of this for security tools, but it should also apply to any platform or service where there is data and sensitive information. This is where we can and should improve in order to raise all security boats. Our efforts as an industry to operate with an eye toward open, prebuilt integrations and clear architectures will ensure that tentpole technologies — whether they're in networking, identity management, endpoint detection and response, or security information and event management — work effectively together. This goes beyond preventing misconfigurations: It's about creating better security outcomes.

Our technology world is flatter today than it has ever been before, whether it's our collective reliance on third-party providers, our interconnected software supply chain, or the interoperability of our tooling. In that environment, it's critical for industry leaders to not only maintain a high degree of compliance across their own ecosystems of third-party providers but to develop technologies and policies that raise the bar for their users and customers. Part of that is through steps like the one GitHub is taking: implementing default policies that rely on stronger factors. But in an interconnected world, we must move beyond individual actions to create open and interoperable technologies that enable users to easily configure and integrate their foundational technologies in secure ways.

GitHub's MFA Plans Should Spur Rest of Industry to Raise the Bar

With almost every business experiencing growth in human and machine identities, firms have made securing those identities a priority.

Rapidly growing employee identities, third-party partners, and machine nodes have companies scrambling to secure credential information, software secrets, and cloud identities, according to researchers.

In a survey of IT and identity professionals released Wednesday from Dimensional Research, almost every organization — 98% — experiences rapid growth in the number of identities that have to be managed, with that growth driven by expanding cloud usage, more third-party partners, and machine identities. Furthermore, businesses are also seeing an increase in breaches because of this, with 84% of firms suffering an identity-related breach in the past 12 months, compared with 79% in a previous study covering two years.  

The rising incidence of breaches is unsurprising, says Julie Smith, executive director of the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA), which sponsored the survey,

"The number and complexity of identities organizations are having to manage and secure is increasing," she says. "Whenever there is an increase in identities, there is a corresponding heightened risk of identity-related breaches due to them not being properly managed and secured, and with the attack surfaces also growing exponentially, these breaches can occur on multiple fronts."

For the most part, organizations focus on employee identities, which 70% consider to be the most likely to be breached and 58% believe to have the greatest impact, according to the 2022 "Trends in Securing Digital Identities" report based on the survey. Yet third-party partners and business customers are significant sources of risk as well, with 35% and 25% of respondents considering those to be a major source of breaches, respectively.

    

Source: IDSA

The IDSA recommends that companies focus on identity-related security outcomes that reduce the risk and impact of data breaches. Almost every respondent (96%) believes that implementing security controls focused on identities, such as multifactor authentication (MFA), could have prevented or minimized a breach.

"Centered on enabling effective identity governance, access, and behavioral detection, the security outcomes add a layer of protection around IT environments," the report states. "It is here that multifactor authentication as a mitigation strategy jumped to the top of the list in preventing breaches."

**MFA Reduces Identity-Related Breaches**

The top three countermeasures identified by respondents as potentially blunting the impact of breaches included MFA, more timely review of privileged access, and continuous discovery and monitoring of privileged access rights, according to the survey. Those three security controls also are likely to get the most investment in the coming year, says IDSA's Smith.

"We wouldn’t necessarily expect the countermeasures and planning to match up 100% as that would indicate organizations are chasing their tails and focusing only on the last breach when forward-thinking strategy and vision about the next potential breach is needed," she says.

Machine identities — such as system credentials, software secretes, and Internet of Things (IoT) passwords — are the main factors driving increased identities at 43% of organizations, according to the report. Despite that, only 18% of companies consider machine identities to be a significant source of breaches.

"Both human and machine identities are vulnerable without the proper mitigation and security tactics in place," Smith says. "Given that machine identities have the potential to expand much quicker than human identities, if a machine identity isn’t properly secured, managing the network of machine identities can quickly pose a major risk."

Meanwhile, the growing number of cloud workloads means that the credentials that allow software to talk use APIs and communicate with other software is an expanding surface of attack, Alex Simons, corporate vice president of program management for Microsoft's Identity division, said in March.

Companies that have executives focused on identity security are more likely to reduce the risk of breaches, according to the IDSA report. While only 30% of respondents consider training in securing passwords to be a very effective strategy, companies that have top-level business executives espousing support for password security are much more likely to be more careful with work-related credentials compared with companies that rely on security teams as the primary evangelist.

"If we’re talking about implementing and deploying meaningful security outcomes, we have to increase engagement beyond IT or security teams," IDSA's Smith says. "This simply demonstrates that when management embraces security as a part of messaging, the general trend implies that security becomes a strategic part of the company’s culture."

80% of Firms Suffered Identity-Related Breaches in Last 12 Months

New Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Google Cloud study shows many enterprises struggle to measure and manage risk in their cloud workloads.

Cloud adoption may be hopping, but many enterprises still wrestle with how to identify and manage their security risks with these services.

A new study conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Google Cloud underscores that while the cloud ideally could help bolster security for organizations, many aren't adeptly handling their risk management in the cloud just yet. 

"Organizations are not taking advantage as aggressively of the capabilities to have a more secure environment" with cloud, says Jim Reavis, CEO of the CSA. "They're not being as proactive in monitoring and managing risk."

Interestingly, it appears many organizations may not know for sure the extent of their cloud adoption. Some 51% say that they now run 41% of their workloads in the public cloud, but it turns out most of them (85%) are not using cloud discovery tools to quantify that but, rather, estimating their use via manual methods. Those who use discovery tools including a cloud access security broker, or CASB (15%), to map their cloud workloads report 31% more cloud usage than those who performed manual assessments — a clue that most organizations relying on manual tracking don't have a complete inventory of what's running in their cloud services, according to the study.

"You can't manage the risk of things you don't know about. The basic things lead to either breaches or data exposure, exfiltration, or a ransomware attack if you are not keeping your cloud assets updated and there are gaps in your usage of cloud," Reavis notes. But the cloud offers a better way to manage assets, he says, than traditional IT networks.

“There are tools there," and automated ways to detect and secure cloud assets, he says.

The study confirms a significant rise in cloud adoption. The average number of software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services used by organizations was more than 147, up from 38 in 2020. Some 66% of organizations say they have 100 or fewer services; 32%, from 101 to 999; and 3%, 1,000 or more services.

The most commonly used infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform is Azure (70%), followed closely by AWS (65%), and then Google Cloud at 24%, according to the study.

"Enterprises interviewed intend on increasing their workloads in the cloud over the next 12 months. With enterprises continuing to add production in the cloud and using more cloud services, managing cloud and digital assets will be critical in the management and measurement of risk in the cloud," according to the report.

The goal of the study was to gauge organizations' challenges of risk management in public cloud services, and Google and the CSA gathered survey data as well as interviews in 2021 with 600 IT and security professionals.

**Cloud Escape**

While the cloud is becoming more pervasive for IT operations, there has not been a correlation or increase in data breaches, Reavis notes.

To date, nearly all publicly disclosed breaches in the cloud have stemmed from misconfigurations, not cyberattacks, says Phil Venables, CISO at Google Cloud. "To prevent and address the risk of misconfigurations and compliance violations earlier in the development process, security leaders have started to embrace security as code to achieve the speed and agility of DevOps, reduce risk, and more securely create value in the cloud," Venables says.

For its part, Google offers a series of blueprints for its customers to help avoid misconfigurations and other cloud mistakes, such as its Risk and Compliance as Code (RCaC), Secure Foundations guide, and Cloud Architecture Center, for example.

"Blueprints help our customers rapidly configure cloud environments in a secure and compliant manner," notes Venables. "And ultimately, this level of secure hygiene helps prevent misconfigurations becoming a security risk or attacker entry point to cloud workloads."

According to the report, some 70% of organizations in the study say they don't have solid processes for mapping risk to their cloud assets. A tiny percentage — 4% — report that they have "highly effective" risk management in the cloud. Slightly more than 20% use cloud data-classification tools.

Meanwhile, the main security worries over applications in the cloud include loss of sensitive data (64%), improper configuration and security settings (51%), and unauthorized access (51%).

Risk Disconnect in the Cloud

Data Processing and Infrastructure Processing Units – DPU and IPU – are changing the way enterprises deploy and manage compute resources across their networks.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the new Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Project. OPI will foster a community-driven, standards-based open ecosystem for next-generation architectures and frameworks based on DPU and IPU technologies. OPI is designed to facilitate the simplification of network, storage and security APIs within applications to enable more portable and performant applications in the cloud and datacenter across DevOps, SecOps and NetOps.

Founding members of OPI include Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, NVIDIA and Red Hat with a growing number of contributors representing a broad range of leading companies in their fields ranging from silicon and device manufactures, ISVs, test and measurement partners, OEMs to end users.

"When new technologies emerge, there is so much opportunity for both technical and business innovation but barriers often include a lack of open standards and a thriving community to support them," said Mike Dolan, senior vice president of Projects at the Linux Foundation. "DPUs and IPUs are great examples of some of the most promising technologies emerging today for cloud and datacenter, and OPI is poised to accelerate adoption and opportunity by supporting an ecosystem for DPU and IPU technologies."

DPUs and IPUs are increasingly being used to support high-speed network capabilities and packet processing for applications like 5G, AI/ML, Web3, crypto and more because of their flexibility in managing resources across networking, compute, security and storage domains. Instead of the servers being the infrastructure unit for cloud, edge or the data center, operators can now create pools of disaggregated networking, compute and storage resources supported by DPUs, IPUs, GPUs, and CPUs to meet their customers' application workloads and scaling requirements.

OPI will help establish and nurture an open and creative software ecosystem for DPU and IPU-based infrastructures. As more DPUs and IPUs are offered by various vendors, the OPI Project seeks to help define the architecture and frameworks for the DPU and IPU software stacks that can be applied to any vendor's hardware offerings. The OPI Project also aims to foster a rich open source application ecosystem, leveraging existing open source projects, such as DPDK, SPDK, OvS, P4, etc., as appropriate. The project intends to:

*   Define DPU and IPU,
*   Delineate vendor-agnostic frameworks and architectures for DPU- and IPU-based software stacks applicable to any hardware solutions,
*   Enable the creation of a rich open source application ecosystem,
*   Integrate with existing open source projects aligned to the same vision such as the Linux kernel, and,
*   Create new APIs for interaction with, and between, the elements of the DPU and IPU ecosystem, including hardware, hosted applications, host node, and the remote provisioning and orchestration of software

With several working groups already active, the initial technology contributions will come in the form of the Infrastructure Programmer Development Kit (IPDK) that is now an official sub-project of OPI governed by the Linux Foundation. IPDK is an open source framework of drivers and APIs for infrastructure offload and management that runs on a CPU, IPU, DPU or switch. In addition, NVIDIA DOCA, an open source software development framework for NVIDIA's BlueField DPU, will be contributed to OPI to help developers create applications that can be offloaded, accelerated, and isolated across DPUs, IPUs, and other hardware platforms.

For more information visit: https://opiproject.org; start contributing here: https://github.com/opiproject/opi.

**Founding Member Comments**

**_Geng Lin, EVP and Chief Technology Officer, F5  
_**"The emerging DPU market is a golden opportunity to reimagine how infrastructure services can be deployed and managed. With collective collaboration across many vendors representing both the silicon devices and the entire DPU software stack, an ecosystem is emerging that will provide a low friction customer experience and achieve portability of services across a DPU enabled infrastructure layer of next generation data centers, private clouds, and edge deployments."

**_Patricia Kummrow, CVP and GM, Ethernet Products Group, Intel  
_**Intel is committed to open software to advance collaborative and competitive ecosystems and is pleased to be a founding member of the Open Programmable Infrastructure project, as well as fully supportive of the Infrastructure Processor Development Kit (IPDK) as part of OPI. We look forward to advancing these tools, with the Linux Foundation, fulfilling the need for a programmable infrastructure across cloud, data center, communication and enterprise industries making it easier for developers to accelerate innovation and advance technological developments.

**_Ram Periakaruppan, VP and General Manager, Network Test and Security Solutions Group, Keysight Technologies  
_**"Programmable infrastructure built with DPUs/IPUs enables significant innovation for networking, security, storage and other areas in disaggregated cloud environments. As a founding member of the Open Programmable Infrastructure Project, we are committed to providing our test and validation expertise as we collaboratively develop and foster a standards-based open ecosystem that furthers infrastructure development, enabling cloud providers to maximize their investment."

**Cary Ussery, Vice President, Software and Support, Processors, Marvell  
**Data center operators across multiple industry segments are increasingly incorporating DPUs as an integral part of their infrastructure processing to offload complex workloads from general purpose to more robust compute platforms. Marvell strongly believes that software standardization in the ecosystem will significantly contribute to the success of workload acceleration solutions. As a founding member of the OPI Project, Marvell aims to address the need for standardization of software frameworks used in provisioning, lifecycle management, orchestration, virtualization and deployment of workloads.

**_Kevin Deierling, vice president of Networking at NVIDIA  
_**"The fundamental architecture of data centers is evolving to meet the demands of private and hyperscale clouds and AI, which require extreme performance enabled by DPUs such as the NVIDIA BlueField and open frameworks such as NVIDIA DOCA. These will support OPI to provide BlueField users with extreme acceleration, enabled by common, multi-vendor management and applications. NVIDIA is a founding member of the Linux Foundation's Open Programmable Infrastructure Project to continue pushing the boundaries of networking performance and accelerated data center infrastructure while championing open standards and ecosystems."

**_Erin Boyd, director of emerging technologies, Red Hat  
_**"As a founding member of the Open Programmable Infrastructure project, Red Hat is committed to helping promote, grow and collaborate on the emergent advantage that new hardware stacks can bring to the cloud-native community, and we believe that the formalization of OPI into the Linux Foundation is an important step toward achieving this in an open and transparent fashion. Establishing an open standards-based ecosystem will enable us to create fully programmable infrastructure, opening up new possibilities for better performance, consumption, and the ability to more easily manage unique hardware at scale."

**About the Linux Foundation**

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 1,800 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, Hyperledger, RISC-V, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: _www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage_. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.

_Marvell Disclaimer: This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, any statement that may predict, forecast, indicate or imply future events or achievements. Actual events or results may differ materially from those contemplated in this press release. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and no person assumes any obligation to update or revise any such forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise._

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