How profiling employee working hours helps to detect security incidents

At the TimeMachine company there are two special old friends Bob and Alice. Bob, as a team manager, usually has a very busy schedule filled with meetings all day long. You can even find him working late into the night trying to catch up on email he received during the day. Alice on the other hand...

The top 3 OWASP risks to the financial services sector in 2021 and how to mitigate them

The Open Web Application Security Project OWASP is a non-profit organization that helps security experts protect web applications from cyber attacks. OWASP counts 32,000 volunteers worldwide who perform security assessments and conduct research on cybersecurity threats about which the larger...

From basic text to streaming 4K movies: A brief history of the World Wide Web

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal for the World Wide Web WWW in 1989, he probably didn’t predict just how much his ideas would change the way we communicate. With about 1.83 billion websites to date, the World Wide Web has been the cornerstone of the information age. Famously Berners-Le...

What to do when your business has been hacked

You might be here because the unthinkable has happened so let’s get straight into this, step by step: Immediate containment. Inform stakeholders. Inform law enforcement. Implement your disaster recovery plan. Analyze and future proof. Early warning signs may be unusual user-account behavior, slow...

5 reasons why depending on your ISP for DDoS protection is a bad idea

A distributed denial of service DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to make an online service unavailable to users, usually by temporarily interrupting or suspending the services of its hosting server. Once thought of as prankish annoyance, DDoS attacks today are often a tool for cybercriminals to...

Imperva mitigated its largest attack as a provider of DDoS protection

In July, Imperva mitigated its largest attack as a provider of DDoS protection, and one of the largest DDoS attacks so far in 2021. The attack lasted for 40 minutes and generated a massive throughput of 1.02 terabytes per second Tbps and 155 million packets per second Mpps. Imperva also mitigated...

The SysAdmin Class for the World’s Greatest Role-Playing Game

If you’re not sure what a System Administrator SysAdmin does, this is the person in your company or possibly an external contractor who fearlessly oversees the maintenance, care, configuration, and stable operation of your computers and servers. It’s your SysAdmin who is responsible for the...

Machine Learning Testing for Data Scientists

In one software development project after another, it has been proven that testing saves time. Does this hold true for machine learning projects? Should data scientists write tests? Will it make their work better and/or faster? We believe the answer is YES! In this post we describe a full...

Logging: A Deep Dive

Our RASP product At Imperva our team builds a product called RASP which stands for Runtime Application Self Protection. As indicated by the name, it is a security product which plugs directly into the runtime of an application in order to provide a similar and complementary set of capabilities as...

How to build a security-first culture with remote teams

If recent world events have driven an increase in the number of remote workers in your organization, you are now confronted by even more security challenges for already stretched security teams and busy IT departments. Sixty-one percent of CISOs are more concerned about security risks targeting...

Four features your data-centric security strategy must provide

Each year, the number of data breaches grows by 30%, underscoring the need for organizations to make data-centric security a business priority. Following the big data movement around the beginning of the 21st century, technological innovations have enabled companies to manage, store and process...

How to leverage accountability to ensure sustainable enterprise data security

As post-pandemic economic recovery continues to drive rapid acceleration in digital transformation, documented data breaches and service disruptions caused by cybercriminal activity have become an unwelcome part of our daily news feed. In spite of the regulations and compliance requirements that...

Bad bot activity on sports betting websites rises during Euro 2020

Across Europe, the EURO 2020 tournament captivated fans over the past month, with Italy ultimately defeating England to take home the cup on July 11. As fans eagerly watched the matches, Imperva Research Labs was busy monitoring activity that wasn’t happening on the playing field -- but across a...

Game Over: How to Stop DDoS Attacks on Online Gamers

You’re just about to take out a long-time rival, claim Victory Royale or round out a royal flush when your ping spikes or you’re DCed. Chances are you, or the game you’re playing, have been hit by a denial of service DoS attack. What’s the story? A recent report cited that of all cyber attacks...

How to Empower Employees to be Secure and Productive

How can CISOs make cybersecurity positive, productive, inclusive, and maintain best practices across the enterprise? -- Do your staff feel valued and important in their roles? More than 65 percent of employees report they do not feel recognized at work, and 31 percent say theyre "engaged but feel...

Moving to AWS Lambda? Here’s what you need to know.

Serverless computing is transforming the way organizations build, ship, automate and scale applications. With no need to worry about infrastructure or who’s going to manage it, developers are free to focus on application development and innovation. The payoffs can be significant: Faster time to...

Oracle Auditing Part 3: Unified Auditing

This is the third, and last, article on the topic of Oracle auditing. It is relevant to Oracle 12c only. With Unified Auditing, Oracle simplified the task of auditing activities in a modern database environment, and rather than having to learn multiple methods, patterns, and techniques for both...

Oracle Auditing Part 1: Standard Auditing

This is the first of three articles on the topic of Oracle auditing. It is relevant to Oracle 10g, 11g, and 12c, although Unified Auditing in 12c makes some of this content irrelevant if you choose to use Pure Unified Auditing. Unified Auditing will be covered in the third part of this series...

Five Common Myths about Ransom DoS Attacks

Did you know that 86% of organizations surveyed in CyberEdge’s Cyberthreat Defense Report this year were compromised by cyberattacks? Since the first known incident in 1989, ransom DoS attacks have become increasingly sophisticated over time. If you are not well versed on the potential threats th...

Oracle Auditing Part 2: Mandatory and Fine-Grained Auditing

This is the second of three articles on the topic of Oracle auditing. It is relevant to Oracle 10g, 11g, and 12c, although Unified Auditing in 12c makes some of this content irrelevant if you choose to use Pure Unified Auditing. Unified Auditing will be covered in the third part of this series an...

What Are Red Team Exercises and Why Are They Important?

Pick a side. It’s game time, and nothing is off the table. -- For most organizations, a true defense-in-depth strategy includes the proactive testing of company cyber defenses. A Red Team Exercise is designed to reveal vulnerabilities in a companys security through hands-on testing, uncovering...

Top 8 Database Security Best Practices

There is a large body of knowledge on what activities are required in order to secure databases and in order to comply with regulations and requirements. We’ve gathered the top 8 best practices for ensuring database security. Databases are arguably the most important and, unfortunately, also the...

Security for Amazon Redshift

We’ll show you how to set up basic monitoring of AWS Redshift using their native security features, including how to set up a Redshift instance, creating S3 buckets, and shipping the audit logs to Cloudwatch. Basic security for Amazon Redshift can be accomplished through standard AWS security...

Security Auditing for MongoDB on Atlas

MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL database that provides high performance, high availability, and easy scalability. To many, it is the leader in the NoSQL space. MongoDB Atlas was launched in June of 2016 and provides MongoDB as a database-as-a-service DBaaS. Atlas provides all of the features...

Securely Managing Entitlement of S3 Resources

Here we’ll talk about securely managing entitlements of S3 resources including managing access control to S3 objects and utilizing audit logging to keep track of the usage of shared resources. Amazon’s AWS services allow for accounts to grant access to resources from other accounts on AWS. This...

Compliance When Migrating to the Cloud: SQL Server Running on Azure vs. On- Premise

In the age of the data era, where data storage is increasing at an exponential rate and access to information is getting easier and faster, data security is a major concern. There are many cases where we can’t prevent people from accessing data, but we can track and investigate suspicious...

Azure SQL Database Security: 9 Features You Should Know

Databases are where organizations hold their “crown jewels” – their data. If you’re running or looking to run SQL on Azure, Azure provides security for the physical, logical, and data layers of services. Basic Azure SQL database security can be enabled using a variety of native security features...

Why You’re Not Making the Leap from Compliance to a Database Security Strategy

Gartner strongly recommends that the concept of “big data strategy” should be replaced with “making big data part of our everyday strategy.” Technology has created a database activity explosion for most enterprises and made traditional agent-based data logging, monitoring, and auditing far too...

jSonar to Begin a New Chapter in Collaboration

A message from JSonar co-founder and CTO, Ron Bennatan. My wife complains that I’m a boring person. I’ve been doing the same thing for 25 years now – databases, then security, then database security, then data security and then some data lake security. But by that account Tom Brady is a boring...

Five Tips to Impress at Your CISO Job Interview

Chief Information Security Officers CISOs are in demand and the lack of experienced candidates, coupled with the evolving required skill set, helped make it the highest paying tech job in 2020. With 100% of large corporations Fortune 500, Global 2000 forecast to have a CISO or equivalent position...

Mitigating attacks in serverless environments

Serverless computing has become the fastest-growing segment in the cloud services market. The benefits are clear and significant: cost savings and lower operational overhead, giving development teams full control over code and flexibility in the infrastructure. This also means that, in terms of...

Do CAPTCHAs work and what’s the alternative?

We know youre busy, so the answer is “No”. Users want less friction, and a good bot detection and mitigation solution will do the job MUCH better. The first lesson on the first day of UI school is that users want the path of least resistance. While the gamification of cybersecurity does have a...

Gartner report recommends a smart approach to enterprises needing to incorporate data privacy capabilities to manage evolving regulatory guidelines

In a recent Gartner report The State of Privacy and Personal Data Protection, 2020-2022, the authors assume that “through 2022, privacy-driven spending on compliance tooling will increase to more than US$8 billion worldwide. By 2023, 65 percent of the world’s population will have its personal...

Infographic: Bad Bot Sophistication Levels

All bad bots interact with applications in the same way a legitimate user would, making them harder to detect and block. They enable high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks on your websites, mobile apps, and APIs. They allow bot operators, attackers, unsavory competitors, and fraudsters to perform ...

Top five insights from the 2021 CyberEdge Cyberthreat Defense Report

For the last eight years, the Cyberthreat Defense Report has been helping enterprise security professionals gauge their internal practices and security investments against their peers across multiple countries and industries. The report is based upon data from 1,200 qualified IT security...

Know your enemy! The four types of cyber attackers trying to breach your security today

As business needs compel organizations to manage an ever-increasing number of database types, both on-premise and in the cloud, the threat surface has also become larger and far more difficult to manage effectively. The bad actors out there know this, too. They are constantly probing, testing, an...

How to Create a Simulated Phishing Attack Across Your Company

Email is one of the many weapons at the disposal of bad actors on the Internet, and your employees are in the firing line. Attackers try to hide behind a trusted entity, sometimes even masquerading as a known vendor or even as a representative of a group within your own organization, like HR or I...

Infographic: How Do You Stop Bad Bots?

According to Imperva’s Bad Bot Report 2021, bad bot traffic has maintained its upwards trend, amounting to 25.6 percent of all traffic in 2020, an all-time high. Combined with good bot traffic, 40.8 percent of internet traffic in 2020 wasn’t human, as human traffic decreased by 5.7 percent to 59....

Lessons Learned from 100 Data Breaches: Part 4, Trends in Average Volumes of Stolen Records

Imperva research shows an increase in the volume of data stolen every year. In 2020, we started to see more and more breaches that exfiltrate records in billions. Based on the analysis of thousands of data breach details published on dbdigest, we made calculations on the raw data and found some...

Imperva delivers mile high performance and protection with new PoPs in Denver and Dublin

We are very pleased to announce that we are extending our global coverage with the addition of two new PoPs points of presence in Denver in the US and Dublin, Ireland. The new PoPs will enhance Imperva’s existing network to provide enhanced protection against distributed denial of service DDoS...

Lessons Learned from 100 Data Breaches: Part 3, Securing Public Cloud Services

In the first two parts of this series, we gained insight into what specific types of data get stolen and what the root causes of breaches are, based on data breach information that Imperva’s Security Labs’ gathered, studied, and analyzed over the last ten years. You can get the full report, Lesso...

Infographic: What Are Bad Bots Doing?

By now, anyone with even a passing interest in how the Web functions has heard of bots. Most people understand that there are good and bad bots. Legitimate bots like Googlebot, an application used by Google to crawl the Internet and index it for search, and others like it represent tremendous...

Analysis of 100 Data Breaches: Part 2, What are the root causes of breaches?

As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, Imperva’s Security Labs continuously monitor cyber threat levels around the world and report on them. In the last post, we reported the breakdown of the specific types of data that get stolen and explained what organizations needed to do to mitigate the...

Bad bots continue to evolve. Your mitigation strategy should, too.

With the global pandemic continuing to catalyze digitalization, we’ve seen two years worth of digital transformation take place in a mere two months, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Clearly, bad actors are capitalizing on the opportunities that digital transformation creates, as more da...

Lessons Learned from 100 Data Breaches: Part 1, What Specific Types of Data Get Stolen?

As part of Imperva’s Security Labs’ ongoing efforts to monitor and report on the current Application and Data Security Threat landscape, we studied and analyzed over 100 of the largest and best-known data breaches of the last decade. Download the full report, Lessons Learned From Analyzing 100 Da...

Making Diversity and Inclusion a Business Imperative at Imperva

To create meaningful change, you need to be the difference you wish to see in the world. At Imperva, we’re taking meaningful action and investing to create a workplace that brings together all voices, experiences and identities. We recognize that true innovation requires diversity of thought,...

Is It Time to Consider Replacing Your CDN?

Content delivery networks CDNs are the pipelines of the Internet. Working behind the scenes, they are reshaping how information is consumed online, accelerating web traffic, enhancing user experience, and providing every website with the ability to truly go global. As you may imagine, any...

Infographic: How Are Bad Bots Hurting Your Business?

Bad bots are software applications which run automated tasks with malicious intent over the internet. They scrape data from sites without permission in order to reuse it and gain a competitive edge e.g. pricing, inventory levels, proprietary content, etc.. They are used for scalping, the act of...

Gaining Insights Is Fundamental for API Security

As enterprises continue their digital transformation journey in this Post-COVID era, applications are the engine that drives their business growth. Whether it’s a digital-first enterprise or one that is accelerating its digital transformation initiatives, APIs are not only opening up systems so...

Imperva’s WAF Gateway 14.4 Protects Enterprises for the Post-COVID Era

Whether it’s called the New Normal or Next Normal era, COVID-19 has impacted all businesses worldwide and accelerated their digital transformation initiatives during this new post-pandemic era. Whether it’s from a recent retail trend like omnichannel commerce or a newly defined, post-COVID practi...