Top Five Trends IT Security Pros Need to Think About Going into 2018

It’s that time of the year when we look back at the tech trends of 2017 to provide us with a hint of things to come. Accordingly, let’s engage in our favorite end-of-year pastime: predictions about the coming year. Equipped with Imperva’s own research, interactions with our customers, and a wealt...

Women in Tech and Career Spotlight: Inna Shalom

The latest in our series featuring women in tech at Imperva is my interview with Inna Shalom, the data insight team lead at Imperva. She spoke about her professional journey and experience working in the cybersecurity industry. Tell us how you got into cybersecurity. IS: I spent the first six yea...

Imperva’s Top 10 Blogs of 2017

I recently took a step back to review all the content we shared in 2017 on the Imperva blog. We covered a broad range of topics including data security, cloud migration, application and API security, AI and machine learning, cybersecurity research, GDPR, insider threats and more. We were busy!...

Botnets, Breaches, and the End of Defense in Depth: Our 2017 Cybersecurity Predictions in Review

As 2016 closed out, Imperva once again peered into its crystal ball. As usual, there was much to foretell regarding the ever-changing cybersecurity realm in 2017. We’ll be doing the same soon as we look ahead into 2018. But before we do, we like to assess how accurate we were against the...

DevOps in the Cloud: How Data Masking Helps Speed Development, Securely

Many articles have discussed the benefits of DevOps in the cloud. For example, the centralization of cloud computing provides DevOps automation with a standard platform for testing and development; the tight integration between DevOps tools and cloud platforms lowers the cost associated with...

Women in Tech and Career Spotlight: Shiri Margel

This month we’ll be closing out our series featuring women in tech at Imperva. While I work closely with many of the women we’ve spotlighted, I’ve found learning more about their backgrounds so interesting—I hope you have too! Continuing in the series, I spoke with Shiri Margel, team lead in the...

The Forrester Wave Ranks Imperva as a Leader for DDoS Mitigation Providers

Imperva has tracked the DDoS threat for some time now. Back in 2014 we saw the rise of DDoS botnets. In 2015, we revealed one of the first IoT-based DDoS attacks. Last year, we predicted and then documented one of the largest botnet-based DDoS attacks. DDoS mitigation, as it turns out, is the...

Data Masking 101 – Whiteboard Wednesday [Video]

Data masking is an effective way to protect a large majority of your organization’s data. It replaces original data with realistic, but fictional data—reducing production data sprawl and your attack surface footprint, while maintaining the data's use for things like development, analytics modelin...

Q3 2017 Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report

Today we are releasing our latest Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report, a statistical analysis of 5,765 network and application layer DDoS attacks mitigated by Imperva Incapsula services during Q3 2017. Before diving into the report’s highlights, it should be mentioned that this quarter was marked...

Database Security at Cloud Scale

The biggest challenge to data security is the sheer volume and pace of data growth. More so even than the shift from relational data to unstructured or the migration of data to the cloud. “Cloud scale” is usually used to refer to technical items like data center size and operations or networks an...

Build-Your-Own Data Masking. Yes or No?

A lot of organizations are taking great strides to protect their sensitive data with a multi-layered strategy—one that includes data masking. We’ve even seen many tackling this critical data security component in DIY fashion, often tasking one resource with developing and implementing scripts to...

Six Ways to Secure APIs

API usage in application development has become the trend of the year. Adoption of micro-services and server-less architectures have only accelerated this trend. Based on conversations with analysts and customers, we expect APIs to become the majority of web application front ends in next couple ...

Good Bots In. Bad Bots Out.

More than half of Internet traffic today comes from bots. These non-human visitors crawl the web constantly, their numbers are increasing, and they are getting smarter and more human-like by the minute. Imperva has been tracking these trends for more than five years, in an ongoing statistical stu...

Women in Tech and Career Spotlight: Shu White

Up next in our series featuring women in technology at Imperva is a spotlight on Shu White, the company’s vice president and deputy general counsel. Hailing from a legal background, I found her perspective particularly unique. Read below for Shu’s take on the cybersecurity industry, the inspiring...

Will AI Change the Role of Cybersecurity?

Mention artificial intelligence AI and security and a lot of people think of Skynet from The Terminator movies. Sure enough, at a recent Bay Area Cyber Security Meetup group panel on AI and machine learning, it was moderator Alan Zeichick – technology analyst, journalist and speaker – who first...

How Reputation Intelligence Improves Application Security

Reputation intelligence is information about cyber entities known for specific activity, whether malicious or benign, which can be fed to and actioned on by a web application firewall WAF. It provides an additional application security layer by effectively identifying and blocking threats from...

Women in Tech and Career Spotlight: Luda Lazar

For National Cyber Security Awareness Month my colleague Joy Ma kicked off the first in of a series of articles where we’ll be spotlighting some of the women who work at Imperva. Continuing in the series, I spoke with Luda Lazar, security research engineer for the Imperva Defense Center, to get h...

Can a License Solve Your Cloud Migration Problem?

No, but it can certainly reduce friction. Cloud adoption is no longer an if, but a when. Even Gartner says there’s no such thing as a ‘no cloud policy.’ The winds of technology change are blowing, but no enterprise is talking about 100% cloud adoption in the near term. Hybrid IT environments are...

Cloud WAF Versus On-Premises WAF

“The Times They Are a Changin’”, Bob Dylan knew it in 1964 and what was true then is even move true today. There continues to be ongoing debate on web application firewalls WAFs, specifically which is better for the enterprise—on-premises solutions or those in the ever-changing cloud. When...

Machine Learning: Identify the Unpredictable – Whiteboard Wednesday [Video]

When it comes to identifying insider threats, the fundamental challenge is how to determine when data access appears out of the ordinary for a typical user or system, and of those instances, which ones are dangerous versus merely unusual. A lot of solutions today serve up so many policy violation...

Critical Infrastructure and Cyber Security

Before the recent natural disasters, I could describe to you how we as a community might recover after a cyberattack to our critical infrastructure, but it would be hard to imagine. Some may argue that it would be too extreme of a scenario to consider and that we would never get to the point wher...

Women in Tech and Career Spotlight: Michal Pal

We continue our articles focusing on the themes of National Cyber Security Awareness Month with the first of a series of articles spotlighting some of the women who work at Imperva. I spoke to Michal Pal, automation group manager for the Imperva Incapsula product line and got to know about what...

Detecting Data Breaches: Why Understanding Database Types Matters

Different data characteristics and access patterns found in different database systems lead to different ways of detecting suspicious data access, which are indicators of potential data breaches. To accurately detect data access abuse we need to classify the database processing type. Is it a...

Protecting Xero’s Cloud-Based Accounting Platform from Cyber Attacks

Meeting with customers is always insightful, and recently I got a chance to sit down with Aaron McKeown, head of security engineering and architecture at Xero, to talk about how they use Imperva SecureSphere for their cloud-hosted applications. Founded in 2006, Xero provides cloud accounting...

Monitor More, Worry Less. Outpace Threats With Machine Learning.

In the past two years, enterprises have created more data than has been created in the entire history of humankind. At scale, securing this amount of data requires a re-think of how we grant and revoke access to sensitive files and, more importantly, how we identify and track the inevitable acces...

Tuning Capacity Tips for SecureSphere Database Activity Monitoring

You have Imperva SecureSphere Database Activity Monitoring DAM up and running. You’ve deployed the system and configured your business audit policies. So, what’s next? In a previous post I discussed the capacity management challenges of database monitoring solutions, in this post I’ll elaborate o...

Today’s Predictions for Tomorrow’s Internet

This weekend I realized just how much the future of securing the Internet of Things IoT will become a critical component to maintain our lifestyle. CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program created by the Air Force Association to encourage careers in STEM. Each year the program...

Ransomware Attacks on MySQL and MongoDB

Ransomware is arguably one of the most vicious types of attack cyber security experts are dealing with today. The impact ransomware attacks can have on an organization is huge and costly. A ransomware payment alone does not reflect the total expense of an attack—the more significant costs come fr...

Bo Knows Security – Whiteboard Wednesday [Video]

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month NCSAM and to address this week's theme of "Cybersecurity in the Workplace is Everyone’s Business" our Whiteboard Wednesday this month features Bo Kim, head of information security at Imperva. When it comes to building a security program, focusing...

How to Protect AWS ECS with SecureSphere WAF

Adoption of container technology is growing widely. More and more workloads are being transferred from traditional EC2 compute instances to container-based services. However, the need for securing the web traffic remains the same regardless of the elected platform. In this post, we’ll deep dive...

Q2 2017 Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report

This week we released our latest Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report, a statistical analysis of more than 15,000 network and application layer DDoS attacks mitigated by Imperva Incapsula services during Q2 2017. This quarter, for the fifth one in a row, we saw a decrease in the number of network...

Professional Services for GDPR Compliance

The GDPR effective date is less than seven months away and the stakes are high. GDPR non-compliance penalties have the potential to be quite significant up to 79 times higher than existing guidelines, and GDPR applies to any organization of any size that collects or processes personal data...

Practical Tips for Personal Online Security

As a cybersecurity professional I write about enterprise security on a daily basis. But with the start of National Cyber Security Awareness Month NCSAM I was inspired to switch gears and write about personal security given this week’s theme of simple steps to online safety for consumers. So, with...

GDPR Requirements: Get Started with Classifier

The GDPR requires that organizations exhibit commitment to individuals’ data privacy by implementing a data protection by design and by default approach, meaning organizations need to build privacy and protection into their products, services, and applications. GDPR also mandates that organizatio...

Building a Security Risk Management Program

The frequency of data breaches today highlights the need to peel back the onion on security programs and identify a laser-focused mission and ultimate goal. As a compliance manager, I know the horror stories first hand. Let’s take a deeper dive into security and risk management basics to enable...

How to Deploy SecureSphere WAF on Azure

If you host apps in the cloud, then you need security in the cloud. The Imperva SecureSphere Web Application Firewall WAF identifies and acts upon dangers maliciously woven into innocent-looking website traffic, both on-premises and in the cloud, such as: Blocking technical attacks such as SQL...

Apache Struts, RCE and Managing App Risk

People used to argue about whether cyber security is a business problem or a technical problem. But this frames the issue poorly. “Problem” and “solution” imply that there is a definitive “solve.” Cybercrime isn’t a technical problem that can be definitively solved. It is an inherent business ris...

Three Ways to Use Data Classification Scan Results

In July we launched Classifier, a free data classification tool that allows you to quickly and easily uncover sensitive data in your databases. Since its launch, the tool has been widely used around the globe, which comes as no surprise given the heightened focus on data protection. Furthermore,...

Encryption: Pros and Cons

The expression “when you are a hammer, everything is a nail” has a curious background. The concept belongs to a generalized law of the instrument which is a cognitive bias that occurs by being overly familiar with certain tools, and the likelihood of force-fitting problems to the tools at hand. A...

CVE-2017-9805: Analysis of Apache Struts RCE Vulnerability in REST Plugin

Just two months ago we published an analysis of a critical remote code execution RCE security vulnerability in Apache Struts. Now Apache Struts has published a new version fixing yet another critical RCE vulnerability September 5, 2017. CVE-2017-9805 is a vulnerability in Apache Struts related to...

Sensitive Data Access: Where Traditional UBA Solutions Fall Short – Whiteboard Wednesday [Video]

In today’s global information economy an ever-increasing amount of sensitive data is collected, used, exchanged, analyzed, and retained. And with that comes an ever-increasing number of accidental or intentional data breaches. Identifying inappropriate access to data is paramount in stopping a...

Managing Security in a DevOps Environment

DevOps is a software development practice in which development and operations engineers collaborate during the entire product lifecycle. With the adoption of DevOps at mainstream levels, we now see security starting to take a bigger role in DevOps’ day-to-day responsibilities. From a security...

Data Protection and the GDPR Job Market

The May 2018 deadline for full GDPR compliance will be upon us all before we know it. The GDPR will affect all organizations—regardless of their location—that handle personal data coming out of the EU. Article 37 of the GDPR requires organizations to retain a data protection officer DPO if, among...

Analysis of Ronggolawe Ransomware and How to Block It

In the last few years ransomware attacks have been significantly on the rise. This infamous trend began by targeting end point users’ machines, such as personal desktop and laptops. Later, it evolved and broadened the attack surface to target mobile phones and servers. Web Servers Not Immune to...

Five Tips for Getting Started with Scuba Database Vulnerability Scanner

Scuba is a free tool that scans leading enterprise databases for security vulnerabilities and configuration flaws, including patch levels, that allows you to uncover potential database security risks. It includes more than 2,300 assessment tests for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP Sybase, IBM D...

Addressing Data Across Borders for the GDPR

Most enterprises today do business across the globe, have databases in multiple countries and DBAs or users in different regions who have access to those databases. With GDPR mandating privacy requirements for personal data of European Union EU residents and visitors, it is important for an...

How to Protect AWS API Gateway with SecureSphere WAF

Serverless architectures are becoming more and more popular, and Amazon’s API Gateway service is a key factor in many serverless deployments on AWS. Currently API Gateway only supports a public CloudFront endpoint, and securing the API Gateway with high-end WAF protection may seem like a difficul...

A Leader for Four Consecutive Years in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAFs

Gartner has published their 2017 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls WAF and Imperva has again been named a WAF leader—now for four consecutive years. Attacks remain same, but infrastructure is changing According to 2017 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, web app attacks remain t...

Do’s and Don’ts of Capacity Estimation for Database Monitoring Tools

When deploying a database monitoring tool, one of the first things you need to do is to determine the size of your deployment. So, where do you start? In a previous blog post I described the various aspects that can have an impact on the capacity requirements needed for a database monitoring...

Challenges of Big Data Security – Whiteboard Wednesday [Video]

Database security best practices are also applicable for big data environments. The question is how to achieve security and compliance for big data environments given the challenges they present. Issues of volume, scale, and multiple layers/technologies/instances make for a uniquely complex...