7 Ways Good Data Security Practices Drive Data Governance

As more organizations continue with digital transformation plans, their ability to be good stewards of the data for which they are responsible becomes more difficult. They are generating more data, more data types, in more repositories, in more and different architectures. Every day, organization...

Three Keys to Securing Shadow Data

What is shadow data? Shadow data is any data contained anywhere in your entire data repository that is not visible to the tools you use to monitor and log data access. Shadow data may include: Customer data that DevOps teams copied into an unknown database to test applications they are developing...

PCI DSS Tackles Client-Side Attacks: Everything You Need to Know About Complying With PCI 6.4.3

Client-side attacks often referred to as Magecart attacks have been around since as early as 2015 and dramatically gained in popularity when the global pandemic accelerated digital transformation, by driving more people and data online. Now the fight against these attacks is stepping up a notch...

Five Steps to Integrating a Data Repository Vulnerability Assessment Into A WAF–Driven Vulnerability Management Program

A vulnerability assessment is a systematic review of security weaknesses in an information system. It evaluates if the system is susceptible to any known vulnerabilities, assigns severity levels to those vulnerabilities, and recommends remediation or mitigation, if and whenever needed. There are...

Why the Search for Best-Of-Breed Tooling is Causing Issues for Security Teams

The growing need to consolidate vendor portfolios The adoption of best-of-breed security solutions has led to unforeseen problems for SOCs. Onboarding a new solution increases complexity; it requires configuration, integration with existing tools, fine-tuning policies, and the ability to create...

Imperva Is a Magic Quadrant Leader for Web Application and API Protection (again)

With the summer coming to a close we are now entering into “Magic Quadrant” season for the application security market and this means the latest edition of the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Web and API Protection. Well, we are pleased with the result because once again Imperva has been...

Imperva Boosts Connectivity with New PoP in Manila

We are delighted to announce the addition of a new Imperva Point of Presence PoP in the Asia Pacific region with the opening of our new data center in Manila, Philippines. The new location brings our total number of PoPs in Asia to 15, significantly boosting our presence in the region and providi...

Are you getting the most out of your security platform investment?

In the last few years, most organizations had to accelerate their digital transformation to continue operations during the pandemic. However, as more software, applications, and data architectures were added to the technology stack, the number of tools implemented to secure these assets became...

Two New Trends Make Early Breach Detection and Prevention a Security Imperative

Key signs to look for in today’s complex data threat landscape Introduction The most vulnerable data repositories are the ones deep in your organization’s infrastructure. Everyone assumes they are safe, but as with your home, organizations must invest in security at entry points. Otherwise, the...

How to Support Agile Development Through Cybersecurity Best Practices

Understanding other peoples problems It’s often said that people only notice cybersecurity when it fails, or when it gets in the way of them doing their jobs. Organizations, and especially software development teams, want to be able to develop quickly and easily to stay ahead of their competition...

Calculate Splunk Ingestion Costs Savings when Pre-Processing Data Repository Logs with Imperva DSF

If you use Splunk to ingest all your data for security analytics, you likely recognize it as one of the greatest indexing tools ever created. With Splunk, your security teams get a real-time view of machine data from the network, data center, or IT environments. Many enterprises also use Splunk t...

Imperva Data Security Fabric Wins 2022 SC Media Trust Award for Data Security

SC Media has announced the winners of their 2022 SC Awards, with 38 companies, executives, and security solutions selected by their panel of judges as the best of the year. We are thrilled to report that ​Imperva Data Security Fabric has earned the 2022 SC Media Trust Award for Data Security. For...

Enable Security Teams to Leverage Machine Learning Technologies

As on-premises and cloud-hosted data repositories get larger, they are outstripping the ability of traditional data-crunching methods to efficiently analyze the information. As a result, more enterprises have turned to data science and machine learning platforms to create business value. The...

The Five Principles of a Zero Trust Cybersecurity Model

When even the US Government concludes that to ensure baseline security practices are in place and to realize the security benefits of cloud-based infrastructure while mitigating associated risks, they must migrate to a zero trust model, every organization should be actively moving in that...

“Don’t touch that server. Ralf set that up, and we don’t know what it does.”

Based on a true story… More than a couple of decades ago, I went to work for a network and web company as their customer marketing department. It was a crazy time. Online marketing was all about getting on DMOZ, Lycos was still a puppy, asking Jeeves felt like talking to an AI, and how you laid o...

In the Fight Against DDoS Attacks, not all PoPs are Created Equal

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. A DDoS attack is launched from numerous compromised devices, often distributed globally in what ...

Three Keys to Turning Data-centric Security Theory into Practice

Most cybersecurity professionals agree that as more organizations move data and applications to cloud-hosted environments, traditional measures focusing on protecting IT infrastructures are not up to the task. In fact, according to Crowd Research Partners, 84 percent of organizations say...

Cybersecurity and PR: Making Data Protection Public

The customer cares Customers regularly see news about privacy and hacking, and they want to know that it’s safe for them to give over their personal data. A lack of trust in an eCommerce site is a leading reason why potential customers abandon their shopping carts. Consumers have no shortage of...

What we know about VMWare CVE-2022–31656 and CVE-2022–31659

Takeaways: VMWare Workspace ONE vulnerabilities CVE-2022-31656 and CVE-2022-31659 work in tandem to allow a remote attacker with network access to conduct remote code execution on the server. Imperva Threat Research has seen a sharp rise in attacks since a POC was published on August 9, mostly...

Is it Illegal to Scrape a Website for Content?

Web scraping is the process of using bots to extract information from a website. In recent years, the debate over web scraping is growing more complex as business intelligence and data privacy issues arise. The practice of web scraping has gone on for nearly as long as there have been websites. T...

Why Cybersecurity Needs to be a Part of Your ESG

What is an ESG? Environmental, social, and corporate governance ESG documentation is a way to visualize and evaluate how an organization is working for the betterment of social goals and how that organization is responding to the cry for greener, more aware, and more responsible, sustainable...

Five Data Security Controls and Processes you Must Bring to Cloud-native Infrastructures

Too frequently, there are significant misunderstandings in organizations with regard to who has the responsibility to protect cloud-hosted data. In Imperva’s recent report, A Data-Centric Cybersecurity Framework for Digital Transformation, IT analyst and author Richard Stiennon explains what...

Research Shows the Annual Cost of API Security-related Breaches is Mind-blowing

Application Programming Interfaces APIs have emerged as useful tools that streamline business operations and enhance the digital experience for customers. As their use has become more widespread, they are a much more prominent part of the cyber threat landscape. API-related hacks and data breache...

The Three Key Competencies that Optimize Data Security Orchestration

One of the principal benefits of a modern data-centric security fabric is being able to automatically apply security controls to the data itself and drive policy-compliant data handling behavior by privileged users. But we all know that detecting a security incident is just the first part of the...

US Websites Targeted by 40% of the Bad Bot Traffic Worldwide

Bad bot attacks are often the first indicator of fraudulent activity targeting your website. This activity may be over-the-top, like validating stolen user credentials and credit card information to later be sold on the dark web or scraping proprietary data to gain a competitive advantage. Bot...

What is Dark Data, and how can we find it?

What is “dark data”? The term “dark data” refers to “any information assets that organizations collect, process, and store during regular business activities but generally fail to use for other purposes” Gartner. Often retained for compliance reasons, this data can also include past employee...

How Organizations Manage to Understand Millions of Unstructured Data Files at Scale

For an ever-growing segment of organizations, making sense of unstructured data is fast becoming imperative. It is also far more challenging. Unlike structured data that’s stored in rows and columns, text-based, and easy to search in relational databases and data warehouses, there is no defined...

Imperva Reaches New Heights as it Opens PoPs in Cape Town and Rio

Imperva is reaching new heights as we expand our global network of data centers with new points of presence PoPs in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Cape Town, South Africa. The two cities, often compared to each other for their many similarities including their breathtaking coastlines, white sandy...

Imperva Earns Three Cyber Defense Global InfoSec Awards for 2022

The Cyber Defense Awards in conjunction with Cyber Defense Magazine recently announced the winners of their prestigious annual Global Infosec Awards for 2022. We are proud to say that Imperva earned three Global Infosec Awards; as Most Innovative for Application Security, Cutting Edge for Cloud...

Four Main Reasons Shoppers Abandon eCommerce Carts

More than just window shopping eCommerce shopping cart abandonment causes brands a sobering USD 18 Billion in annual revenue Forrester Research. While rates differ by device, with mobile and tablet device users most likely to leave before completing their order, nearly 70 percent of shoppers dese...

Bots Hide Behind User Privacy – Should You Be Concerned?

Bot operators are perpetually devising innovative techniques to sneak past security as they go about their dubious, often downright illegal business. Emulating human behavior and traffic patterns are key elements of their strategy. One of the many layers comprising this strategy is reporting thei...

A Data-Centric Cybersecurity Framework for Digital Transformation

In this white paper A Cybersecurity Framework for Securing Cloud Data for Digital Transformation, analyst Richard Steinnon of IT Harvest explains that while cloud vendors supply a resilient and secure infrastructure, organizations who put data into the cloud are ultimately responsible for...

Multiple Imperva Products Earn 2022 Fortress Cyber Security Awards

In June, the Business Intelligence Group announced that three Imperva products have earned the 2022 Fortress Cyber Security Awards. The mission of this prestigious award program is to identify and reward leading companies and products globally that are successfully keeping data and electronic...

How to ‘Win’ a Red Team Exercise

What is a red team exercise? Organizations that conduct red team exercises use penetration testing tactics to assess vulnerabilities and discover weak points in their cybersecurity preparation. Usually, this involves two teams - one red the protagonists and one blue the incident responders who mu...

What is Steganography, and how can we Avoid it?

What is steganography? Steganography is, broadly, a type of covert communication involving the use of any medium to hide messages. Steganography is a relatively old technique of hiding ‘secret’ data in plain sight to avoid detection. Seeing a resurgence of late, bad actors are taking advantage of...

Top Challenges to Implementing Data Privacy: Nailing Down Discovery and Classification First is Key

Why Discover and Classify is so critical Ice hockey goal-scoring great Wayne Gretzky is reported to have said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” The data security version of this quip is “you protect zero percent of the data you can’t see” and the data privacy version is “if you...

Four Reasons why you Should Consider Contingency DDoS Protection

The experts agree that Imperva is solidly positioned as a leader in Distributed Denial of Service DDoS mitigation. Over our many years as leaders in this space, we have determined that no matter how reliable your current DDoS protection is, there is always a chance that your network infrastructur...

How to do Feature Selection Using Feature Contribution Data

Feature contribution is a method to give a weight to each feature that reflects its impact on the model’s prediction. Feature contribution can be calculated on an entire dataset or a single data point. In our previous blog post, we showed how to visualize feature contributions to make it easy to...

Anomaly Detection at Scale Using SQL and Facebook’s Prophet Forecasting Algorithm

Anomaly detection is a very important task. At Imperva we use it for threat hunting, risk analysis, risk mitigation, trends detection and more. In a previous post we showed how it can be done in a simple method by SQL. This time we wanted to use Prophet, which is an algorithm for forecasting time...

Fundamental Security Concepts and Best Practices Every Game Developer Should Know

Gaming is now the world’s favorite form of entertainment, with Newzoo reporting that by 2023 there will be more than three billion gamers across the planet. With the growth of multiplayer games, however, the number of cheaters has also increased. A study by The New York Times found that almost 50...

The Benefits of Including Static Data Masking in Your Security Arsenal

Static data masking SDM is defined as, “The act of permanently replacing sensitive data at rest with a realistic fictional equivalent for the purpose of protecting data from unwanted disclosure.” Industry analysts characterize SDM as a must-have data protection layer capable of protecting large...

New Waiting Room Solution Ensures Best Peak User Experience

New Imperva Waiting Room Enables Organizations to Deliver Consistent Optimal Website User Experiences During Peak Traffic Periods Organizations benchmark website success by the volume of legitimate traffic and online sales it generates. Website architects want to drive as many visitors as possibl...

The Role of the Cybersecurity Leader in 2022

Who does the modern CISO need to be? According to the 2021 Gartner, Inc. Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, the role of the chief information security officer CISO has to change in 2022 to combat the ever-evolving modern threat landscape. Eighty-eight percent of company...

How to Monitor Athena Usage to Understand Your Operations, and Control Security and Costs

Introduction to our data lakes experience Data lakes are great. They are flexible as they allow many object formats and multiple query engines. They are also cost effective - there is no need to manage or pay for resources like disks, cpu and memory. Data is simply stored in an object store and i...

How to Find Extra Cybersecurity Budget

Risk is up and budgets are down Organizational cybersecurity is a business issue, one could even say a finance issue, not just an IT issue. Gone are the days when cybersecurity was a luxury investment. Worldwide attacks are growing daily in frequency and complexity, regardless of the business siz...

ATO Attacks Targeting Financial Services Increased 58 Percent in May. Who Else Needs to Worry?

Account takeover ATO is a form of identity theft that cyber criminals use to get unauthorized access to the accounts of legitimate users through some kind of brute force method such as Credential Stuffing. In 2022, account takeover attacks are on the rise. In June for example, Imperva’s Threat...

Why a “Lift-and-shift” Cloud Migration Strategy Doesn’t Support Data Security

The classic 1982 Steven Spielberg horror film “Poltergeist” chronicles disturbing, unexplained paranormal activity happening in a suburban family’s idyllic home. As the activity becomes more sinister and terrifying, the family learns that their neighborhood was built on an old burial ground. It...

Five Ways the Gaming & Gambling Industry is Targeted by Bad Bots

Let’s play a game of chance: What are the odds that your gaming website is being targeted by bad bots? Imperva research suggests they’re higher than you may think. Imperva’s 2022 Bad Bot Report reveals that 53.9 percent of traffic to gaming and gambling websites comes from bad bots. With the...

How the Evolution of Agents has Been Essential for Modern Database Security

In today’s data driven world, every organization’s most important asset is their data. Accordingly and similarly to other protected components like applications, web and peripheral gateways, databases require a dedicated security solution as well. An essential database security solution must...

Determining “Need to share vs. Need to know” is a Cornerstone of a Data Protection Strategy

There is a paradox that lies at the heart of data security. Data itself only has real value if an organization can share it with stakeholders that need it to perform their roles. However, the more widely an organization shares data the greater the risks of the data being compromised. Data securit...