SANS Institute experts weigh in on the top threat vectors faced by enterprises and the public at large.
Ericka Chickowski, Contributing Writer May 14, 2024
RSA CONFERENCE 2024 – San Francisco – Only five months into 2024, and the year has been a busy one for cybersecurity practitioners, with multiyear supply chain attacks, nation-state actors exploiting multiple vulnerabilities in network gateways and edge devices, and multiple ransomware incidents against large healthcare entities. What’s ahead for the rest of year?
At last week’s RSA Conference, Ed Skoudis, president of the SANS Technology Institute, convened his annual panel of SANS Institute instructors and fellows to dig into topics that should be top of mind for cyber defenders for the remaining months of the year.
Security Impact of Technical Debt
The security cracks left behind by technical debt may not sound like a pressing new threat, but according to Dr. Johannes Ullrich, dean of research for SANS Technology Institute, the enterprise software stack is at an inflection point for cascading problems. What’s more, “It affects more and more not only just our enterprise applications, but also our security stack,” he said.
Technical debt is the accumulation of work in software engineering or system design that’s left undone or put off until tomorrow for the sake of getting a minimum viable product up and running today. The debt may be accrued intentionally to optimize for speed or cost reasons, or it could build up unintentionally due to immature software engineering practices. Either way, it tends to raise a ton of cybersecurity risks as the debt grows.
And according to Ullrich, the rising accrual of technical debt combined with the growing complexity of the software supply chain is increasing the profile of this threat vector.
“Even as a developer myself, it is very easy to say, ‘Hey, this new library doesn’t really have any new features and doesn’t fix any security vulnerabilities, so I’m not going to apply that update,” he says. “The problem is that five years from now, after you skip 10 to 15 different incremental updates, then the big security vulnerability hits that library and now you have to work through all of these little quirks that have added up over the years so you can fix it.”
Article (https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/top-5-most-dangerous-cyber-threats-in-2024?_mc=NL_DR_EDT_DR_weekly_20240516&cid=NL_DR_EDT_DR_weekly_20240516&sp_aid=123517&elq_cid=34964379&sp_eh=949bacdba1e2c4851acc11df0ff47140b1c6468716621bc723fe5fe498198bd9&sp_eh=949bacdba1e2c4851acc11df0ff47140b1c6468716621bc723fe5fe498198bd9&sp_cid=53519)
In my world of tech support it is happening with 98% of all manufacturers today Microsoft being the leader in my opinion.
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