The ultimate goal of Identity Security is to provide secure access to every identity for any resource or environment, from any location, using any device. Yet ever-evolving technology and dynamic threats can make executing a comprehensive Identity Security program a complex undertaking. According to the new Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research report “The Holistic Identity Security Maturity Model,” most organizations (42%) are still in the early days of their Identity Security journeys. Understanding your business’s current Identity Security maturity in relation to its ideal state is vital because, in the words of Henry Kissinger, “If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.”

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Zero Trust.

You’ve heard about it. A lot. But there are quite a few nuances when it comes to how Zero Trust security is defined and discussed. Is it a platform or a principle? It’s one of those terms that’s so widely cited that it has the tendency these days to elicit eye rolls within the cybersecurity industry and to be referred to as a buzzword by those sitting at the cool kids’ lunch table.

At its core, though, Zero Trust is a strategic cybersecurity model enabled to protect modern digital business environments, which increasingly include public and private clouds, SaaS applications, DevOps, and robotic process automation (RPA). It’s a critical framework, and every organization should adopt it and understand the fundamentals of how it works. Identity-based Zero Trust solutions like single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) are designed to ensure that only authorized individuals, devices, and applications can access an organization’s systems and data.

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A cybercriminal group has been compromising enterprise networks for the past two months and has been deploying a new ransomware program that researchers dubbed CACTUS. In the attacks seen so far the attackers gained access by exploiting known vulnerabilities in VPN appliances, moved laterally to other systems, and deployed legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools to achieve persistence on the network.

“The name ‘CACTUS’ is derived from the filename provided within the ransom note, cAcTuS.readme.txt, and the self-declared name within the ransom note itself,” researchers with Kroll Cyber Threat Intelligence said in a new report. “Encrypted files are appended with .cts1, although Kroll notes the number at the end of the extension has been observed to vary across incidents and victims. Kroll has observed exfiltration of sensitive data and victim extortion over the peer-to-peer messaging service known as Tox, but a known victim leak site was not identified at the time of analysis.”

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