by Rebeca | Mar 2, 2022 | cybersecurity, News, soffid
A digital signature is a mathematical technique used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software or digital document. Everywhere you can see the importance of digital signatures. The digital equivalent of a handwritten signature or stamped seal, but it offers far more inherent security. A digital signature solves the problem of tampering and identity theft in digital communications.
Digital signatures evidence the origin, identity and status of electronic documents, transactions or digital messages. Signers also use it to acknowledge informed consent.
Where lacks the importance of digital signatures?
In many countries, including the United States, digital signatures are considered legally binding. In the same way as traditional handwritten document signatures.
The use of “digital signatures” has exploded during the pandemic. Around the globe, people have changed how they travel, transact, and work. In the manufacturing sector, organizations have gravitated to hybrid work environments. In all these cases, this tool protects digital interactions and digital assets, from documents to software code.
Unfortunately, all of these digital assets remain at risk. Because the signing certificate expires. Fraudsters can make these certificates appear as if they are still valid. But time stamping services prevent forgeries. This process gains confidence in digital signatures.
Are digital signatures secure?
Yes, electronic signatures are safe. People often ask, “Can my digital signature be forged, misused, or copied?”. Furthermore, it is very easy to forge or manipulate wet signatures. Instead, electronic signatures have many layers of security and authentication built in. Therefore, its use is valid in legal proceedings.
The importance of a security-first approach to e-signatures
The level of e-signature security varies by provider, so it’s important to choose an e-signature provider that has robust security and protection weaved into every area of their business. Those security measures should include:
- Physical security: protects the systems and buildings where the systems reside
- Platform security: safeguards the data and processes that are stored in the systems
- Security certifications/processes: help ensure the provider’s employees and partners follow security and privacy best practices
Until now, digital signatures were useful as a tool only for internal company purposes. Consequently, online transactions and other processes use this tool. This tool allows transactions to be safe and smooth for both sellers and customers. Authentication is effective even if it is digital. Therefore, digital signatures are a form of authentication.
Learn all about digital identity.
Advantages of using digital signatures for online transactions
With such a structured way of working, this tool allows offer distinct advantages in securing online transactions.They are equipped with an ever-evolving array of technologies and advanced security systems. What are these advantages? Check out the list below.
- Minimize the risk of payment fraud
- Simplify contract execution
- Share data more securely
The development of the digital economy is currently a new phenomenon in global economic governance. Both in developed and developing countries. That is why the role of digital signatures in the new business economy is growing more and more.
References:
(1) Solution Review
(2) Docusign
(3) Techtarget
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by Rebeca | Feb 23, 2022 | cybersecurity, Resources, soffid
Cybersecurity has become much more complicated in recent years and that affects the digital trust of a company. The days when antivirus software and a network firewall were enough to get the job done are behind us. In the past, many IT professionals were very good at defending the perimeter to keep digital assets safe. But in today’s IT environment, such a perimeter does not exist.
Digital Trust in companies and its importance
With the rise of cloud computing, DevOps, the IoT and employees accessing systems with an array of devices from all over the world, the network “perimeter” has become difficult to define. In response, companies are shifting their attention to authentication. In response, companies are shifting their attention to authentication. Companies are moving away from traditional perimeter security methods in favor of strong identity-centric technology. As well as choosing digital certificates instead of public key infrastructure (PKI).
2021 was another memorable year. In fact, many organizations create remote processes in response to the pandemic. That’s why he spent this past year optimizing and hardening his systems. In this way they can guarantee a positive and safe experience for their client.
However, with identity theft, payment fraud, phishing, and other financial crimes at an all-time high, the work of digital security is never done. In an era of ever-present digital threats that can undermine and erode stakeholder trust, organizations should invest to earn “digital trust”. That is, protect their data and information from fraud and bad actors to safeguard their relationships, reputation, and revenue. This task could be more difficult than ever before as technology and the threats to digital trust it enables continue to evolve.
Requirements and details about digital trust and its importance
The stakes are high and any misstep can affect customer loyalty. In addition to negatively changing financial performance, brand value and ultimately undermining an organization’s ability to build and maintain trust. Surveys suggest that 81% of consumers lose trust in a brand after a breach. While 25% stop interacting with it altogether. The pandemic accelerated the move to digital work infrastructures. This drove spending on emerging technology security strategies and solutions.
It is important to note that addressing digital trust must include an end-to-end interdisciplinary approach between people. As well as between processes, governance and regulation, with technology being a key enabler. In this study, we focus on advanced technology enablers that organizations can explore, over and beyond existing cyber measures, to enhance digital trust.
Chief security officers should play a key role in building trust with customers, and that translates to better customer acquisition, greater customer loyalty, and more revenue.
Digital trust is the measure of consumer, partner and employee confidence in an organization’s ability to protect and secure data and the privacy of individuals. As data breaches become bigger and more common, digital trust can be a valuable commodity for companies that earn it, and it is starting to change the way management looks at security.
How to build trust with customers
Building trust is no simple task. As well as doing the normal security tasks of implementing the right technologies and processes to ensure good security posture, organizations need to communicate.
To help build trust, he says organizations need to be upfront and transparent with their customers. They should clearly explain what they are doing with data and why, be clear what data is being collected and what it will be used for, and explain what security steps and processes are in place to ensure it remains secure.
Final words about digital trust
For example, using multifactor authentication (MFA) is good security practice, but communicating why a customer is being asked to provide extra authentication during a transaction or process helps build that trust. “It’s important that a company demonstrates to their customers why they’re putting extra layers of security; say ‘we’re doing this because’ as opposed to ‘we’re doing this’.”
References:
(1) Deloitte
(2) security Solution
(3) Solution Review
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by Rebeca | Feb 16, 2022 | cybersecurity, soffid
At the heart of remote cybersecurity is Privileged Access Management (PAM). It’s the protection around sensitive and privileged user accounts, which are the crown jewels for cybercriminals. For the channel, PAM creates a new revenue stream and further business opportunities with their customers. It is true that having unrestricted access to clients’ IT estates is part and parcel for a service provider. But, it does pin a huge target on their backs.
Offering comprehensive PAM solutions will enable channel partners to secure, manage and monitor access to their own privileged accounts. As well as those of their clients, keeping the most valuable keys to their network safe.
Remote working is here to stay, and the channel is pivotal in supporting organisations in their efforts to maintain the best protection against cyber attacks. Whether they’re adopting a hybrid, or fully remote working model. Channel partners have a rich portfolio of security solutions. They are in the ideal position to facilitate these flexible models and provide organizations with the seamless IT support. Because they need to connect workers securely, irrespective of their location.
Privileged Access Management can provide partners with greater security not only for their clients but for their own accounts too
In today’s cyber environment, stolen and misused privileged accounts can be used to inflict tremendous damage. As well as the access they provide to sensitive and critical data and hosts
Implementing a Privileged Access Management (PAM) tool
Implementing a PAM tool reduces the likelihood of privileged credentials being compromised or misused in both external breaches and insider attacks. Such tools also help reduce the impact of an attack when it occurs. Because radically short the time during which the organization is unaware that it is under attack or being subverted. Cloud security, anomaly detection, and securing the software development life-cycle also can be addressed with a PAM tool. As can regulatory compliance and operational efficiency.
PAM solutions need to be aware of not only who a user is, but also to which resources they should be granted privileged access. To enhance security even further, strong PAM solutions tend to have their own layers of security capabilities. That is, they will have the ability to limit user access not only by role, but also by other factors, such as time and location. This ensures that even an authenticated user only sees the specific resource being accessed, and only when appropriate.
As a quick example, a given user has privileged access to a server to perform an upgrade because they have the server administrator role. But the PAM administrators might also limit that privileged access, for business reasons or simply as a security practice. Granting a two-hour window starting at midnight, for example.
Outside of that time frame, even with the login credentials, the user won’t be able to access the server for good or malicious reasons.
Multifactor Authentication (MFA) & Privileged Account Management (PAM)
If a user has successfully authenticated to the system, the PAM system will provide the user the privileged access they have been granted. Of course, that’s entirely appropriate, when the user is who they say they are. At the same time it is potentially disastrous when a privileged user within the system is not who they say they are.
Strong PAM solutions have safeguards to protect against this very situation. Session management tools, for example, will alert the security team (or automatically kill the session) when the activity undertaken by a privileged user is outside of defined parameters. One possible case might be a so-called database administrator who suddenly starts rapidly executing a large number of queries against multiple databases.
But what of the case where a hacker has stolen a DBA’s credentials, gained entrance to the system? And then undertakes activity which does not raise alarms, such as running an occasional query as the legitimate DBA might do?
Once you gain access to the system, do you engage in non-alarm activity? Like running an occasional query like a legitimate DBA would.
How do MFA and PAM work together?
This is the kind of situation that MFA and PAM solutions avoid when they work together.In this way they provide a true layered defense of security. Where strong PAM solutions excel at providing only the appropriate access to privileged users. A strong MFA vs. PAM capability ensure users are who they say they are before they get to the point of granting privileges.
It’s a layered strategy that truly helps security teams and administrators create a defense-in-depth. It is a solid way to increase the cybersecurity of a company. Especially in today’s environments that are subject to constant hacking attempts.
References:
(1) Newsweek.com
(2) secureworld.com
(3) Dark Reading
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by Rebeca | Feb 10, 2022 | cybersecurity, Resources, soffid
Globalization, easy access to information, exponential growth of immigration and society diversity, worldwide political and cultural conflicts, all these phenomenons have impacted the threat paradigm of security that has also been immutably changed by domestic and foreign terrorism.
Everywhere you go, organizations are in the middle of some sort of transformation. Whether it’s modernizing the platforms that have been there forever, trying to launch a data center in the cloud, or trying to manage manufacturing or IoT devices more efficiently, the size and shape of our digital footprint is changing. We no longer just have a “digital network”, or “digital services”, we now have an entire “digital ecosystem” and even that keeps expanding.
There’s no denying that we’re living in a time where the cybersecurity threat landscape is increasingly dynamic and complex. The landscape includes cloud-native environments, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), containers, secrets management, remote work
These new technologies and practices logically require security tooling to help address potential vulnerabilities and respond to threats and incidents when they do occur. However, there is a cost associated with the increased tool introduction and use.
Using multiple security applications results in identity sprawl. When a company uses siloed systems to manage its security risks without synchronizing them all, it creates a different identity for each application user. Few applications do not connect with the central server, forcing organizations to manage multiple identities.
Many organizations using cloud services have to suffer through various identity management. Organizations need to resolve identity sprawl issues to strengthen their cybersecurity and maximize security alerts. As every identity requires different credentials and passwords, it is impossible to keep track of them. Therefore, companies use the same passwords and account credentials for every application, pushing them to credential-stuffing.
If a company’s one application is targeted and breached, the attackers will gain access to the rest of the security applications and then sell this information on the dark web. From here, threats snowball, leaving the organization vulnerable to considerable brute force and hybrid attacks.
Product sprawl wastes many resources as the IT teams have to work overboard in software maintenance and individually train every employee to use all security products. It also wastes valuable time finding, opening, navigating, obtaining vital information, and switching between multiple products.
Product sprawl negatively affects individual and team productivity. When the teams have to operate numerous applications, it reduces the opportunity to work together and stay on the same page. Moreover, the transition from existing tools also becomes impossible as it requires training sessions to get them up to speed with every software.
What about Convergence?
We can define Convergence as the identification of security risks and interdependencies between business functions and processes within the Enterprise, and the consequential development of managed business process solutions to address those risks and interdependencies. This definition captures a significant shift from the emphasis on security as a purely functional activity, to security as an “added-value” to the overall mission of business. This is an important starting point because it essentially changes the way the concept of security is positioned within the enterprise.
Future of Security
Managing the successful convergence of information and operational technology is central to protecting your business and achieving crucial competitive advantage
Identity Governance and Administration is– and to have effective security must be– that common meeting point of many different security disciplines.
To efficiently and effectively draw the security perimeter, it makes more sense to have a single, holistic view of organizational identities where you can determine policy, view posture, enact compliance, and respond to risk.
GRC (Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance) is the future of cyber security. A well-thought GRC strategy improves security objectives by better decision making, information quality, and team collaboration.
A cybersecurity platform makes it easy to transition new employees without extensive training. As the previous cybersecurity system needs to be manually monitored and tracked, GRC has automated firewalls. High-quality antiviruses and firewalls make businesses more secure, catching and destroying viruses before they breach the central data platform.
For organizations that are already worried about their cybersecurity incident response preparation, the accelerated pace of migration to the cloud brings on new and unique challenges. In an attempt to close these security gaps, organizations spend on the latest cybersecurity tools.
Some special accounts, credentials, and secrets allow anyone who gains possession of them to control organization resources, disable security systems, and access vast amounts of sensitive data. Their power can provide unlimited access, so it’s no surprise that internal auditors and compliance regulations set specific controls and reporting requirements for the usage of these credentials. Interconnected IT ecosystems streamline business processes but often obfuscate core risks that need to be identified, analyzed, and monitored to create an enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) vision. Soffid is is equipped with federation functionalities, privileged account management, low level permits, separation of functions and recertification processes.
Our intelligent analytics continuously monitor for and identify new access risks while providing native connectors with GRC solutions so risk managers can create holistic enterprise risk management strategies.
Sources:
(1) riskandcompliancemagazine.com
(2) Pwc
(3) Deloitte
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by Rebeca | Feb 2, 2022 | News, Release, soffid
In today’s digital world, enterprise IT and security professionals are increasingly seeking identity and access management (IAM) services to provide secure and positive customer experiences.
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Soffid 3.3.X, our latest version. The new Soffid release includes security enhancements.
It also includes:
- the possibility of having multiple instances of synchronization servers, each with its own IP address.
- Two web services are created internally.
- One public https to provide service to SSO clients, synchronization, …. etc.,
- and another internal http to access the monitoring of logs and the system.
Java mail has been updated for both the console and the sync server.
Improvements have been included for memory management in java 11.
The docker version has been improved so that both console and sync server can be run without the docker user being root.
Console
At the Sync server monitoring page, you could view the status of all the sync servers instances.
Improvements on the columns organization at the pages with lists as Users and accounts. Now you can configurate the order at the “Add or remove columns” option.
A disabled group will be displayed strikethrough, as happens with users and accounts.
At security level, a new authorization to allow enabled and disabled users.
An improvement at the Access logs page has been added. The session control start and end has been improved and the protocol used to connect now is displayed.
An account is blocked for ten minutes if the user fails three times writing the credentials.
Sync Server
With distributed environments in mind, we have added the capability for each Sync server to auto-generate its own certificate and auto-sign it. These certificates will be stored in a Soffid database table to know the relationship between the certificates and the sync servers.
For each synchronization server a certificate will be generated with a validity of two years.
45 days before the expiration date, a new certificate will be created.
15 days before the expiration date, the new certificate will be activated.
It will be mandatory to restart the synchronization server to use the new certificate, if necessary, the synchronization server will restart itself just before the expiration date.
Connectors
When you are configuring an agent, at the “integration flows” tab, you can click into the mapping properties and the proper properties will be displayed to update.
Incremental update in SQL connector to detect the table changes made out of Soffid.
Performance improvements when a lot of connectors are in use.
Soffid features help enable enterprises to meet multiple business needs, taking ease of use and cost efficiency into consideration. This is in addition to providing enterprises with the ability to reduce administrative burdens and deliver more frictionless user experiences. As the market for identity security evolves and enterprises continue to demand cutting-edge products, Soffid is committed to making industry-leading enhancements without sacrificing the user experience.
Explore to learn more about our products and solutions, the broadening role of identity in IT and product development, and how Soffid can power your business.
