Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies - Second Edition

By : Tim Rains
3 (2)
Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies - Second Edition

3 (2)
By: Tim Rains

Overview of this book

Tim Rains is Microsoft's former Global Chief Security Advisor and Amazon Web Services’ former Global Security Leader for Worldwide Public Sector. He has spent the last two decades advising private and public sector organizations all over the world on cybersecurity strategies. Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies, Second Edition builds upon the success of the first edition that has helped so many aspiring CISOs, and cybersecurity professionals understand and develop effective data-driven cybersecurity strategies for their organizations. In this edition, you’ll examine long-term trends in vulnerability disclosures and exploitation, regional differences in malware infections and the socio-economic factors that underpin them, and how ransomware evolved from an obscure threat to the most feared threat in cybersecurity. You’ll also gain valuable insights into the roles that governments play in cybersecurity, including their role as threat actors, and how to mitigate government access to data. The book concludes with a deep dive into modern approaches to cybersecurity using the cloud. By the end of this book, you will have a better understanding of the threat landscape, how to recognize good Cyber Threat Intelligence, and how to measure the effectiveness of your organization's cybersecurity strategy.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
13
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14
Index

Security and compliance game changers

There are numerous ways that the cloud can tilt the playing field in favor of defenders. In this section, I’ll cover two security and compliance game changers.

The power of APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provide a powerful mechanism for systems to interact with humans and other systems. There are different kinds of APIs, but generally, APIs define the specific inputs a system is willing to accept and the outputs it will provide. The details of how the system processes inputs and provides outputs can be abstracted from view, thus simplifying the system for humans and other systems that want to use it. In other words, I don’t need to know how the system works internally in order to use it. I just need to know about its APIs. I can call an API and pass it the information it requires and then wait for the output, while the magic of software happens.

Magic here is a euphemism for all the smart engineers’...