Maybe it’s time for your yearly pen test. Or, maybe you’re building up your very own internal pen test team. Navigating this journey can be challenging, but we’re committed to making it easy for you. Fortunately, we bring a wealth of insight from our “other side of the table” perspective. This multipart series will prepare you for concerns on both sides of the table, so you can be certain you’re ready for your next engagement.

Scoping is a key first step in any compliance assessment, and those who have been through the process understand how vital—and how tricky—it can be. Scoping is particularly crucial in PCI DSS, as drawing your boundaries largely determines which requirements your organization must satisfy, and when you’re operating within a Zero Trust environment, things appear to get more complicated.

As threats continue to evolve and grow more creative and sophisticated, cybersecurity remains a paramount concern of organizations everywhere. But these days, it’s not enough to implement the necessary data to protect the data in your systems—more and more, bad actors are targeting third-party providers as a backdoor into their greater supply chains, making third-party risk management (TPRM) more important than ever.

For anyone immersed in digital technology, you know that artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage right now, and for good reason, the use cases for this technology are growing all the time. But as AI continues to enmesh with daily life as well as business, security concerns have grown in parallel, as have questions regarding the implications on organizations and their ongoing compliance efforts. At the top of mind for many has been how AI factors into SOC 2 examinations.

While many companies are moving to the cloud, it's still common to find Active Directory (AD) deployed locally in Windows environments. During internal network pen tests, I was pretty comfortable with lateral movement and privilege escalation (via missing patches or LLMNR/NBT-NS/IPv6, open network shares, etc.) but felt lacking in how I could leverage attacks against AD to provide more impact during the assessment. In my journey to get better at attacking AD, I was able to enroll in different free and paid courses. This blog post will provide you with an overview of the four I found to be most beneficial personally.

Artificial intelligence (AI)—you’ve heard of it, you’re likely using it, and you know it’s already used everywhere and its reach will only likely increase. These days, the term "AI" is thrown around frequently, but because this technology is actually made up of many different subsets that generally all get thrown under the umbrella of AI, it can sometimes lead to confusion.

Generally, with new cybersecurity regulations, organizations affected are provided a “grace period” to make the necessary adjustments to achieve full compliance before enforcement begins. Looking toward the horizon and 2025, many new laws will be coming into full effect, which means organizations will now likely be subject to various penalties if they’re not ready and haven’t satisfied all relevant requirements.

While the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is technically just a set of guidelines, best practices, and standards intended to improve your infrastructure so that organizations can better manage and reduce cybersecurity risk, it’s possible to go through a five-step assessment process to make sure you really are adhering to those standards and provide independent assurance to your customers.