Handing over the keys to the new driver in the family? Daunting. Handing over the keys to cloud instances at your company to a new hire? Perhaps just as daunting.

A new employee’s first day is a big deal for everyone, and especially for the IT department, which is responsible for setting up the appropriate permissions and access controls for all of the organization’s cloud-based applications. It’s a massive responsibility, given the potential risks if those same permissions are not properly supervised. A 2024 Tenable report found that 23% of cloud identities, both human and non-human, have “critical” or “high severity” excessive permissions.

Jay Martin, CISO at IT solutions and services provider Blue Mantis, told IT Brew that the industry is in a “fairly immature state” when it comes to handling cloud permissions and that having a standardized process around it is critical.

“The last thing you want to do is onboard an administrative assistant on the HR side into your financial system,” Martin said. “So, there’s practices that need to be set up in advance.”

Learn the “last thing you want to do” when onboarding.—BM

For cybersecurity vendors, the recruitment process has seemingly become a real-life version of Among Us as threat actors continue to masquerade as fake IT workers seeking a gig.

SentinelOne can attest to this. A recent report from its research division SentinelLabs disclosed that the threat intelligence platform tracked about 360 fake personas and more than 1,000 job applications linked to the DRPK-linked IT fake worker scheme in the applicant pool for the cybersecurity firm. Tom Hegel, a distinguished threat researcher and research lead at SentinelOne, told IT Brew that the malicious ploy has become a “numbers game” for North Korea-based threat actors as they apply for positions in “the masses in very automated ways.”

“It’s pretty consistent,” Hegel said. “Every couple of weeks, we see a good flood of them come in.”

Know how to spot those little red flags.—BM

When it comes to cybersecurity, if you teach a firm to defend itself, you just might protect it for a lifetime.

That’s the approach taken by an increasing number of cybersecurity companies, as IT Brew found at this year’s RSAC. RSA CEO Rohit Ghai—RSA and RSAC are now separate businesses—told us that the shift from cybersecurity being a fundamentally “elitist” industry to one that recognizes the importance of education and awareness is significant for the security sector.

“Demystifying cyber and netting it out in terms of cyber, you can also get overwhelmed,” Ghai said. “One is to get educated in terms of why you do what you do, things to worry about, things to pay attention to—but it’s a pretty complex equation. And for the mere mortal, for the normal human, it can be overwhelming, so netting it out and simplifying it is critical.”

That kind of simplification appeals to Debbie Gordon, founder and CEO of Cloud Range, an attack simulation company. She told IT Brew that the platform’s simulated environment, or range, is intentionally vulnerable, allowing users to see the gaps in their system and work on closing them, rather than adapting for one quick fix.

One IT pro messes with client firewalls.—EH