All news with #encryption at rest tag

How CISOs Justify Security Investments to the Board

🔒 CISOs must position security investments as strategic enablers that directly support corporate objectives rather than as purely technical upgrades. Presentations should connect proposed solutions to outcomes like entering new markets, protecting margins, ensuring compliance, and improving resilience. Use concrete scenarios, cost models, and recovery timelines to show how investments reduce probability and impact of incidents while improving operational stability. Tailor messaging to the board’s maturity and speak in terms of risk, return, and shareholder value.

FTC Settlement Requires Illuminate to Delete Student Data

⚖️ The FTC has proposed a settlement requiring Illuminate Education to delete unnecessary student data and strengthen its security program after a 2021 breach that exposed information for about 10.1 million students. The agency alleges failures including lack of access controls, storing data in plain text, weak patching, and misrepresenting encryption in contracts. The proposed order mandates data minimization, a public retention schedule, prompt breach reporting to the FTC, and will be open for 30 days of public comment; violations could trigger civil penalties.

Amazon EMR Serverless Removes Local Storage Provisioning

🚀 Amazon EMR Serverless now provides fully managed serverless local storage for Apache Spark workloads, removing the need to provision disk type or size per application. The service offloads intermediate operations such as shuffle to an auto-scaling, encrypted serverless storage with job-level isolation, so customers pay only for compute and memory consumed. This reduces disk-related job failures and can lower costs by up to 20%. It is generally available for EMR release 7.12 and later.

Amazon S3 Tables: Automatic Cross-Region Iceberg Replication

🔁 Amazon S3 Tables now support automatic replication of Apache Iceberg tables across AWS Regions and accounts, duplicating full table structure, snapshots, and metadata to destination buckets. The feature creates read-only replica tables, backfills them to the source's latest state, and continuously monitors for updates while allowing independent snapshot retention and encryption settings per replica. Replicas are queryable with Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio or any Iceberg-compatible engine such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, Apache Spark, and DuckDB. This capability is available in all Regions where S3 Tables are supported.

Oracle Database@AWS Integrates with AWS KMS for TDE

🔐 AWS announced integration between Oracle Database@AWS and AWS Key Management Service (KMS), enabling KMS to encrypt Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) master keys. The feature is available in all regions where Oracle Database@AWS runs and incurs only standard KMS charges—there is no additional Oracle Database@AWS fee. Customers gain centralized key control, CloudTrail auditing, and automatic key rotation for TDE keys.

AWS Recycle Bin Extends Support to EBS Volumes Now

♻️ Recycle Bin for Amazon EBS now supports EBS Volumes, allowing you to recover accidentally deleted volumes directly rather than restoring from snapshots. You can create retention rules to protect all volumes or target specific volumes with tags; recovered volumes retain tags, permissions, and encryption and are immediately available at full performance. Volumes in Recycle Bin are billed at standard EBS Volume rates and the capability is available via CLI, SDKs, and the AWS Console across commercial, China, and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS S3 bucket-level setting to standardize encryption

🔒 Amazon S3 now provides a bucket-level default encryption configuration to enforce SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS for all write requests, allowing organizations to standardize server-side encryption types across buckets. The PutBucketEncryption API update lets you disable SSE-C on specific buckets or in CloudFormation templates. This capability is available in all AWS Regions and configurable via Console, SDK, API, or CLI. It helps simplify compliance and reduce misconfiguration risk.

Amazon S3 Adds Post-Quantum TLS Key Exchange Support

🔐 Amazon S3 now supports post-quantum TLS key exchange on regional S3, S3 Tables, and S3 Express One Zone endpoints using the NIST-standardized Module Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM). PQ-TLS key exchange is available at no additional cost across all AWS regions and will be negotiated automatically when clients are configured for ML-KEM. Combined with server-side AES-256 encryption by default, S3 offers quantum-resistant protection for data both in transit and at rest.

European Digital Sovereignty Summit Shifts Priorities

🔒 European leaders, including Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Emmanuel Macron, will attend a Berlin summit of digital ministers and IT experts expected to draw about 900 participants. The conference highlights concerns that US laws such as CLOUD Act and FISA 702 can compel US cloud providers to disclose data held in Europe, driving calls to reduce dependencies on non‑European vendors. Officials and industry leaders emphasise technological controls — notably strong encryption and customer-held keys — and the need for scalable European cloud alternatives while addressing regulatory and startup barriers.

Amazon ECR Adds PrivateLink Support for FIPS Endpoints

🔒 Amazon Web Services announced that Amazon ECR now supports PrivateLink endpoints validated under FIPS 140-3. This allows customers with security and compliance requirements to use FIPS-validated cryptographic modules while keeping traffic private within their Amazon VPCs. The enhancement helps organizations meet regulatory obligations without exposing container registry traffic to the public internet. Availability includes several commercial and AWS GovCloud regions.

Amazon EKS Independent Validation of Zero-Operator Access

🔒 AWS announced an independent affirmation of the Amazon EKS zero operator access design, validated by cybersecurity firm NCC Group. The review found no architectural gaps and confirmed that AWS personnel lack technical means to access or manipulate customer content in managed Kubernetes control planes or etcd backups. AWS highlights Nitro-based confidential compute, tightly scoped administrative APIs with multi-party change approval, mandatory logging and auditing, and envelope encryption for etcd as core protections. Customers retain visibility via cluster audit logs and remain responsible for securing worker node configurations outside managed modes.

Google Announces Private AI Compute for Cloud Privacy

🔒 Google on Tuesday introduced Private AI Compute, a cloud privacy capability that aims to deliver on-device-level assurances while harnessing the scale of Gemini models. The service uses Trillium TPUs and Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE) and relies on an AMD-based Trusted Execution Environment to encrypt and isolate memory on trusted nodes. Workloads are mutually attested, cryptographically validated, and ephemeral so inputs and inferences are discarded after each session, with Google stating data remains private to the user — 'not even Google.' An external assessment by NCC Group flagged a low-risk timing side channel in the IP-blinding relay and three attestation implementation issues that Google is mitigating.

Layered Security for SMBs During the Holiday Season

🔒 Small and medium-size businesses face rising, measurable cyber risk as ransomware incidents increase and attacks spike during the holiday season. Resource constraints and end-of-life Windows 10 devices magnify exposure, while firmware-level and endpoint gaps can defeat traditional defenses. A layered, defense-in-depth approach across silicon, the operating system, and endpoints reduces attack surfaces. Business-grade devices such as the ASUS Expert Series integrate these protections to turn necessary upgrades into strategic security investments.

Why Enterprises Still Struggle with Cloud Misconfigurations

🔒 Enterprises continue to struggle with cloud misconfigurations that expose sensitive data, according to recent industry reporting and a Qualys study. The report cites a 28% breach rate tied to cloud or SaaS services over the past year and high misconfiguration rates across AWS (45%), GCP (63%) and Azure (70%). Experts blame permissive provider defaults, shadow IT and rapid business-driven deployments, and recommend controls such as MFA everywhere, private networking, encryption, least-privilege and infrastructure-as-code.

Azure Ultra Disk: Performance, Cost, Instant Access

🚀Microsoft refreshed Azure Ultra Disk to deliver substantially lower tail latency, finer provisioning granularity, and faster snapshot-driven recovery for mission-critical workloads. Platform changes target an 80% reduction in P99.9 and outlier latency and a ~30% improvement in average latency. The update raises the IOPS/GiB ceiling to 1,000, introduces 1 GiB billing granularity, and sets minimums of 100 IOPS and 1 MB/s per disk to improve cost optimization. Instant Access Snapshot (public preview) enables disks from snapshots to hydrate up to 10x faster for rapid recovery and scale-out.

AWS Backup: Support for KMS Customer Managed Keys for Vaults

🔐 AWS Backup now lets you encrypt logically air-gapped vaults with your own AWS KMS customer managed keys (CMKs). This gives organizations more control over key lifecycle, access policies, and compliance posture while preserving the security benefits of logically air-gapped backups. Support covers same-account and cross-account CMKs and is available in all Regions where air-gapped vaults are supported. You can enable CMK encryption when creating vaults via the console, API, or CLI.

Digital Health Needs Security at Its Core to Scale AI

🔒 The article argues that AI-driven digital health initiatives proved essential during COVID-19 but simultaneously exposed critical cybersecurity gaps that threaten pandemic preparedness. It warns that expansive data ecosystems, IoT devices and cloud pipelines multiply attack surfaces and that subtle AI-specific threats — including data poisoning, model inversion and adversarial inputs — can undermine public-health decisions. The author urges security by design, including zero-trust architectures, data provenance, encryption, model governance and cross-disciplinary drills so AI can deliver trustworthy, resilient public health systems.

Amazon Aurora DSQL Adds FIPS 140-3 Compliant Endpoints

🔐 Amazon Web Services announced that Aurora DSQL now supports FIPS 140-3 compliant endpoints, enabling customers to meet federal cryptography requirements when sending requests over public or VPC endpoints. The capability is available beginning Oct 31, 2025, in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon). This update lets organizations contracting with the U.S. federal government use Aurora DSQL for workloads that require a FIPS-validated cryptographic module.

WhatsApp Adds Passwordless Passkey Chat Backups now

🔒 WhatsApp is rolling out passkey-encrypted chat backups on iOS and Android, allowing users to secure backups with biometrics or a device screen lock instead of a password. Passkeys rely on a device-generated private/public key pair so the private key never leaves the device, reducing exposure to credential theft. Users can enable the feature under Settings > Chats > Chat backup > End-to-end encrypted backup. Meta has begun a global rollout that will reach users over the coming weeks and months.

FinWise Breach Highlights Encryption and Insider Risk

🔒 The FinWise data breach involved a former employee who retained credentials and accessed systems on May 31, 2024, exposing personal records for 689,000 American First Finance customers. The intrusion remained undetected until June 18, 2025, prompting lawsuits alleging inadequate encryption and weak security governance. Experts say robust protection requires not only encryption but effective key management, strict access controls, and proactive monitoring. Vendor solutions such as D.AMO are presented as integrated platforms combining encryption, an isolated KMS, and centralized control to mitigate insider risk.