The Cyber Defense eMagazine November Edition for 2023

Developers Hold the New Crown Jewels. Are
They Properly Protected?
By Aaron Bray, CEO. Phylum
Cybersecurity has changed dramatically in the last four years. During the pandemic, organizations around
the globe found themselves faced with accelerating digital transformation initiatives, remote workforces,
and a whole host of other concerns that have dramatically changed the attack surface they must defend.
However, most organizations have a security posture that hasn't yet metamorphosed in response to the
changes their operations, processes, and systems have undergone.
One of the biggest impacts of these changes has been a dramatic shift in the tradeoff concerning where
the proverbial security "crown jewels" of the organization lie, and the cost an attacker faces in trying to
gain access to them. In the past, organizations consisted largely of traditional, on-premise workforces
who primarily used workstations while at work, which connected to domain controllers that lived onpremise,
and were tended by system administrators. This effectively centralized power in the hands of
the system administrators, which made them the primary target of any potential attacker.
Compromising an account with domain administrator privileges would enable access to virtually anything
connected to the network. Additionally, consider that the security posture of this type of organization,
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