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Modernizing SecOps for Cloud

Security Operations, SecOps for short, has been one of the more difficult security domains to  modernize for cloud. It requires a combination of new subject matter expertise, new technologies, process updates, and even a slightly different mindset. Cloud impacts SecOps in ways both obvious and subtle, and because most organizations still have datacenters and offices, teams need to add new skills and update operations while still supporting everything already on their plates. It’s a daunting challenge, but one that can be made much easier to tackle by distilling down, into the core of how cloud changes things, and taking lessons from the successes of early adopters.  This paper will detail the impact of cloud on SecOps, review the core technical capabilities needed to respond, and highlight techniques for successfully modernizing security operations to support cloud operations. We will finish up with example processes you can use as templates for your own operations.   We would like to thank FireMon for licensing the content in this paper. Our unique Totally Transparent Research model allows us to perform objective and useful research without requiring paywalls or other such nonsense, which make it hard for the people who need our research to get it. A day doesn’t go by where we aren’t thankful to all the companies who license our research. Download: Modernizing_SecOps_For_Cloud   Disclosure: the author is partly employed at FireMon but this content was developed and posted independently and reviewed and edited by non-FireMon personnel. The content was originally posted as a blog series at Security Boulevard. Share:

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Securing APIs: The New Application Attack Surface

The way applications are built, deployed, and maintained in most organizations is being disrupted. Macro changes include the ongoing cloud migration disrupting the tech stack, new application design patterns bringing microservices to the forefront, and DevOps changing dev/release practices. As we’ve been slowly navigating this sea change, the common thread across these changes is increasing reliance on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs have quickly emerged as the most attractive and least- protected target within new applications because they have access to critical data and services. In this paper, Securing APIs, we work through how application architecture and attack surfaces are changing, how application security needs to evolve to deal with these disruptions, and how to empower security in environments where DevOps rules the roost. So you are better prepared to protect whatever applications look like moving forward. Our research is licensed by forward-looking companies that realize the importance of educating their communities on the rapidly changing technology landscape. We thank our friends at Salt Security for licensing this report. Our research is done using our Totally Transparent research methodology. This allows us to do impactful research while protecting our integrity. You can download the paper (PDF). Share:

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Security Hygiene: The First Line of Security

After many decades as security professionals, it’s depressing to keep seeing the same issues and mistakes. It feels like we’re stuck in hacker Groundhog Day. Get up, clean up the mistakes made by users or administrators, handle a new attack, and fill out compliance reports, only to have to do it all over again the next day. The most basic advice we give anyone building a security program is to make sure you handle the fundamentals well. You remember security fundamentals, right? Things like ensuring visibility for every asset, and maintaining a strong security configuration and posture for those assets. You also need to patch systems efficiently and effectively when vendors issue updates. In this Security Hygiene: The First Line of Security paper, we’ll provide a reminder as to the importance of the fundamentals and present a process to ensure you can fix issues efficiently and effectively. Our research is licensed by companies that understand the need to keep their communities not just at the cutting edge of technology, but to do it securely. We thank our friends at Oracle for licensing this report. Our research is done using our Totally Transparent research methodology. This allows us to do impactful research while protecting our integrity. Download the paper (PDF). Share:

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Data Security in the SaaS Age

Data security remains elusive. You can think of it as something of a holy grail. We’ve been espousing the idea of data-centric security for years, focusing on protecting the data, so you can worry less about securing devices, networks, and associated infrastructure. As with most big ideas, it seemed like a good idea at the time. In practice, data-centric security has been underwhelming — it gradually became clear that having security policy and protection travel along with the data, as it spreads to every SaaS service you know about (and a bunch you don’t), was just too much to count on. What we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. Not at scale anyway. We need to take a step back and stop trying to solve yesterday’s problem. Protecting data by encrypting it, masking it, tokenizing it, or wrapping a heavy usage policy around it wasn’t the answer, for various reasons. In this Data Security in the SaaS Age paper, we rethink both the expectations and potential solutions to protect the data stored in SaaS applications. Our research is licensed by companies that put a premium on educating their communities on important shifts in technology, and how security must evolve accordingly. We’re pleased that AppOmni licensed this report. Our research is done using our Totally Transparent research methodology. This allows us to do impactful research while protecting our integrity. You can download the paper (PDF). Share:

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Enterprise DevSecOps

This is our latest iteration on how to build a DevSecOps program. This research paper is the result of hundreds of hours of research and several hundred conversations with Fortune 1000 firms on the challenges companies face and the problems they are most interested in tackling. We go deep into covering all phases and facets of secure application development. And we did a complete reversal on the naming convention; from DevOps to DevSecOps. It became obvious during our calls that despite the idealism involved with leaving ‘Sec’ out of the title, security is getting short shifted and it needs to be called out. From the paper: In our 2015 work “Building Security Into DevOps” we embraced the idea that security was an equal partner and there was no reason to call out security specifically. In hindsight, this was wrong. The fact is security practitioners are having a much harder DevOps journey, and they are the ones struggling, and they are the ones who need a roadmap on security integration. Stated another way, practitioners of DevOps who have fully embraced the movement will say there is no reason to add ‘Sec’ into DevOps, as security is just another ingredient. The DevOps ideal is to break down silos between individual teams (e.g., architecture, development, IT, security, and QA) to better promote teamwork and better incentivize each team member toward the same goals. If security is just another set of skills blended into the overall effort of building and delivering software, there is no reason to call it out any more than quality assurance. Philosophically they’re right. But in practice we are not there yet. Developers may embrace the idea, but they generally suck at facilitating team integration. Sure, security is welcome to participate, but it’s up to them to learn where they can integrate, and all too often security is asked to contribute skills which they simply do not possess. It’s passive-aggressive team building! This is a major re-write of our 2015 research work and we hope you will find it beneficial. And we wanted to thank Veracode for licensing this content. Our licensees are what makes it possible to bring this paper to you free of charge! You can download a copy of the research here: Enterprise_DevSecOps_2019_V2.FINAL_.pdf Share:

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Understanding and Selecting RASP 2019 Research Paper

So what is RASP? Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) is an application security technology which embeds into an application or application runtime environment, examining requests at the application layer to detect attacks and misuse in real time. RASP functions in the application context, which enables it to monitor security – and apply controls – very precisely. This means better detection because you see what the application is being asked to do, and can also offer better performance, as you only need to check the relevant subset of policies for each request. There is no lack of data showing that applications are vulnerable to attack. Many applications are old and simply contain too many flaws to fix. You know, that back-office application that should never have been allowed on the Internet to begin with. These applications are often unsupported, with the engineers who developed them no longer available, or the platforms so fragile that they become unstable if security fixes are applied. In most cases it would be cheaper to re-write the application from scratch than patch all the issues, but economics seldom justify (or even permit) the effort. Other application platforms, even those considered ‘secure’, are frequently found to contain vulnerabilities after decades of use. Heartbleed, anyone? New classes of attacks, and even new use cases, have a disturbing ability to unearth previously unknown application flaws. We see two types of applications: those with known vulnerabilities today, and those which will have known vulnerabilities in the future. But the real audience for this technology is developers who want to build security into their applications. As more and more software development shops embrace automation, RESTful APIs are no longer optional. Security need to be as automated and agile as development teams. Tooling that can both embed into the application stack for scalability and deployment, as well as help isolate which bits of code are truly vulnerable, are needed more than ever before. RASP is getting to be a mature product class and delivering security in the development pipeline and in production. You can download our 2019 updated version of our Understanding and Selecting RASP paper on the link below: Share:

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Security Monitoring State of the Union

A few years ago we wrote a paper called Security Monitoring Team of Rivals, which really highlighted the reality that you had to make your SIEM and security analytics products work together. The analytics platforms could not provide the broader capabilities delivered by the SIEM, especially in the areas of compliance and incident response. And the SIEM wasn’t really built to do higher end analytics, and it showed when trying to do anything but fairly simple correlation. Oh, how the times have changed. We’ve seen a pretty dramatic evolution of features on both sides of the discussion. And shockingly enough, all of the players in the market are positioning to provide the strategic platform for security monitoring. We see existing SIEM players bundling in security analytics capabilities, and security analytics players positioning their products as next-generation SIEM. As usual, customers are caught in the middle, trying to figure out what is the truth and what is marketing puffery. So in this Security Monitoring State of the Union paper, we delve into the use cases driving the need for security monitoring, the product/service requirements that emerge from these use cases, and the buying process to choose your security monitoring platform. As always our research is licensed by forward-looking companies that realize the importance of educating their communities on the rapidly changing technology landscape. Our friends at McAfee have licensed this report. Our research is done using our Totally Transparent research methodology. This allows us to do impactful research while protecting our integrity. You can download the paper (PDF). Share:

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Multi-Cloud Key Management 2019

Discussion on multi-cloud strategies is atop the list of inbound questions customer ask us. “How do you architect applications and what technologies will promote a cloud neutral approach?” is what is commonly asked, and all have a fear of vendor lock-in. As such, they want critical security controls to be under their control. And given most customers worry over control of encryption keys, key management is always a major issue. As such, we are re-launching our research work on multi-cloud key management. Infrastructure as a Service entails handing over some security and operational control to the service provider. But responsibility for your data security does go along with it. Your provider ensures compute, storage, and networking components are secure from external attackers and other tenants, but you must protect your data and application access to it. That means you need to control the elements of the cloud that related to data access and security, to avoid any possibility of your cloud vendor(s) viewing it. Encryption is the fundamental security technology for data security and privacy, so it should be no surprise that encryption technologies are everywhere in cloud computing. The vast majority of cloud service providers enable network (transport) encryption by default and offer encryption for data at rest to protect files and archives from unwanted inspection by authorized infrastructure personnel. But the principal concern is who has access to encryption keys, and whether clouds vendor can decrypt your data without you knowing about it. So many firms insist on brining their own keys into the cloud, not allowing their cloud vendors access to their keys. And, of course, many organizations ask how they can provide consistent protection, regardless of which cloud services they select? So this research is focused on these use cases. We hope you find this research useful. And we would like to thank nCipher Security for licensing this paper for use with their customer outreach and education programs. Like us, they receive an increasing number of customer inquiries regarding cloud key management. Support like this enables us to bring you objective material built in a Totally Transparent manner. This allows us to perform impactful research and protect our integrity. You can download the paper here Share:

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Making an Impact with Security Awareness Training

If you want your organization to take security awareness training seriously, you need to plan for that. If you don’t know what success looks like you are unlikely to get there. To define success you need a firm understanding of why the organization needs awareness training. We are talking about communicating business justification for security awareness training, and more importantly what results you expect from your organization’s investment of time and resources. The most valuable outcome is to reduce risk, which gives security awareness training its impact on corporate results. It’s reasonable to expect awareness training to result in fewer successful attacks and less loss: risk reduction. Every other security control and investment needs to reduce risk, so why hasn’t security awareness training been held to the same standard? We don’t know either, but the time has come to start thinking about it. To overcome limitations in security awareness training and achieve the desired business objectives, in this paper we introduced the concept of Continuous, Contextual Content (3C) as the cornerstone of the kind of training program which can achieve security initiatives. This approach provides a user-centric concept to deliver the necessary content when they need it, reminding the employee about phishing, not at a random time, but after they’ve clicked on a phishing message. We also cover incentives, content approaches, and metrics to ensure your awareness training program provides sustainable impact. We’d like to thank Mimecast for licensing the content. It’s through the support of forward-thinking companies that use our content to educate their communities that allow us to write what you need to read. As always, our research is done using our Totally Transparent research methodology. This allows us to do impactful research while protecting our integrity. Download the paper here. Share:

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Scaling Network Security

Existing network security architectures, based mostly on preventing attacks from external adversaries, don’t reflect the changing dynamics of enterprise networks. With business partners and other trusted parties needing more access to corporate data and the encapsulation of most application traffic in standard protocols (Port 80 and 443), digging a moat around your corporate network no longer provides the protection your organization needs. Additionally, network speeds continue to increase putting a strain on inline network security controls that much scale at the same rate as the networks. Successfully protecting networks require you to scale network security controls while being able to enforce security policies flexibly. By applying context to the security controls used for each connection ensures proper protection without adding undue stress to the controls. The last thing you can do is compromise security in the face of increasing bandwidth. The scaled network architecture involves applying access control everywhere to make sure only authorized connections have access to critical data and implementing security controls where needed, based on the requirements of the application. Moreover, security policies need to change as networks, applications and business requirements change, so the architecture needs to adapt without requiring forklift upgrades and radical overhauls. This Scaling Network Security paper looks at where secure networking started and why it needs to change. We present requirements for today’s networks which will take you into the future. Finally, we go through the architectural constructs we believe can help scale up your network security controls. We’d like to thank Gigamon for licensing the content. It’s through the support of forward-thinking companies that use our content to educate their communities that allow us to write what you need to read. As always, our research is done using our Totally Transparent research methodology. This allows us to do impactful research while protecting our integrity. You can download the paper. Share:

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