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Multi-Cloud Key Management 2019

Adrian Lane May 16, 2019 No Comments

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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Firestarter: 2019: Insert Winter is Coming Meme Here

Rich January 7, 2019 No Comments

In this year-end/start firestarter the gang jumps into our expectations for the coming year. Spoiler alert- the odds are some consolidation and contraction in security markets are impending… and not just because the Chinese are buying fewer iPhones. Share:

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Making an Impact with Security Awareness Training

Mike Rothman December 29, 2018 No Comments

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

Mike Rothman December 29, 2018 No Comments

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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Invent Security Review

Rich December 17, 2018 No Comments

It’s that time of year again. The time when Amazon takes over our lives. No, not the holiday shopping season but the annual re:Invent conference where Amazon Web Services takes over Las Vegas (really, all of it) and dumps a firehouse of updates on the world. Listen in to hear our take on new services like Transit Hub, Security Hub, and Control Tower. Share:

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Firestarter: Hardware Hacks and Lift and Pray

Rich October 4, 2018 No Comments

Did China manage to hardware hack the Apple and Amazon data centers? Or did Bloomberg get it wrong? And what the heck can you do about it anyway? This week we start with a discussion of today’s blockbuster security news, before shifting gears back to cloud. It turns out most organizations are having to lift and shift to cloud, even when that is not ideal. We talk about some of your options, even facing ridiculous management timelines. Share:

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Firestarter: Black Hat and AI… What Could Go Wrong?

Rich August 28, 2018 No Comments

In this episode we review the lessons of this year’s Black Hat and DEF CON. In particular, we talk about how things have changed with the students we have in class, now that we’ve racked up over 5 years of running trainings on cloud security. then we delve into one of the biggest, and most confusing, trends… the mysteries of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Considering our opinions of natural intelligence, you might guess where this heads… Share:

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It’s a GDPR Thing

Rich July 6, 2018 No Comments

Mike and Rich discuss the ugly reality that GDPR really is a thing. Not that privacy or even GDPR are bad (we’re all in favor), but they do require extra work on our part to ensure that policies are in place, audits are performed, and pesky data isn’t left lying around in log files unexpectedly. Share:

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Evolving to Security Decision Support

Mike Rothman June 1, 2018 No Comments

Not that it was ever really easy, but at least you used to know what tactics adversaries were using, and had a general idea of where they would end up, because you knew where your important data was, and which (single) type of device normally accessed it: the PC. It’s hard to believe we now long for the days of early PCs and centralized data repositories. Given the changes in the attack surface and capabilities of adversaries, you need a better way to assess your organization’s security posture, detect attacks, and determine applicable methods to work around and eventually remediate exposures in your environment. We believe that way is called Security Decision Support. It starts with enterprise visibility, so you know which of your assets are where and what potential attacks they may see. Then you apply more rigorous analytics to the security data you collect to understand what’s happening right now. Finally you use integrate your knowledge of your technology environment, what attackers are doing in the wild, and telemetry from your organization, to consistently and predictably make decisions about what needs to get done. What you need is a better way to assess your organizational security posture, determine when you are under attack, and figure out how to make the pain stop. This requires a combination of technology, process changes, and clear understanding of how your technology infrastructure is evolving. This papers delve into these concepts to show how to gain both visibility and context – so you can understand both what you have to do and why. Security Decision Support enables you to prioritize the thousands of things you can do, enabling you to zero in on the few you must. We’d like to thank Tenable for licensing this content. The support of forward-thinking companies who use our content to educate their communities enables 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 (PDF). Share:

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Firestarter: The RSA 2018 Episode

Rich April 12, 2018 No Comments

This week Rich, Mike, and Adrian talk about what they expect to see at the RSA Security Conference, and if it really means anything. As we do in most of our RSA Conference related discussions the focus is less on what to see and more on what industry trends we can tease out, and the potential impact on the regular security practitioner. For example, what happens when blockchain and GDPR collide? Do security vendors finally understand cloud? What kind of impact does DevOps have on the security market? Plus we list where you can find us, and, as always, don’t forget to attend the Tenth Annual Disaster Recovery Breakfast! Share:

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