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Using RSA

Rich March 31, 2015 No Comments

The RSA Conference is the biggest annual event in our industry (really – there are tens of thousands of people there). But bigger doesn’t mean everything is better, and it can be all too easy to get lost in the event and fail to get value out of it. Even if you don’t attend, this is the time of year a lot of security companies focus on, which affects everything you see and read – for better and worse. This week we discuss how we get value out of the event, and how to find useful nuggets in the noise. From skipping panels (except Mike’s, of course) to hitting some of the less-known opportunities like Learning Labs and the Monday events, RSA can be very useful for any security pro, but only if you plan. Share:

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Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices

Mike Rothman March 30, 2015 No Comments

We’ve seen a renaissance of sorts regarding endpoint security. To be clear, most of solutions in the market aren’t good enough. Attackers don’t have to be advanced to make quick work of the endpoint protection suites in place. That realization has created a wave of innovation on the endpoint that promises to provide a better chance to prevent and detect attacks. But the reality is far too many organizations can’t even get the fundamentals of endpoint security. But the fact remains that many organizations are not even prepared to deal with unsophisticated attackers. You know, that dude in the basement banging on your stuff with Metasploit. Those organizations don’t really need advanced security now – their requirements are more basic. It’s about understanding what really needs to get done – not the hot topic at industry conferences. They cannot do everything to fully protect endpoints, so they need to start with essentials. In our Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices paper, we focus on what needs to be done to address the main areas of attack surface. We cover both endpoint hygiene and threat management, making clear what should be a priority and what should not. It’s always useful to get back to basics sometimes, and this paper provides a way to do that for your endpoints. We would like to thank Viewfinity for licensing the content in this paper. Our licensees allows us to provide our research for no cost and still pay our mortgages, so we should all thank them. Download: Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices (PDF) Share:

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Cracking the Confusion: Encryption and Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers, and Applications

Rich March 20, 2015 No Comments

Today we see encryption growing at an accelerating rate in data centers, for a confluence of reasons. A trite way to summarize them is “compliance, cloud, and covert affairs”. Organizations need to keep auditors off their backs; keep control over data in the cloud; and stop the flood of data breaches, state-sponsored espionage, and government snooping (even by their own governments). Thanks to increasing demand we have a growing range of options, as vendors and even free and Open Source tools address this opportunity. We have never had more choice, but with choice comes complexity – and outside your friendly local sales representative, guidance can be hard to come by. For example, given a single application collecting an account number from each customer, you could encrypt it in any of several different places: the application, the database, or storage – or use tokenization instead. The data is encrypted (or substituted), but each place you might encrypt raises different concerns. What threats are you protecting against? What is the performance overhead? How are keys managed? Does it all meet compliance requirements? This paper cuts through the confusion to help you pick the best encryption options for your projects. In case you couldn’t guess from the title, our focus is on encrypting in the data center: applications, servers, databases, and storage. Heck, we will even cover cloud computing (IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service), although we covered it in depth in another paper. We will also cover tokenization and discuss its relationship with encryption. We would like to thank Vormetric for licensing this paper, which enables us to release it for free. As always, the content is completely independent and was created in a series of blog posts (and posted on GitHub) for public comment. Download the full paper. Share:

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Cyber Cash Cow

Rich March 16, 2015 No Comments

Last week we saw a security company hit the $2.4B valuation level. Yes, that’s a ‘B’, as in billion. This week we dig into the changing role of money and investment in our industry, and what it might mean. We like to pretend keeping our heads down and focusing on defense and tech is all that matters, but practically speaking we need to keep half an eye on the market around us. It not only affects the tools at our disposal, but influences the entire course of our profession. Share:

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Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there)

Rich March 2, 2015 No Comments

Last week the US Director of National Intelligence said cyberattacks are a greater risk than terrorism. This week we debate what that means, and whether terminology is getting so muddled that it becomes meaningless. Plus we rip into Rich’s post claiming security people need to stop thinking of themselves as warriors, and start thinking like spies. Share:

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Cyber!!!

Rich February 16, 2015 No Comments

Last week President Obama held a cybersecurity summit out in the Bay Area. He issued a new executive order and is standing up a new threat sharing center. This is in response to ongoing massive attacks such as the Anthem breach and (as we heard this weekend) hundreds of millions stolen in bank thefts. But what does it all mean to security pros and the industry? The truth is, not much in our day-to-day (yet), but you certainly had better pay attention.   Share:

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It’s Not My Fault!

Rich February 9, 2015 No Comments

Rich, Mike, and Adrian each pick a trend they expect to hammer us in 2015. Then they talk about it, probably too much. From threat intel to tokenization to SaaS security. And oh, we did have to start with a dig at the Pats. Cheating? Super Bowl? Really? Come on now. Share:

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Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network

Mike Rothman February 4, 2015 No Comments

We have been writing extensively about the disruption currently hitting security, driven by cloud computing and mobility. Our Inflection: The Future of Security research directly addresses the lack of visibility caused by these macro trends. At the same time great automation and orchestration promise to enable security to scale to the cloud, in terms of both scale and speed. Meanwhile each day’s breach du jour in the mass media keeps security topics at the forefront, highlighting the importance of protecting critical information. These trends mean organizations have no choice but to encrypt more traffic on their networks. Encrypting the network prevents adversaries from sniffing traffic to steal credentials and ensures data moving outside the organization is protected from man-in-the-middle attacks. So we expect to see a much greater percentage of both internal and external network traffic to be encrypted over the next 2-3 years. Our Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network paper tackles setting security policies to ensure that data doesn’t leak out over encrypted tunnels, and that employees adhere to corporate acceptable use policies, by decrypting traffic as needed. It also addresses key use cases and strategies for decrypting network traffic, including security monitoring and forensics, to ensure you can properly alert on security events and investigate incidents. We included guidance on how to handle human resources and compliance issues because increasing fraction of network traffic is encrypted. We would like to thank Blue Coat for licensing the content in this paper. Without our licensees you’d be paying Big Research big money to get a fraction of the stuff we publish, free. Download: Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network (PDF) Share:

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2015 Trends

Rich January 26, 2015 No Comments

Rich, Mike, and Adrian each pick a trend they expect to hammer us in 2015. Then we talk about it, probably too much. From threat intel to tokenization to SaaS security. And oh, we did have to start with a dig on the Pats. Cheating? Super Bowl? Really? Come on now. Share:

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Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC

Mike Rothman January 25, 2015 No Comments

This cloud thing is going to have major repercussions on how you protect technology assets over time. But what does that even mean? We start this paper by defining how and why the cloud is different, and then outline a number of trends we expect to come to fruition as described in our The Future of Security paper. Then we look at how security monitoring functions need to evolve, as an increasing amount of technology infrastructure runs in the cloud. An excerpt from the introduction sums this up nicely. As the mega-trends of mobility and cloud computing collide, security folks find themselves caught in the middle. The techniques used to monitor devices and infrastructure no longer work. There are no tap points, and it is often prohibitively inefficient to route cloud traffic through inspection choke points. Security monitoring needs to change fundamentally to stay relevant – even viable – in this cloud age. Although the industry isn’t going to shut down all of our data centers overnight. Not everything is moving whole hog into the private cloud or over to a SaaS-based service. So you will need to exist in purgatory between traditional data center technologies and cloud computing for a while. Thus you need to revisit your active controls and your security monitoring functions. Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC describes and assesses the new cloud use cases you need to factor into your security monitoring strategy, and discusses emerging technologies which can help you cope. Finally we will discuss coexistence and migration to a system to monitor the hybrid cloud because the existing stuff will be around for a while. We would like to thank IBM Security for licensing the content. Without our licensees you would be paying a king’s ransom to read our research. Download: Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC Share:

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