It all started with an innocent call from my mortgage broker. He started with, “What if I could shave 75 basis points off your note, with no cost to you?” As you might have noticed, I’m a skeptical type of fellow. I asked, “What’s the catch?” He laughed and said, “No catch, I can get you from 4.25% to 3.5% and I’ll pay the costs.” I responded again, “There must be a catch. What am I missing?” He maked some wise remark about Groundhog Day and then told me there really is no catch. I can save a…
We have discussed the evolution of vulnerability management from a tactical tool to a much more strategic platform providing decision support for folks to more effectively prioritize security operations and resource allocation. But some vendors may not manage to effectively broaden their platforms sufficiently to remain competitive and fully satisfy their customer requirements. So at some point you may face a replacement decision, or to put it more kindly, a decision of evolution or revolution…
Given the general focus on most organizations on the attackers out there , they may miss the attackers that actually have the credentials and knowledge to do some real damage. These are your so-call privileged users and far too many organizations don’t do much to protect themselves from an attack from that community. By the way, this doesn’t necessarily require a malicious insider. Rather it’s very possible (if not plausible) that a privileged user’s device gets compromised, therefore giving…
Rich here. I’m writing thi from an airport, so I will eschew my normal ‘personal’ intro and spend a little time on our favorite security show: Airport Screening Follies.
It feels like Bizarro World to me. I woke up this morning freezing my backside off. We turned off the heat a few weeks ago and it was something like 65 this morning. Outside it was in the 40s, at the end of April. WTF? And the Northeast has snow. WTF? I had to bust out my sweatshirts, which I had hoped to shelve for the season. Again, WTF?
We’re in the home stretch of the Vulnerability Management Evolution research project. After talking mostly about the transition from an audit-centric tactical tool to a much more strategic platform providing security decision support, it is now time to look critically at what’s required to make the platform work in your enterprise. That means providing both built-in tools to help manage your vulnerability management program, as well as supporting integration with existing security and IT…
So far we have talked about scanning infrastructure and the application layer, before jumping into some technology decisions you face, such as how to deal with cloud delivery and agents. But as much as these capabilities increase the value of the vulnerability management system, it’s still not enough to really help focus security efforts and prioritize the hundreds (if not thousands) of vulnerabilities or configuration problems you’ll find. So let’s look at a few emerging capabilities that…
As we wrap up Watching the Watchers it’s worth reminding ourselves of the reality of enterprise security today. Nothing stands alone – not in the enterprise management stack anyway – so privileged user management functions need to play nicely with the other management tools. There are levels of integration required, as some functions need to be attached at the hip, while others can be mere acquaintances.
As we discussed in the last couple posts, any VM platform must be able to scan infrastructure and scan the application layer. But that’s still mostly tactical stuff. Run the scan, get a report, fix stuff (or not), and move on. When we talk about a strategic and evolved vulnerability management platform, the core technology needs to evolve to serve more than merely tactical goals – it must provide a foundation for a number of additional capabilities. Before we jump into the details we will…
It was a Mr. Mom weekend, so I particularly appreciated settling in at the coffee shop on Monday morning and getting some stuff done. And it wasn’t just trucking the kids around to their various activities. It was a big weekend for all of us to catch up on work. XX1 has the CRCT standardized test this week, which is a big deal in GA, so there was much prep for that. Both XX2 and Boy have How to presentations in class this week. So they each had to write and practice a presentation. And I had…