Intelligence comes from data. And there is no lack of security data, that’s for sure. Everything generates data. Servers, endpoints, networks, applications, databases, SaaS services, clouds, containers, and anything else that does anything in your technology environment. Just as there is no award for finding every vulnerability, there is no award for collecting all the security data. You want to collect the right data to make sure you can detect an attack before it becomes a breach. As we…
It’s brutal running a security operations center (SOC) today. The attack surface continues to expand, in a lot of cases exponentially, as data moves to SaaS, applications move to containers, and the infrastructure moves to the cloud. The tools used by the SOC analysts are improving, but not fast enough. It seems adversaries remain one (or more) steps ahead. There aren’t enough people to get the job done. Those that you can hire typically need a lot of training, and retaining them continues to…
As we wrap up the New Age Network Detection (NAND) series, we’ve made the point that network analysis remains critical to finding malicious activity, even as you move to the cloud. But clearly, collection and analysis need to change as the underlying technology platforms evolve. But that does put the cart a bit ahead of the horse. We haven’t spent much time honing in on the specific use cases where NAND makes a difference. So that’s how we’ll bring the series to a close. To be clear, this is…
It turns out that we are still writing papers and posting them in our research library, even though far less frequently than back in the day. Working with enterprises on their cloud security strategies consumes most of our cycles nowadays. When we’re not assessing clouds or training on clouds or getting into trouble, we’ve published 3 papers over the past year. I’ve finally posted them to the research library for you to check out.
As we return to our series on New Age Network Detection, let’s revisit our first post. We argued that we’re living through technology disruption on a scale, and at a velocity, we haven’t seen before. Unfortunately security has failed to keep pace with attackers. The industry’s response has been to move the goalposts, focusing on new shiny tech widgets every couple years. We summed it up in that first post:
Like the rest of the technology stack, the enterprise network is undergoing a huge transition. With data stores increasingly in the cloud and connectivity to SaaS providers and applications running in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms, a likely permanently remote workforce has new networking requirements. Latency and performance continue to be important, but also being able to protect employee devices in all locations and providing access to only authorized resources. Bringing the…
As discussed in Application Architecture Disrupted, macro changes including the migration to cloud disrupting the tech stack, application design patterns bringing microservices to the forefront, and DevOps changing dev/release practices dramatically impact building and deploying applications. In this environment, the focus turns to APIs as the fabric that weaves together modern applications. Alas, the increasing importance of APIs also makes them a target. Historically, enterprises take baby…
As we started the API Security series, we went through how application architecture evolves and how that’s changing the application attack surface. API Security requires more than traditional application security. Traditional application security tactics like SAST/DAST, WAF, API Gateway, and others are necessary but not sufficient. We need to build on top of the existing structures of application security to protect modern applications. So what does API Security look like? We wouldn’t be…
When you think of disruption, the typical image is a tornado coming through and ripping things up, leaving towns leveled and nothing the same moving forward. But disruption can be slow and steady, incremental in the way everything you thought you knew has changed. Securing cloud environments was like that, initially trying to use existing security concepts and controls, which worked well enough. Until they didn’t and forced a re-evaluation of everything that we thought we knew about security.…
We went through the risks and challenges of infrastructure hygiene, and then various approaches for fixing the vulnerabilities. Let’s wrap up the series by seeing how this kind of approach works in practice and how we’ll organize to ensure the consistent and successful execution of an infrastructure patch. Before we dive in, we should reiterate that none of the approaches we’ve offered are mutually exclusive. A patch does eliminate the vulnerability on the component, but the most expedient path…