The last few years have proved to be a catalyst for digital transformation for many of our enterprise customers. Application modernization and adopting multicloud are the foundational building blocks for digitizing business. Customers employ CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery) to modernize their applications, building them on a cloud infrastructure. This evolution has given rise to new application security challenges in terms of speed, scale, as well as new and unfamiliar control points – not to mention siloed organizations and tools.
To address these security challenges, Cisco Secure Workload delivers zero trust microsegmentation in an infrastructure, location, and form factor agnostic way. It safeguards application workloads, wherever they live across the hybrid and multicloud environment. The recent release of Secure Workload 3.7 introduces “policy as code” support – delivering security at the speed of DevOps. It enables Secure Workload to be integrated with the customer’s choice of CI/CD toolchains, such as Jenkins or GitLab, and ingest the application security policy during the build phase of the application. Secure Workload then renders the policies onto the relevant workloads when the application goes live.
As the graphic below illustrates, Secure Workload ingests policies using Terraform or Ansible, which are widely adopted tools used by the DevOps team to automate infrastructure related tasks. Secure Workload integrates with the CI/CD toolchains using a YAML (.yml) manifest to ingest the policy. It then programs the same policies to the relevant enforcement point to achieve least privilege access for the newly built or upgraded application.
Policy as code helps customers automate policy deployment at the speed and scale of modern applications. It also simplifies collaboration between DevOps/DevSecOps and NetSec teams. The policies are written in the application language and give appropriate controls to developers to write their requirements into the application while the NetSec team ensures full compliance to the infosec policies dictated by the CISO organization.
In summary, Secure Workload removes the barriers to achieving automated application deployment across highly distributed multicloud environments, without compromising security, compliance, or user experience. The result – stronger security, faster application deployment, and more efficient collaboration.
For more information on policy as code, contact your Cisco Account Team or Partner Account Manager.
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Geez we've been getting hammered down here: Optus, MyDeal, Vinomofo, Medibank and now Australian Clinical Labs. It's crazy how much press interest there's been down here and whilst I think some of it is a bit hyperbolic, bringing the issue to the forefront and ensuring it's being discussed is certainly a good thing. Anyway, let's see what happens between now and next week's video, at this rate there'll be at least one more major Aussie breach to talk about!
Raspberry Robin, a worm that spreads through Windows systems via USB drives, has rapidly evolved: now backdoor access is being sold or offered to infected machines so that ransomware, among other code, can be installed by cybercriminals.…
Only a "handful" of US states have stopped buying Chinese technologies deemed by the government to pose security threats, according to a report from a Washington policy research group.…
A look at a recent string of law enforcement actions directed against (in some cases suspected) perpetrators of various types of cybercrime
The post Courts vs. cybercrime – Week in security with Tony Anscombe appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Webinar The cloud is constantly in flux, and with its continual growth comes an equally rapid acceleration of threats and vulnerabilities direct towards it. You could say the cloud environment resembles the wild west where even hired guns carefully guarding your wagon train are not always enough to prevent an ambush by a gang of determined outlaws.…
Vernon has been our Manager of Technical Accounting for more than two years, but that doesn’t mean he’s busy with spreadsheets and numbers all day.
It’s been an amazing ride so far. My team touches on several areas of responsibility, including financial period closing, financial reporting, and accounting for complex transactions.
The most rewarding part of my role is definitely the variety and complexity – they really go hand-in-hand and I enjoy asking questions and figuring out the solutions, even when there is not always a textbook answer. I enjoy the challenge of working collectively with a team to find solutions by applying research and experience to a set of facts.
It’s also rewarding to be able to collaborate with auditors and other stakeholders who would be interested in the results.
My favorite thing about working at McAfee is the team. We have an amazing team. It’s full of really smart people. I’ve seen some companies try and find the best talent they can, but McAfee has just taken that to a whole different level. Everyone in their respective areas is really tuned in to the broader effort and we work well together. At McAfee, we enjoy both a high level of talent and collaborative effort. You don’t often find both in the same place.
I really believe that each person brings certain strengths to the table, and they should be able to exercise those strengths to develop and expand their capabilities. Once those natural roles are established, it’s best to trust them to determine how best to perform in their roles and collaborate with the team in achieving results that add value to the broader group.
First, expect the unexpected – consider each new experience an opportunity for personal growth.
Secondly, get involved in projects. If you have the opportunity to do something different or work with a cross-functional team, do it. It builds your own skill base, which opens the door for greater future opportunities and you get to meet people outside of your own department and develop relationships that may prove valuable over time.
The post For some, accounting is more than just spreadsheets! Vernon’s McAfee Journey appeared first on McAfee Blog.
The White House is adding the chemical sector to a program launched last year to improve cybersecurity capabilities within America's critical infrastructure industries.…
Sponsored Feature The inexorable pace of technological innovation in response to the unrelenting growth of cyber attacks has led to fragmentation within cyber security provision. Things generally follow a common pattern, starting with a new security requirement being identified, whether a response to a novel threat, or a compliance or regulation challenge. This leads buyers to specialized tools, usually from smaller vendors that do one thing well. But inevitably over time, buyers end up using a mishmash of systems and tools, each with its own job and management processes.…
With passwords and MFA out of the way, let’s next look at connected apps or services that are tied to our priority accounts. When you log into other sites on the web through Facebook, Google, or another social account, as well as when you install social media apps or games, you are sharing information about those accounts with those services. This may be as limited as the email address and username on file, or may include much more information like your friends list, contacts, likes/subscriptions, or more.
A well-known example of this data-harvesting method is the Cambridge Analytica story, where installing a social media app opened up access to much more information than users realized. (Note: as mentioned in the linked article, Facebook added protective measures to limit the amount of data available to app developers, but connected accounts can still present a liability if misused.)
With this in mind, look under the Security or Privacy section of each of your account’s settings, and review where you have either used this account to log into a third-party website or allowed access when installing an app. Here are some handy links to some of the most common services to check:
If you aren’t going to use the app again or don’t want to share any details, remove them. Once you’ve checked your accounts, repeat this process with all the apps installed on your phone.
Just like connecting a social account to a third-party game can share information like your contact info and friend’s list, installing an app on your mobile device can share information including your contacts, camera roll and more. Fortunately, mobile OSes have gotten much better at notifying users before installation on what information is shared, so you should be able to see which apps might be nosier than you’re comfortable with.
Finally — and this is really for the nerds and techies out there — check if you have any API (short for “application programming interface”) keys or browser extensions connected to your accounts. API keys are commonly used to let different apps or services “talk” between one another. They let you use services like Zapier or IFTTT to do things like have your Spotify favorites automatically saved to a Google Sheet, or check Weather Underground to send a daily email with the forecast.
Browser extensions let you customize a web browser and integrate services, like quickly clicking to save an article for review on a “read it later” service like Instapaper. Even if you trust the developer when installing these apps, they may pose a risk later on if they are recovered or taken over by an attacker. These “zombie extensions” rely on a broad install base from a legitimate service which can later be misused to gather information or launch attacks by a malicious developer.
We’ve made great progress already, and taken steps to help defend your accounts from prying eyes going forward – now it’s time to lock down your previous activities on social media. Rather than enumerate every option on every service, I’ll highlight some common tools and privacy settings you’ll want to check:
Before moving on to email, I’ll add another plug for the NYT Social Media Security and Privacy Checklists if you, like me, would rather have a series of boxes to mark off while going through each step above.
Security experts know that you can’t erase the possibility of risk, and it can be counterproductive to build a plan to that expectation. What is realistic and achievable is identifying risk so you know what you’re up against, mitigating risk by following security best practices, and isolating risk where possible so that in the event of an incident, one failure doesn’t have a domino effect affecting other resources. If that seems a bit abstract, let’s take a look at a practical example.
Tech journalist Mat Honan was the unlucky victim of a targeted hack, which resulted in a near-complete lockout from his digital life requiring a Herculean effort to recover. Fortunately for us, Mat documented his experience in the Wired story, “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking,” which offers an excellent summary of exactly the type of domino effect I described. I encourage you to read the full article, but for a CliffsNotes version sufficient for our needs here:
Honan’s article goes into much more detail, including some of the changes made by the services exploited to prevent similar incidents in the future. The key takeaway is that having a couple of emails without strong authentication tied to all his most important accounts, including the recovery of these email accounts themselves, meant that the compromise of his Amazon account quickly snowballed into something much bigger.
We’re going to learn from that painful lesson, and do some segmentation on our email channels based on the priority and how public we want that account to be. (“Segmentation” is an industry term that can be mostly boiled down to “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and keep critical or vulnerable resources separate from each other.) I would suggest setting up a few different emails, listed here from least- to most-public:
For all of the above, of course, we’ll create strong passwords and set up 2FA. And speaking of 2FA, you can use the same split-channel approach we followed for email to set up a dedicated verification number (using a VOIP service or something like Google Voice) when sending a passcode by SMS is the only option supported. Keeping these recovery numbers separate from your main phone number reduces the risk of them being leaked, sold, or captured in an unrelated breach.
Good news: We’re almost done with doxxing ourselves! In the next section, we’ll sweep out those unused accounts to avoid leaving data-filled loose ends and take a look at how data brokers profit off of your personal information and what you can do to opt-out.
You’ve made it this far so maybe you’re passionate like we are about developing innovative ways to make security accessible. We’d love for you to join our mission.
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Just a few years ago when the topic of supporting offsite workers arose, some of the key conversation topics were related to purchase, logistics, deployment, maintenance and similar issues. The discussions back then were more like “special cases” vs. today’s environment where supporting workers offsite (now known as the hybrid workforce) has become a critical mainstream topic.
Now with the bulk of many organization’s workers off-premise, the topic of security and the ability of a security vendor to help support an organization’s hybrid workers has risen to the top of the selection criteria. In a soon to be released Cisco endpoint survey, it’s not surprising that the ability of a security vendor to make supporting the hybrid workforce easier and more efficient was the key motivating factor when organizations choose security solutions.
Today, when prospects and existing customers look at Cisco’s ability to support hybrid workers with our advanced security solution set and open platform, it’s quite clear that we can deliver on that promise. But, yes, good tools make it easier and more efficient, but the reality is that running a SOC or any security group, large or small, still takes a lot of work. Most organizations not only rely on advanced security tools but utilize a set of best practices to provide clarity of roles, efficiency of operation, and for the more prepared, have tested these best practices to prove to themselves that they are prepared for what’s next.
Knowing that not all organizations have this degree of security maturity and preparedness, we gathered a couple of subject matter experts together to discuss 5 areas of time-tested best practices that, besides the advanced tools offered by Cisco and others, can help your SOC (or small security team) yield actionable insights and guide you faster, and with more confidence, toward the outcomes you want.
In this webinar you will hear practical advice from Cisco technical marketing and a representative from our award winning Talos Threat Intelligence group, the same group who have created and are maintaining breach defense in partnership with Fortune 500 Security Operating Centers (SOC) around the globe.
You can expect to hear our 5 Best Practices recommendations on the following topics;
Check out our webinar to find out how you can become more security resilient and be better prepared for what’s next.
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You probably don’t have to ditch your phone just yet – try these simple tips and tricks to make any Android device or iPhone run faster
The post Why your phone is slow – and how to speed it up appeared first on WeLiveSecurity