Login
The ability to generate NetFlow from devices that do not natively produce it along with significant storage efficiency and improved workflows make for a significant update to CTB.
Cisco Telemetry… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Let’s say that, during the middle of a busy day, you receive what looks like a work-related email with a QR code. The email claims to come from a coworker, requesting your help in reviewing a d… Read more on Cisco Blogs
For years, analysts, security specialists, and security architects alike have been encouraging organizations to become DMARC compliant. This involves deploying email authentication to ensure their… Read more on Cisco Blogs
There has been an exponential increase in breaches within enterprises despite the carefully constructed and controlled perimeters that exist around applications and data. Once an attacker can access… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Related tags
Join the guided tour outside the Security Operations Center, where we’ll discuss real time network traffic of the RSA Conference, as seen in the NetWitness platform. Engineers will be using Cisco S… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Cisco is honored to be this year’s winner of the Best Next Generation Firewall Award in the SE Labs 2023 Annual Report. This industry recognition validates Cisco’s continuous push towards harmonizing network, workload, and application security across hybrid and multicloud environments. I’m incredibly proud of the Cisco Secure Firewall team and am thankful for our amazing customers who continue to trust Cisco and develop their network security around our capabilities.
SE Labs, a cybersecurity testing and evaluation firm, provides impartial and independent assessments of various cybersecurity products and solutions. In their 2023 Annual Report, SE Labs states:
“Our Annual Security Awards recognizes security vendors that notonly do well in our tests, but perform well in the real world withreal customers. These awards are the only in the industry thatrecognize strong lab work combined with practical success.”
SE Labs performs tests on behalf of customers seeking independent proof-of-value assistance, as well as security vendors. At Cisco, we use third-party evaluations from multiple sources, including SE Labs, to augment our internal testing and to drive product improvement.
Winners were determined after months of in-depth testing, based on a combination of continual public testing, private assessments and feedback from corporate clients who use SE Labs to help choose security products and services. The award further validates that our customers can expect superior threat protection and performance with Cisco Secure Firewall.
SE Labs’ reports use the MITRE ATT&CK framework, employing both common “commodity” malware samples and sophisticated, targeted attacks. Their network security testing uses full attack chains to assess the detection and protection abilities of network devices and combinations of network and endpoint solutions. SE Labs publishes its testing methodologies and is BS EN ISO 9001: 2015 certified for The Provision of IT Security Product Testing.
As a worldwide leader in networking and security, Cisco is better positioned than any other security vendor to incorporate effective firewall controls into our customers’ infrastructure — anywhere data and applications reside. We offer a comprehensive threat defense with industry-leading Snort 3 IPS to protect users, applications, and data from continuously evolving threats. Our solutions also leverage machine learning and advanced threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, one of the world’s largest commercial threat intelligence teams.
In the constantly evolving world of cybersecurity, it is important to have access to the latest and most advanced technologies to stay ahead of threats. Whether you are an enterprise, government, healthcare, or a service provider organization, Cisco Secure Firewall provides top-ranked security.
When you invest in Cisco Secure Firewall, you are investing in award-winning threat defense with capabilities that are built for the real world. Learn more about SE Labs 2023 Annual Report, Cisco Secure Firewall and how you can refresh your firewall.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
For Cisco engineers working on Duo, having a remote-first workplace has helped them reach life goals, connect with colleagues around the world, and be intentional communicators. We understand that working remotely can be an adjustment — that’s why we’ve compiled the 10 parts of remote work that surprised our team members most and their advice for navigating the nuances. If you’re interested in being part of a remote-first workplace, check out our open positions.
Senior Engineering Leader David Rines has worked remotely for the past seven years. He’s found that Cisco’s approach to distributed teams has “enabled us to pick up the right talent, and not necessarily local talent. We are moving towards a global, follow the sun environment,” he said.
One of the aspects Rines appreciates most of this structure is getting “a widely varied set of perspectives and experiences that help build a more reliable, more robust product, which is why we’re here.”
Another benefit to having colleagues across the globe is the sharing of recipes, a perk Senior Site Reliability Engineer Bernard Ting particularly enjoys. Proactively communicating with colleagues virtually “helps you to form bonds with people from other teams. You can always learn something new about cultures elsewhere. I talk to people about food and so I’m always gathering recipes from people from all over the world,” Ting shared.
While some may fear that working remotely could lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness, a different camaraderie can flourish in the structure of our distributed teams. With colleagues across time zones, “there’s always someone there who you can reach out to help solve your problem,” Rines said.
Collaboration hours are another way Site Reliability Engineering Manager Jaya Sistla has cultivated virtual community and problem-solving. These hours are blocked off for team members to talk about what they’re working on. “The main thing is being able to ask for help so you don’t go into the rabbit hole debugging things,” Sistla said.
Ting points out that working in a distributed model allows you to really engage in virtual events and conversations. Given that the team mainly communicates through online chat, Ting has found that “forces you to see everyone as equally approachable, which has made me more comfortable reaching out to people from anywhere in the world.”
For folks sharing an office, collaboration can happen through casual chats over coffee. When facing a challenge, you can ask your neighbor for support. While ideally virtual communication could have a similar cadence and spontaneity, the logistics of remote and distributed work require intentionality and being proactive in connecting with colleagues as people and as co-workers.
When Ting first started working remotely, he felt that every meeting needed to be formal and have a business objective. By sharing his feelings with his manager, he was reassured that “socializing is a very important part of teamwork, because if you don’t have a good relationship with your colleagues you’re not going to be able to have healthy discussions, healthy conflict or be able to critique each other when the situation arises.”
Since that conversation, Ting has been more proactive about catching up with colleagues, which can include sharing a coffee over video chat. Duo’s “coffee roulette” formalizes the process as every month, employees who opt in can be randomly paired up for a quick half-hour chat focused exclusively on socializing. Ting has found being proactive about socializing virtually helpful. “It’s made me more intentional with my time and really treasure the social experience you can get,” he said.
Some folks may be concerned that without a manager observing their efforts and work ethic day in and day out, it may be harder to recognize accomplishments and challenges. Ting found that within his team “when you work on projects and in your one-on-ones with your managers, they’re always very intentional about learning what you’ve been doing and seeing what your progress is like on certain projects. I’ve been asked, ‘How do you think you can improve? What are some of the things you’ve been doing outside of the team work?’”
To cultivate cross-team collaboration and education, there are thoughtfully planned virtual lunch and learns. “We schedule training sessions and common meetings at times that are flexible for everyone. If it has to be repeated, we do it so people can comfortably attend rather than stretching themselves and attending at odd hours,” Sistla said.
For Software Engineer Nick Aspinall, an important and fun part of working remotely is keeping in touch with virtual messaging. One unique perk has been getting to create and customize emojis with team members including a few of himself in “various ridiculous states,” he said.
Connecting with colleagues on themed channels focused on personal and professional interests from coffee to pets “makes it really cool because you can meet people across different teams and still get some of the feeling of rubbing elbows that you get when you’re in the office,” Aspinall said. Participating in these virtual conversations boosts morale while also providing an endless supply of cute animal pics.
Given the multi-faceted nature of our work and the importance of consistent information sharing, having different communication channels and formats to communicate data with varying degrees of complexity is vital. Having information readily accessible, accurate and updated is particularly necessary in a field like cybersecurity.
Senior Software Engineer Mario Lopez finds that the variety of information sources contributes to an easeful remote working experience. For instance, for complex architecture decisions or detailing, Duo’s Wiki is the best source.
Software Engineer Hanna Fernandez has benefited from chat channels dedicated to design and engineering topics to “see what everyone’s up to and what thoughts people have,” she said. Sista pointed out these are great places to ask questions and open up dialogue to solve problems.
Our culture is “video-on,” meaning that it is preferred that during video meetings, as much as possible, attendees have their cameras on. Lopez loves this because “you get a bit of that personal human element.”
“We’re all people behind these screens. You definitely get some of people’s personality through text, but you get it more when you actually see them. It’s infectious when you see someone smiling. You’ve got to smile back,” he shared (while we both smiled).
When Fernandez started at Cisco, she was advised to schedule individual meetings with everyone she would be working with on every team that she joined. That suggestion is one she’s applied even virtually.
“It’s a great strategy because I already know that my team is super talented and very smart, but this way I also get to know them as humans beyond their roles,” Fernandez said. Fernandez also finds it important to check in with co-workers and ask how they’re feeling and how their time off was. “I know a lot of people hate small talk, but it’s not just small talk. I’m genuinely interested in how my co-workers are doing.”
One of Ting’s biggest goals was buying his first house in the countryside outside of London. By working remotely, Ting has flexibility in his location which allowed him to achieve his goal of buying a house and settling down with his partner, while giving their dogs the space they need to be dogs.
When transitioning from fully remote to hybrid, it’s important to recognize that there will be some shifts to get accustomed to. As the structures of remote, distributed and hybrid work evolve, it’s important to stay flexible and notice what’s possible through multiple modalities of team building. Many teams have enjoyed in-person gatherings and connecting through virtual lunches and team games when remote.
Fernandez has had multiple roles with multiple structures at Cisco. As an intern, she was fully in person and shared desk space with other interns who collaborated on full stack engineering. While working in finance IT, Fernandez was hybrid and many of her colleagues were distributed among multiple offices. The pandemic began while she was in a DevOps role, forcing her to maintain boundaries around her work time while working fully remotely. In her current role working on Duo, Fernandez is completely remote but advocates for in-person events if possible, because “humans are social creatures who want to see each other’s faces in real life once in a while.”
For Aspinall, “when we did come back to the office, there was a bit of an adjustment period where you were overstimulated from the office.” He also wanted to ensure team members who were 100% remote were fully included. Now he sees that while half his team is fully remote and the other half is hybrid, “that doesn’t stop anyone from doing anything. All of our meetings feel the same. They’re all seamless.”
If you’re interested in joining our team from wherever you are in the world, check out our open roles.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Related tags
Imagine this: Your CEO sends you an email asking for your help transferring $5,000 to a new vendor for an urgent project. You make the transfer, only to find out later that the email was actually from an imposter, and that money is now in the hands of cybercriminals. Oops, right? crickets
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a type of cybercrime that involves compromising or imitating legitimate business email accounts to carry out fraudulent transactions or steal sensitive information. The goal of a BEC attack is typically to trick the victim into transferring money, clicking on a malicious link, or disclosing sensitive information such as login credentials. BEC attacks can have a devastating impact on organizations of all sizes and in all industries, making it essential for businesses to be aware of the threat, understand the business risk, and take the necessary steps to protect themselves.
According to the latest FBI IC3 report, BEC is “one of the most financially damaging online crimes” and in 2021 was accountable for $2.4 Billion in adjusted losses for businesses and consumers.
One of the most common types of BEC attacks is called impersonating or email spoofing. By pretending to be a trusted colleague or business partner to gain the victim’s trust, the attacker uses social engineering techniques to trick the victim into clicking on a link or attachment in an email that contains malware, takes the victim to a malicious website, and has them transfer funds or change payment information.
BEC attacks can be very sophisticated and are difficult to detect. Many times, what the end-user sees on their email client does not represent the true email address of that sender, or it shows one that has been spoofed.
Typically, the attacker tries to impersonate someone in the organization with enough authority to not be questioned about what he/she is asking to be done.
As with everything in security, to be able to succeed in stopping BEC attacks, additional security layers & techniques should be implemented. There are several options to mitigate or reduce the number of successful BEC attacks. Creating a list of the people who will be likely to be impersonated will provide the best results. Usually, with names from the CxO level, this is known as a High Impact Personnel list. It will be used along with other security analysis engines to make sure any impersonated/spoof emails, along with other threats, get stopped and will not reach the end user.
The Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense solution leverages hundreds of detection engines that utilize state-of-the-art artificial intelligence/machine learning and natural language processing to convict messages from the most creative attackers! On top of this, our customers can define their High Impact Personnel list, and together with the other detection engines, will be able to not only block malicious messages but also understand the reasons and categories of why a message is being convicted as malicious.
In summary, Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a serious threat to organizations of all sizes and in all industries. To protect against BEC attacks, businesses should implement multiple techniques including identifying their High Impact Personnel for their organization, educating employees about the threat, and relying on reporting to understand who is being targeted most frequently so their security policies can be adjusted.
See how Secure Email Threat Defense identifies specific business risk factors to protect your organization.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Attackers specifically craft business email compromise (BEC) and phishing emails using a combination of malicious techniques, expertly selected from an ever-evolving bag of tricks. They’ll use these techniques to impersonate a person or business that’s well-known to the targeted recipient and hide their true intentions, while attempting to avoid detection by security controls.
As a result of the requisite expertise needed to combat these complex attacks, email security has traditionally been siloed away in disparate teams and security controls. Practitioners are buried under an ever-growing pile of RFCs, requiring extensive domain-specific knowledge, unending vigilance, and meticulous manual interventions, such as tweaking trust levels and cultivating allow/block lists with IPs, domains, senders, and vendors.
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is leading the industry forward with a major shift, elevating email security into a new era; where administration will consist of merely associating specific business risks with the appropriate due diligence response required to remediate against them.
Email Threat Defense has introduced a new Threat Profile that provides the customer with deep insights into the specific business risks of individual email threats and the confidence to act quickly. This new visualization is powered by a new patent-pending threat detection engine. This engine leverages intelligence distilled from Talos global-scale threat research across a massive volume of email traffic into machine learning, behavioral modeling, and natural language understanding.
The detection engine granularly identifies specific underlying threat techniques utilized in the message by the attacker. The identified techniques provide the full context of the threat message as the supporting foundation for the engine to determine threat categorization and the specific risk to the business. These malicious Techniques, together with the threat category and specific business risk, are used to populate the Threat Profile.
Each message’s Threat Profile is identified in real-time, automatically remediated per policy, and surfaced directly to the operator in the message detail views, providing deep contextual insights into the attacker’s intent and the associated risks to the business. As part of a larger Extended Detection and Response (XDR) strategy, the actionable intelligence in Email Threat Defense is integrated with the wider enterprise orchestration of security controls via SecureX, easing the operational burden by decreasing your mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Email Threat Defense delivers a distinct understanding of malicious messages, the most vulnerable targets within the organization, and the most effective means of protecting them from phishing, scams, and BEC attacks. With a clean design and core focus on simplifying administration, Email Threat Defense deploys in minutes to strengthen protection of your existing Microsoft 365 Exchange Online platform against the most advanced email threats.
For more information, visit the Cisco Secure Email product pages, read the Email Threat Defense data sheet, and view the demo video below.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
For these Cisconians, hands-on is the way to go when it comes to giving back. Using Cisco’s Time2Give benefit that provides 10 paid days to volunteer each year, team members rolled up their sleeves to build homes, cuddle and care for animals, distribute food and more. If you also value giving back, check out our open roles.
Marketing Specialist, Global Events Julie Kramer used Time2Give to build a shed with Habitat for Humanity of Huron Valley. Kramer especially appreciated learning about the organization’s purpose in addition to learning how to build.
John Hindman, an account executive, used Time2Give to spend a week in Nicaragua with SuNica, an organization centered on clean water and fellowship. Hindman cleared out downed trees, picked coffee and built treehouses to allow the organization to host more children from surrounding communities.
In the community Hindman visited, repurposing recycled materials is critical to the economy, and one way that happens is through “mining” the local landfill. Hindman’s team encouraged local employees and led games and activities for local children.
For those considering Time2Give, Hindman says, “Do it. Unplug, find something you’re passionate about, set up your out-of-office, and ignore everything work-related for the time you’re serving.”
Animal lover Carrie Cordeiro, a Cisco Secure digital strategist/manager on the Brand Marketing team, volunteers with Hopalong and Muttville as a kitten cuddler and dog walker. Most of her time is spent transporting kittens, puppies, cats and dogs around the Bay Area to vet appointments, adoption centers and foster locations.
The best part for Cordeiro is “getting to interact with so many adorable animals,” she said. As for leadership support around utilizing Time2Give? “I love doing it and my management team absolutely supports it, especially when I share photos.”
Customer Success Manager Kristen Gehrke reminds us that, “You don’t always have to look far to utilize Time2Give.” She sewed a baby blanket for Bluebonnet Trails Community Services. “The best part of the experience was giving back to mothers and their babies, as I am an expecting mother myself,” she said.
Engineering Manager Blake Ellingham organized food pantry shelves and packed bags for food distributions with HTB Food Bank. “I love getting to do work with my hands that helps others,” he said.
Ellingham recommends scheduling something routine for Time2Give. “Consistency matters! By going in every week for a half day of volunteering, I was able to make great friends with the staff,” he said.
From empowering youth globally and remotely to volunteering across community hubs, Cisconians deeply value innovative ways to contribute their time and talents.
If you are interested in increasing the impact of your skills and passions at work and beyond, check out our open positions.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
The word is out! Cisco Secure Endpoint’s effectiveness is off the charts in protecting your enterprise environment.
This is not just a baseless opinion; however, the facts are rooted in actual test results from the annual AV-Comparative EPR Test Report published in October 2022. Not only did Secure Endpoint knock it out of the park in enterprise protection; but Cisco Secure Endpoint obtained the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) per agent at $587 over 5 years. No one else was remotely close in this area. More to come on that later.
If you are not familiar with the “AV-Comparatives Endpoint Prevention and Response Test is the most comprehensive test of EPR products ever performed. The 10 products in the test were subjected to 50 separate targeted attack scenarios, which used a variety of different techniques.”
These results are from an industry-respected third-party organization that assesses antivirus software and has just confirmed what we know and believe here at Cisco, which is our Secure Endpoint product is the industry’s best of the best.
Look for yourself at where we landed. That’s right, Cisco Secure Endpoint smashed this test, we are almost off the quadrant as one of the “Strategic Leaders”.
We ended up here for a combination of reasons, with the top being our efficacy in protecting our customers’ environments in this real-world test that emulates multi-stage attacks similar to MITRE’s ATT&CK evaluations which are conducted as part of this process (click here for an overview of MITRE ATT&CK techniques). Out of all the 50 scenarios tested, Secure Endpoint was the only product that STOPPED 100% of targeted threats toward enterprise users, which prevented further infiltration into the organization.
In addition, this test not only assesses the efficacy of endpoint security products but also analyzes their cost-effectiveness. Following up on my earlier remarks about achieving the lowest cost of ownership, the graph below displays how we stacked up against other industry players in this space including several well-known vendors that chose not to display their names due to poor results.
These results provide a meaningful proof point that Cisco Secure Endpoint is perfectly positioned to secure the enterprise as well as secure the future of hybrid workers.
Enriched with built-in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities, Cisco Secure Endpoint has allowed our customers to maintain resiliency when faced with outside threats.
As we embark on securing “what’s next” by staying ahead of unforeseen cyber threats of tomorrow, Cisco Secure Endpoint integration with the complete Cisco Secure Solutions portfolio allows you to move forward with the peace of mind that if it’s connected, we can and will protect it.
Now that you have seen how effective Secure Endpoint is with live real-world testing, try it for yourself with one of our live instant demos. Click here to access instructions on how to download and install your demo account for a test drive.
Click here to see what analysts, customers, and third-party testing organizations have to say about Cisco Secure Endpoint Security efficacy, easy implementation and overall low total cost of ownership for their organization —and stay ahead of threats.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Cisconians delight in contributing to their communities in a variety of ways including at the local theatre, farm and library. Cisco’s paid Time2Give benefit encourages team members to volunteer at the places where their passions thrive.
How should you decide where to get involved? Customer Success Program Manager Kate Pydyn advises: “Find something that speaks to your passion while giving back. There are so many opportunities that involve being outdoors, crafting, teaching skills you’ve developed, telling stories or providing comfort.”
With ten paid days a year to give, these Cisconians demonstrate that building relationships with people, the arts and the earth can increase fulfillment, connection and community.
Urban farming is an issue very close to the heart of Petra Hammerl, a senior enterprise customer success manager who works on Duo Security. Hammerl frequently volunteers at Farm City Detroit, part of Detroit Blight Busters. Using Time2Give, Hammerl has shared the experience by “bringing a crew of awesome co-workers which has been amazing and a lot of fun,” she said.
“It felt great to take action! There are so many problems in the world, and I often feel powerless to make a difference. What I did was small, but with all of the volunteers together, the work that was done makes a real difference in the lives of my neighbors.” – Kate Pydyn
Pydyn and Emily Gennrich, a manager of operations for security customer success at Cisco Secure, joined in on the fun by contributing to multiple facets of gardening from weeding to harvesting food. “It felt great to take action! There are so many problems in the world, and I often feel powerless to make a difference. What I did was small, but with all of the volunteers together, the work that was done makes a real difference in the lives of my neighbors,” Pydyn said.
Senior Communications Manager, Brand Strategy & Design at Cisco Secure Chrysta Cherrie spent her Time2Give as a sighted assistant at the VISIONS vendor fair, hosted at the Ann Arbor District Library Downtown. “I was really happy to take some time to volunteer at the VISIONS vendor fair for people who are blind, visually impaired or physically disabled,” Cherrie said.
Learning how to be a sighted assistant was “a reminder that we can do more when we can rely on each other. Taking the time to better understand how someone makes their way through life gives you a chance to build empathy,” Cherrie said. She escorted attendees around the event where exhibitors offered products and services like electronic readers, leader dogs and transportation. There were also talks throughout the day and Cherrie helped attendees navigate between the presentation and vendor areas.
Meeting attendees of the VISIONS vendor fair and experiencing how meaningful the event is also moved Cherrie. The fair “brings out folks throughout southeast Michigan, so there’s a good chance that the person you’re assisting will run into some friends, and getting to see people connect like that can’t help but make you feel good,” Cherrie said.
Jenny Callans, a senior design researcher who works on Duo Security, serves as the chair of the Friends of the Detroit Film Theatre’s Auxiliary, a part of the Detroit Institute of Arts. “We support the mission of the Friends of the Detroit Film Theatre to make great niche films accessible to audiences,” she said. To do that, the organization is responsible for building a community of film fans and overseeing how donations are spent.
For Callans, the most meaningful part of using Time2Give to support the FDFT and the DIA is sharing her love of film with others. Time2Give supports her duties as FDFT chair, and gives her a sense of connection when she’s visiting the DFT to take in a movie. “Sitting in a theatre next to my young adult son, but surrounded by strangers watching a film that is unusual or unexpected but which moves me and challenges me to think is the best part hands-down,” Callans said.
From supporting youth to volunteering at community hubs, Time2Give “is a fantastic opportunity to have a long-lasting, meaningful relationship with your community by volunteering as a board or committee member! Having a long-term presence with an org is amazingly impactful, for you and for the organization,” Callans said.
Time2Give is one of Cherrie’s favorite things about working at Cisco. She says, “Take advantage of the opportunity! Time2Give is a great way to give back to your community and the people and causes that you care about.”
Stay tuned for more posts celebrating the community engagement Time2Give fosters and check out our open roles to join in on giving back.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
I’m sure you’ve seen them — emails or messages that sound alarming and ask you to act quickly. We live in a digital world that produces hundreds of messages and alerts every day. It’s often hard to determine the validity of a suspicious message or phishing email. Whether you are an administrator, or an end-user, it can be overwhelming to accurately identify a malicious message. When in doubt, here are some questions you should ask yourself:
Is the message from a legitimate sender?
Do I normally receive messages from this person?
If there’s a link, can I tell where it’s sending me?
Attackers continue to evolve their methods, and they’re highly educated on the defenses they come up against in the wild. They’ll craft messages that do not involve any traditional indicators of compromise, such as domains, IP address, or URL links. They’ll also start their attacks by sending messages as an initial lure to establish trust, before sending an email with altered invoice or one claiming to be a helpless employee attempting to get their payroll fixed.
Phishing is a socially-based attack type, one where the threat actors focus on human behavior. When these attacks target organizations, there are multiple levels of attack at play. One that focuses on behavioral patterns and workflow, and the other centers on the victim’s emotional boundaries, such as targeting their desire to help others. You see this pattern frequently in Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks.
Below, we’ve placed an example of a lure, which will test the victim to see if there is a means to quickly establish trust. Here, the threat actor is pretending to be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the victim’s organization. If the lure is successful, then the threat actor will progress the attack, and often request sensitive records or wire transfers. Notice that in the email headers, the person pretending to be the CFO is using a Gmail account, one that was likely created just for this attack. The message is brief, stresses importance and urgency, and requests assistance, playing on the victim’s workflow and desire to help an executive or someone with authority.
The example below is a simplified one, to be sure, but the elements are legitimate. Daily, emails like this hit the inboxes of organizations globally, and the attackers only need to locate a single victim to make their efforts payout.
In the FBI / IC3 2021 Internet Crime Report, there were nearly 20,000 Business Email Compromise complaints filed, with an adjusted loss of nearly 2.4 billion dollars. While spoofing the identity of an executive is certainly one way to conduct a BEC attack, the FBI says that threat actors have started leveraging the normality of hybrid-work to target meeting platforms to establish trust and conduct their crimes. When successful, the funds from the fraudulent wire transfers are moved to crypto wallets and the funds dispersed, making recovery harder.
So as an end user what can you do to protect your organization? Be mindful anytime you receive an urgent call to action, especially when the subject involves money. If your workflow means that you regularly receive these types of requests from the specific individual, verify their identity and the validity of the request using another channel of communication, such as in person or via phone. If you do validate their identity via the phone, take care to avoid calling any numbers listed in the email.
Cisco Secure Email helps stop these types of attacks by tracking user relationships and threat techniques. These techniques often include account takeover, spoofing and many more. Using an intent-based approach allows Secure Email to detect and classify business email compromises and other attacks, so administrators are empowered to take a risk-based approach to stopping these threats.
Find out more about how Cisco Secure Email can help keep your organization safe from phishing.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Giving back is part of the ethos at Cisco. Part of how that happens is through employees volunteering as part of Cisco’s Time2Give benefit in which employees can use paid time to contribute to their communities and support the causes they’re passionate about. During the pandemic, Cisco increased this benefit from five paid volunteering days to 10 and encourages virtual volunteering, too.
Elizabeth Chang, a software engineer on the Duo Security platform services team, considers Time2Give a great opportunity to “invest in people around you. It is amazing that Cisco supports what we are passionate about and that we can use this time to grow ourselves in other areas of life,” she said.
Cisconians care deeply about many causes, and this post celebrates how teammates spend their time supporting children, youth and teens in and out of school and those preparing for college. Stay tuned for future posts highlighting how other employees give their time. You may even be inspired to find out how you can develop your skills while contributing to organizations that matter to you!
Pierpaolo Panarotto, an account executive on Duo’s EMEAR continental team, volunteers at Sport senza frontiere onlus, a summer sports camp in Italy for refugee children. This summer Panarotto tutored and taught badminton. The program also welcomed children from Ukraine this year.
For Panarotto, the best part, hands down, was seeing the children’s smiles. He advised, “Give back to your community. Sometimes we forget how lucky we are.”
Chang also volunteered at a summer camp, supporting middle and high school students in Boston. The program she supported, Area Youth Ministry Leadership Camp and Summer Boost, fosters leadership skills and college readiness while promoting mentorship.
By helping lead a coding workshop, Chang was able to share what she does professionally. “I was glad that I got to help inspire youth to pursue computer science,” she said. The camp was such a hit that many participants “didn’t want to go home because they had such a fun time,” Chang shared.
“Take the time! You’ll never get the opportunity to go back and take it later. Your community and your heart will thank you!” – Sarah Moon-Musser
Now that school has started, Engineering Program Manager in Platform Engineering Sarah Moon-Musser helps teach the Belleville High School Marching Band’s color guard choreography for their halftime show. She loves spending time with the students. To those considering utilizing Time2Give Moon-Musser says, “Take the time! You’ll never get the opportunity to go back and take it later. Your community and your heart will thank you!”
College readiness is also a passion for Justin Fan and Seema Kathuria who both volunteer with Code2College. They’re able to volunteer virtually by reviewing resumes and college entrance essays and providing constructive feedback through shared documents.
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Kathuria appreciates “learning about the experiences of high school students and how they approach writing about their accomplishments,” she said.
For Fan, a senior customer success manager in security customer success, “the best part is supporting younger generations as they move into college and career. They’re so much more focused and mature than I was at their age,” he said. Fan also participates in virtual career workshops with high school and college students with Students Rising Above.
For others wanting to use Time2Give, Fan suggests finding opportunities you’re passionate about and utilizing light meeting days to volunteer. Kathuria says, “Take advantage of the 10 Time2Give days per year that Cisco gives us. It is very generous, and it feels so good to give back to the community in whatever way makes you happy and fulfilled.”
If you’re looking to feel fulfilled by your work and the impact you can make, please check out our open roles.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Ransomware is one of the most dangerous threats organizations face today, so it’s no wonder that Cisco Talos Incident Response named it the top threat of the year in 2021. These attacks continue to grow and become more advanced, with ransomware attacks growing by 13% over 2021 and a whopping 79% over 2020 so far this year (see Figure 1 below).1 Stopping ransomware attacks isn’t easy either, as adversaries continue to change their techniques and attacks become increasingly sophisticated.
Fortunately, Cisco Secure Endpoint defends your organization from ransomware by delivering security outcomes that enable you to radically simplify your security, maximize your security operations, and achieve peace of mind. Let’s dive deeper into each of these areas to better understand how Secure Endpoint can help your organization defend against ransomware attacks.
Cybersecurity has become increasingly complex due to the numerous security solutions deployed by organizations today. These disparate point-products increase complexity while creating security gaps because they require additional management overhead and typically don’t communicate with each other. This increases the burden on security operations teams since they must spend time managing these different solutions and filling in the gaps between tools rather than using their time to investigate and respond to threats
Cisco takes a very different approach to cybersecurity by looking at ransomware endpoint protection holistically, as part of an integrated security solution. For instance, Secure Endpoint includes built-in extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities from the Cisco SecureX platform that centralizes visibility in a single console, creates high-fidelity detections by correlating threats, and coordinates threat response across your entire security environment. In addition, Secure Endpoint unifies your security stack, simplifies management, and reduces agent fatigue because we’ve consolidated endpoint protection, cloud security, and remote access agents into a single agent.
Learn more about how Secure Endpoint helps you simplify your security while defending your organization from ransomware attacks by watching this video:
One of the common themes we’ve heard from our customers is that their security operations teams are frequently overstretched. The ongoing cybersecurity skills shortage means that security teams have to do more with less and a vast number of security tools to manage along with inefficient security operations processes, often leading to burned-out security teams.
Cisco addresses these challenges by allowing you to get the most out of your security operations. For example, you can accelerate investigation and incident response with valuable vulnerability context since we’ve integrated risk-based vulnerability management from Kenna Security into Secure Endpoint. Moreover, Secure Endpoint includes advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities via Orbital Advanced Search and built-in XDR from SecureX that enable you to rapidly detect, respond to, and contain ransomware attacks. Lastly, you can get the security expertise you need with proactive threat hunting from SecureX Threat Hunting, which uses an analyst-centric process to quickly spot hidden ransomware.
Check out how Secure Endpoint helps you maximize your security operations while defending your organization from ransomware attacks by watching this video:
Keeping up with the latest ransomware attacks can seem like an impossible challenge due to Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) kits which make it simple and lucrative to target organizations with ransomware and the evolving threat landscape, where attackers are continuously changing their methods to evade detection.
Cisco helps you stay ahead of the newest ransomware attacks and gives you the peace of mind you deserve by taking a comprehensive approach to ransomware endpoint protection. This means ensuring that you never have to go it alone with always-on security operations from Cisco Secure Endpoint Pro, a managed service that uses a team of Cisco security experts to perform the heavy lifting of securing your endpoints. It also includes offering advanced EDR and integrated XDR capabilities such as Orbital and SecureX to speed detection and response, simplify investigations, and quickly contain ransomware attacks before it’s too late. Finally, Secure Endpoint prevents initial ransomware infections with multifaceted prevention techniques such as machine learning, exploit prevention, and behavioral protection as well as actionable threat intelligence from the Cisco Talos research team.
Learn more about how Secure Endpoint helps you achieve peace of mind while defending your organization from ransomware attacks by watching this video:
All these capabilities in Cisco Secure Endpoint enable you to defend against ransomware attacks from compromising your endpoints while ensuring you stay resilient against threats. For more information on how Secure Endpoint can defend your organization from ransomware attacks, please watch the Cisco Secure Endpoint Ransomware Series.
1 BlackFog The State of Ransomware in 2022: https://www.blackfog.com/the-state-of-ransomware-in-2022
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
We’re excited to announce Cisco Secure Client, formerly AnyConnect, as the new version of one of the most widely deployed security agents. As the unified security agent for Cisco Secure, it addresses common operational use cases applicable to Cisco Secure endpoint agents. Those who install Secure Client’s next-generation software will benefit from a shared user interface for tighter and simplified management of Cisco agents for endpoint security.
Now, with Secure Client, you gain improved secure remote access, a suite of modular security services, and a path for enabling Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) across the distributed network. The newest capability is in Secure Endpoint as a new module within the unified endpoint agent framework. Now you can harness Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) from within Secure Client. You no longer need to deploy and manage Secure Client and Secure Endpoint as separate agents, making management more effortless on the backend.
Within Device Insights, Secure Client lets you deploy, update, and manage your agents from a new cloud management system inside SecureX. If you choose to use cloud management, Secure Client policy and deployment configuration are done in the Insights section of Cisco SecureX. Powerful visibility capabilities in SecureX Device Insights show which endpoints have Secure Client installed in addition to what module versions and profiles they are using.
The emphasis on interoperability of endpoint security agents helps provide the much-needed visibility and simplification across multiple Cisco security solutions while simultaneously reducing the complexity of managing multiple endpoints and agents. Application and data visibility is one of the top ways Secure Client can be an important part of an effective security resilience strategy.
Visit our homepage to see how Secure Client can help your organization today.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
No, ransomware attacks are not random. From extortion to data breaches, ransomware is always evolving, and is becoming very lucrative with ransomware-as-a-service kit making it easier to target organizations. The days of just a single bad actor searching for vulnerabilities in your security stack are over. Security Operations Centers (SOCs) and the security analyst community are dealing with a sophisticated global network of adversaries who can do irreversible damage. The conversation must shift from how we can prevent a breach to how do we prepare for the inevitable breach.
Recently I found out that the small private college I attended right out of high school closed their doors permanently, falling victim to a targeted ransomware attack. This institution not only provided an education but also contributed to the local economy in this rural town for over 150 years.
The cyberattack occurred during the pandemic when most educational institutions had suddenly shifted to remote learning. Adversaries knew that the shift to remote learning would expose the college’s lack of acceptable tools for monitoring and managing applications, frequently from unsecure locations.
Unfortunately, the hackers were able to halt all admission activities, locked the administrators out from accessing critical data pertaining to the upcoming school year and ultimately, forced the school to close their doors – even after they paid the hackers the ransom.
And this is not an isolated case – Comparitech published a story ‘Ransomware attacks on US schools and colleges cost $3.56bn in 2021’ and outlined how threat actors have evolved with their ransomware attacks on schools and colleges. This is particularly concerning as many of these institutions do not have the skillsets or resources to protect their students or organization from these attacks. Below you can review their findings from a study done between 2018 – 2022:
In 2021:
Just having a firewall alone will not stop all of the attacks, it’s just a matter of time before you experience a breach. Once the breach happens, you need a security system that will quickly detect and remediate the threat .
Resiliency must be a critical outcome for any security solution and Cisco Secure Endpoint is built to stop hackers at the point of entry. Our cloud native solution allows your security operations team to quickly detect and respond to threats minutes after a breach occurs.
Small to medium size businesses, hospitals, and educational institutions internal network will rely on cyber insurance in-lieu of a fully staffed, skilled cyber-security team. In today’s climate of ever-increasing sophisticated cyber threats this won’t cut it. You will need an agent that quickly detects, responds, and has visibility across your different security solutions.
With Cisco Secure Endpoint Pro we are equipped to assist with the responsibility of monitoring your endpoints for cyberattacks. With 24/7/365 monitoring capabilities, our SOC will quickly detect and remediate any threats that targets your organization. Secure endpoint pro provides flexibility and the option of letting our SOC team do the heavy lifting while you focus on your core business.
Tangible outcomes provided by Secure Endpoint and Secure Endpoint Pro:
An effective managed endpoint detection and response solution frees up time for your SOC team along with accelerating detection and response time. Cisco Secure Endpoint can reduce incident response time by as much as 97%, which limits the damage threat actors can cause after you have been breached.
Cisco Security has launched a solution geared towards protecting your school’s network by blocking malicious threats before they enter the endpoint and compromising your data. The secure endpoint agent is deployed, sits on the school endpoint freeing up time from a stretched thin IT department.
Don’t know where to get started? Check out how our EDR solution got you covered below and how to contact us to learn more.
Interested? Reach out to grantsquestions@cisco.com to learn about public funding options available in your state.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
FreshRSS