Archive for April 16, 2018

Cisco Doubles Down On Security Innovation & Investment To Protect The Endpoint & Email

Posted in Commentary with tags on April 16, 2018 by itnerd

Employees remain an organization’s greatest asset however they can be a risk when it comes to cybersecurity. Attackers are crafting highly targeted, fraudulent emails that look legitimate and use them to deliver malware to unsuspecting users. When successful, it costs the majority of companies $500K or more in lost revenue, customers, opportunities, and out-of-pocket costs. To combat the rise of advanced threats targeting employees, Cisco is announcing new email security services to protect users from these fraudulent emails, as well as new capabilities to protect employee’s devices from ransomware, cryptomining, and fileless malware.

Nearly all endpoint security solutions on the market claim to block 99 percent of malware. But what about the one percent of threats that evade detection using sophisticated techniques? Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints, a cloud-managed endpoint security solution, prevents attacks and helps uncovers the one percent of threats that can cripple a business. Cisco is adding a number of new capabilities to AMP for Endpoints, including:

  • Sophisticated detection and protection mechanisms to stop today’s threats, including ransomware, and cryptomining: Cisco is now bolstering its threat protection even when a user is offline. The new AMP for Endpoints exploit prevention helps protect against fileless attacks, including those that reside solely in memory. Cisco AMP’s new malicious activity protection stops ransomware execution, killing the processes and preventing propagation.

o   Cisco threat researchers analyzed ransomware variants to identify the common techniques used for encryption. The result: a new engine that continuously protects against ransomware encryption and propagation to keep businesses safe from ransomware.

o   Fileless malware has recently gained popularity in part because of the difficulty in detecting it. Built directly into the foundation of Cisco AMP is a new protection mechanism that requires no tuning or adjustments to stop these threats. It protects against unpatched software vulnerabilities and keeps working around the clock, even when users are offline.

 

  • Threat investigation with Cisco Visibility, a new cloud application built into the endpoint console which simplifies and accelerates security investigations so security analysts can rapidly investigate incidents with confidence, quickly and at scale. It ingests, normalizes, and enriches security events and provides a visual representation of the extent of a compromise spanning from endpoints to network to cloud.

o   Cisco Visibility combines threat intelligence from Cisco Talos™ and third parties with internal security event and alert data from across an organization’s security infrastructure to simplify investigations, reduce complexity, and shorten incident triage and remediation time.

o   Visibility minimizes the need to switch between multiple consoles to perform common tasks. With a few simple clicks, a user can dive deeper into the data from Talos, Cisco Umbrella Investigate™, Threat Grid, AMP, and other sources to quickly understand how observables exist in an environment and how they relate to each other.

Cisco invests in new email security services

No matter how much the threat landscape changes, malicious email and spam remain vital tools for adversaries to distribute malware, and many of these threats reach the endpoint. Organizations must protect their own company domains from being misused as the delivery mechanism of malicious emails, as well as protect their internal users from phishing and spoofing attacks from emails with suspect senders.

Cisco is helping address these issues and more effectively prevent email identity deception used in phishing attacks. Cisco has concluded an OEM agreement with Agari to market and sell new services that enhance its Email Security product. The new email security services introduced include:

  • Cisco Domain Protection: Automates the process of using email authentication to prevent phishing, protect brands from fraud, and maintain email governance by analyzing, updating, and taking action against senders misusing their domain to send malicious email. This service uses Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC),an email authentication standard, and real-time reporting back to domain users about noncompliant emails being sent from their domains. This will be a requirement for many organizations in the future, and as of October 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered federal agencies with .gov email domains to fully implement strict DMARC policies by October 2018.
  • Cisco Advanced Phishing Protection: Adds sophisticated machine learning capabilities to Cisco Email Security to block advanced identity deception attacks for inbound email by assessing its threat posture. It also uses both global and local telemetry data combined with analytics and modeling to validate the reputation and authenticity of senders. This helps organizations understand which emails carry targeted phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks so only legitimate emails reach an employee inbox.

Deployment through managed security services

To enable customers of all sizes to realize the benefits of these new capabilities, Cisco is expanding its relationship with ConnectWise so managed service providers (MSP) can offer Cisco Security as a part of their portfolio. The expanded relationship will offer the new ConnectWise Advanced Security Dashboard. This cloud management platform fully integrates with the ConnectWise Manage business management solution and complements ConnectWise Unite with Cisco, the existing portal for MSPs based on leading Cisco cloud-managed products. The new ConnectWise Advanced Security Dashboard provides MSPs with the ability to deliver managed security services with Cisco’s security portfolio including Cisco AMP for Endpoints, Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances, Cisco Next-Generation Firewall, and Cisco Meraki MX appliances.

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Organizations Use The Cloud Ubiquitously, But They’re Less Sold On Cloud-First Strategies: McAfee

Posted in Commentary with tags on April 16, 2018 by itnerd

McAfee unveiled its third annual cloud report on April 16, and while it found demand for cloud services continues to grow, it also discovered significantly fewer organizations are pursuing a cloud-first strategy.

Called “Navigating a Cloudy Sky: Practical Guidance and the State of Cloud Security,” the report covers the state of cloud adoption and the concerns with private and public cloud services for the more than 1,400 IT professionals surveyed.

Visibility is one of the biggest issues organizations have with cloud adoption. Some executives are more hesitant to invest in cloud services because they can’t see exactly what’s happening in cloud environments.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

  • 83 per cent store sensitive data in the public cloud
  • 69 per cent trust the public cloud to keep their sensitive data secure
  • One in four organizations has experienced data theft from the public cloud
  • One in five organizations has experienced an advanced attack against its public cloud infrastructure
  • 97 per cent of organizations use cloud services (public, private, or a combination of both), up from 93 per cent one year ago

McAfee listed three best practices and recommendations based on the report. They include:

  • DevOps and DevSecOps have been demonstrated to improve code quality and reduce exploits and vulnerabilities. Integrating development, quality assurance and security processes within the business unit or application team is crucial to operating at the speed today’s business environment demands.
  • Even the most experienced security professionals find it difficult to keep up with the volume and pace of cloud deployments on their own. Automation that augments human advantages with machine advantages, such as that found in tools such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible, is a fundamental component of modern IT operations.
  • Multiple management tools make it too easy to for something to slip through. A unified management system across multiple clouds with an open integration fabric reduces complexity.

There’s also an informative infographic here that hits the key points.

 

US Companies Banned From Selling To ZTE

Posted in Commentary with tags on April 16, 2018 by itnerd

I guess that you can add ZTE to the list of Chinese companies who have run afoul of The Trump Administration as Reuters has a story that US companies are now banned from selling to the Chinese firm:

The U.S. Department of Commerce is banning American companies from selling components to leading Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corp for seven years for violating the terms of a sanctions violation case, U.S. officials said on Monday. The Chinese company, which sells smartphones in the United States, pleaded guilty last year in federal court in Texas for conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions by illegally shipping U.S. goods and technology to Iran. It paid $890 million in fines and penalties, with an additional penalty of $300 million that could be imposed. As part of the agreement, Shenzhen-based ZTE Corp promised to dismiss four senior employees and discipline 35 others by either reducing their bonuses or reprimanding them, senior Commerce Department officials told Reuters.

So, I wonder how long it will be before  ZTE joins Huawei from being unable to sell phones in the US. Given the current political climate, I would say that it’s only a matter of time before that’s a reality.