Tech Bytes: Redefining Secure Remote Access With Fortinet’s SASE Solution (Sponsored)
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we explore sponsor Fortinet’s Secure Access Service Edge, or FortiSASE, offering, including the FortiClient agent, what cloud-delivered security services are available, SASE use cases, and more. Our guest is Nirav Shah, VP of Products at Fortinet.
The post Tech Bytes: Redefining Secure Remote Access With Fortinet’s SASE Solution (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Tech Bytes: Redefining Secure Remote Access With Fortinet’s SASE Solution (Sponsored)
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we explore sponsor Fortinet’s Secure Access Service Edge, or FortiSASE, offering, including the FortiClient agent, what cloud-delivered security services are available, SASE use cases, and more. Our guest is Nirav Shah, VP of Products at Fortinet.Advanced Technology on Display at AWS re:Invent
AWS showcased some real-life examples of many of its advanced technologies in the Expo Hall at the recent AWS re:Invent conference.Expanding Area 1 email security to the Athenian Project
This post is also available in 简体中文, Deutsch, Français and Español.
Election security encompasses a wide variety of measures, including the protection of voting machines, election office networks, voter registration databases, and other systems that manage the electoral process. At Cloudflare, we have reported on threats to state and local governments under the Athenian Project, how we prepare political campaigns and state parties under Cloudflare for Campaigns for election season, and our work with organizations that report on election results and voting rights groups under Project Galileo.
Since the 2022 US midterm elections, we have been thinking about how we help state and local governments deflect larger cyber threats that target the election community and have been analyzing the biggest problems they are facing. In October 2022, Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said, “The current election threat environment is more complex than it has ever been.” Amid threats, intimidation toward election workers, and cyber attacks against election infrastructure and operations, preparing for elections is no easy task.
At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. The Internet plays a key role in promoting democracy and ensuring Continue reading
Two months later: Internet use in Iran during the Mahsa Amini Protests
A series of protests began in Iran on September 16, following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini — a 22-year-old who had been arrested for violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law. The protests and civil unrest have continued to this day. But the impact hasn’t just been on the ground in Iran — the impact of the civil unrest can be seen in Internet usage inside the country, as well.
With the proliferation of smartphones and the ubiquity of the Internet that has resulted, it’s no longer simply the offline world impacting the Internet; what happens on the Internet is impacting the offline world, too. For that reason, it’s not surprising that in order to limit the spread of the protests — both news of it happening and the further organization of civil unrest — the Iranian government introduced limits on the Internet. This included banning certain social media and communications tools: most notably including Instagram and WhatsApp, which are estimated to be used by over 50% of the Iranian population.
But despite the threat that the protests pose, and the Internet’s enabling role in them, it has not been cut off altogether. In fact, from the perspective of Cloudflare, Continue reading
The latest on attacks, traffic patterns and cyber protection in Ukraine
On February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Cloudflare jumped into action to provide services that could help prevent potentially destructive cyber attacks and keep the global Internet flowing. In the nearly 10 months since that day, we’ve posted about our actions, network traffic patterns, cyberattacks and network outages we’ve seen during the conflict.
During Impact Week, we want to provide an update on where things currently stand, the role of security companies like Cloudflare, and some of our takeaways from the conflict so far.
Cyberattacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and Cloudflare’s assistance
Since the time of the invasion, Ukrainian government and civilian infrastructure has come under a barrage of DDoS and other common cyberattacks. Although the public perception has been that cyberattacks have not played a significant role in the conflict, cyberspace has been an active battlefield. Ukrainian websites saw a significant spike in application layer firewall mitigated attacks in March 2022 and another spike in mid-September. Ukrainian sites have also seen a significant increase in the percentage of requests that were mitigated as attack traffic on a daily average, when compared with Q4 2021. Those spikes are shown below, using a seven-day rolling average:
The challenges of sanctioning the Internet
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, governments around the world, including the US, UK, and EU announced sweeping sanctions targeting the Russian and Belarussian economies. These sanctions prohibit a specified level of economic activity in an effort to use economic influences to punish targeted countries. Almost overnight, we saw unprecedented restrictions put in place for multinational companies doing business in Russia or Belarus.
Separately, recent events in Iran led the US government to authorize additional Internet/communications activities, which were being used widely by average Iranians protesting against the government. This was done by expanding some existing licenses, or exceptions, to sanctions the US has imposed on Iran.
While the use of sanctions as a tool for responding to foreign relations crises is nothing new, the wide-ranging multilateral sanctions that have been imposed on Russia and the recent authorizations in Iran are significant and provide fresh examples of how sanctions can affect access to a free and open global Internet.
Balancing interests in sanctions policy
Cloudflare is committed to complying with all applicable sanctions, including US, UK, and EU sanctions, and we have put in place programs to ensure that compliance. At the same time, we recognize the important role we and Continue reading
How Cloudflare helps secure the inboxes of democracy
This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Français, Español.
We at Cloudflare believe that every candidate, no matter their political affiliation, should be able to operate their campaign without having to worry about the risk of cyberattacks. Malicious attackers such as nation-state threat actors, those seeking monetary reward, or those with too much time on their hands often disagree with our mission and aim to wreak havoc on the democratic process.
Protecting Email Inboxes Is Key In Stopping Attacks
In the past years, malicious actors have used email as their primary threat vector when trying to disrupt election campaigns. A quick search online shows how active attackers still are in trying to compromise election official’s email inboxes.1 Over 90% of damages done to any organization are caused by a phishing attack, making protecting email inboxes a key focus. A well crafted phishing email paired, or an errant click could give an attacker the opportunity to see sensitive information, disseminate false information to voters, or steal campaign donations.
For the United States 2022 midterm elections, Cloudflare protected the inboxes of over 100 campaigns, election officials and public organizations supporting elections. These campaigns ranged from new officials Continue reading
Democratizing access to Zero Trust with Project Galileo
This post is also available in Deutsch, Français, Español, 简体中文.
Project Galileo was started in 2014 to protect free expression from cyber attacks. Many of the organizations in the world that champion new ideas are underfunded and lack the resources to properly secure themselves. This means they are exposed to Internet attacks aimed at thwarting and suppressing legitimate free speech.
In the last eight years, we have worked with 50 partners across civil society to onboard more than 2,000 organizations in 111 countries to provide our powerful cyber security products to those who work in sensitive yet critical areas of human rights and democracy building.
New security needs for a new threat environment
As Cloudflare has grown as a company, we have adapted and evolved Project Galileo especially amid global events such as COVID-19, social justice movements after the death of George Floyd, the war in Ukraine, and emerging threats to these groups intended to silence them. Early in the pandemic, as organizations had to quickly implement work-from-home solutions, new risks stemmed from this shift.
In our conversations with partners and participants, we noticed a theme. The digital divide in terms of cyber security products Continue reading
Network Dictionary: necropost
What is a necropost?
Cloudflare Zero Trust for Project Galileo and the Athenian Project
This post is also available in 日本語, Deutsch, Français, Español.
The organizations served by Projects Galileo and Athenian face the same security challenges as some of the world’s largest companies, but lack the budget to protect themselves. Sophisticated phishing campaigns attempt to compromise user credentials. Bad actors find ways to disrupt connectivity to critical resources. However, the tools to defend against these threats have historically only been available to the largest enterprises.
We’re excited to help fix that. Starting today, we are making the Cloudflare One Zero Trust suite available to teams that qualify for Project Galileo or Athenian at no cost. Cloudflare One includes the same Zero Trust security and connectivity solutions used by over 10,000 customers today to connect their users and safeguard their data.
Same problem, different missions
Athenian Project candidates work to safeguard elections in the United States. Project Galileo applicants launched their causes to support journalists, encourage artistic expression, or protect persecuted groups. They each set out to fix difficult and painful problems. None of the applications to our programs wrote their mission statement to deal with phishing attacks or internal data loss.
However, security problems plague these teams. Instead of being Continue reading
vagrant-libvirt Dependency Hell
One of the tiny details Open Networking preachers conveniently forget to mention is the tendency of open-source software to use a gazillion small packages from numerous independent sources to get the job done. Vendors selling commercial products (for example, Cumulus Linux) try their best to select the correct version of every package involved in their product; open-source projects could quickly end in dependency hell.
netlab tries to solve the dependency conundrum with well-defined installation scripts. We recommend you start with a brand new Ubuntu server (or VM) and follow the four lines of instructions1. In that case, you usually get a working system unless something unexpected breaks behind the scenes, like what we experienced a few days ago.
vagrant-libvirt Dependency Hell
One of the tiny details Open Networking preachers conveniently forget to mention is the tendency of open-source software to use a gazillion small packages from numerous independent sources to get the job done. Vendors selling commercial products (for example, Cumulus Linux) try their best to select the correct version of every package involved in their product; open-source projects could quickly end in dependency hell.
netlab tries to solve the dependency conundrum with well-defined installation scripts. We recommend you start with a brand new Ubuntu server (or VM) and follow the four lines of instructions1. In that case, you usually get a working system unless something unexpected breaks behind the scenes, like what we experienced a few days ago.
Welcome to Cloudflare’s Impact Week
In the early days of Cloudflare, we made it a policy that every new hire had to interview with either me or my co-founder Michelle. It’s still the case today, though we now have more than 3,000 employees, continue to hire great people as we find them, and, because there are only so many hours in the day, have had to enlist a few more senior executives to help with these final calls.
At first, these calls were about helping screen for new members of our small team. But, as our team grew, the purpose of these calls changed. Today, by the time I do the final call with someone we’ve made the decision to hire them, so it’s rarely about screening. Instead, the primary purpose is to make sure everyone joining has had a positive conversation with a senior member of our team, so if in the future they ever see something going wrong they’ll hopefully feel a bit more comfortable letting one of us know. I think because of that these calls are some of the most important work I do.
But, for me, there’s another purpose. I get to hear first-hand why people chose to apply. That’s Continue reading
Querying Netbox with Pynetbox
You should be using Netbox or something equivalent. I’m serious. Stop documenting your network with Word docs and Wiki pages and use something where the information can be queried. I’ve been using Netbox for a couple years, and it’s where I keep all that important information about my network. I use it to store hardware inventory, circuit inventory, contact information, site information…all sorts of stuff. Since all this information is already recorded there, I can just query it for the information I need. That includes any time I need to write some Python code to do something on the gear. I use the pynetbox module to do that.
To use pynetbox (or anything that uses API calls to Netbox), you’ll need to set up an API token. I am not qualified to tell you what the best way to manage these are, so we’re just going to assume you have an appropriate token configured already.
The Python Code
We’re going to write a short script to get all the devices from the Netbox instance…and here it is!1
import pynetbox
import urllib3
NETBOX_SERVER = "*.*.*.*"
NETBOX_API_KEY = "742*****"
nb_conn = pynetbox.api(url=f"https://{NETBOX_SERVER}", token=NETBOX_API_KEY)
nb_conn.http_session.verify = Continue reading