Cloudflare’s WAF is recognized as customers’ choice for 2021
The team at Cloudflare building our Web Application Firewall (WAF) has continued to innovate over the past year. Today, we received public recognition of our work.
The ease of use, scale, and innovative controls provided by the Cloudflare WAF has translated into positive customer reviews, earning us the Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice Distinction for WAF for 2021. You can download a complimentary copy of the report here.
Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinctions recognize vendors and products that are highly rated by their customers. The data collected represents a top-level synthesis of vendor software products most valued by IT Enterprise professionals.
The positive feedback we have received is consistent and leads back to Cloudflare’s product principles. Customers find that Cloudflare’s WAF is:
- “An excellent hosted WAF, and a company that acts more like a partner than a vendor” — Principal Site Reliability Architect in the Services Industry [Full Review];
- “A straightforward yet highly effective WAF solution” — VP in the Finance Industry [Full Review];
- “Easy and Powerful with Outstanding Support” — VP Technology in the Retail Industry [Full Review];
- “Secure, Intuitive and a Delight for web security and accelerations” — Sr Director-Technical Product Continue reading
SONiC’s Next Home: The SmartNIC Data Processing Unit (DPU)
This guest post is by Ihab Tarazi, Sr. VP and Networking CTO at Dell Technologies. We thank Dell Technologies for being a sponsor. It’s an exciting time to be a part of today’s networking evolution where all the pieces are finally falling into place to help us truly realize a software-defined network. SONiC is an […]
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Heavy Networking 570: Dell Brings The SONiC NOS To SmartNICs And DPUs (Sponsored)
On today's sponsored Heavy Networking podcast we examine the use of SmartNICs and DPUs to offload networking and security processes. We also discuss the use of the SONiC network OS to run on SmartNICs and DPUs, with P4 as a programming layer. Dell Technologies is our sponsor, and our guest from Dell is Ihab Tarazi, Sr. VP and Networking CTO.
The post Heavy Networking 570: Dell Brings The SONiC NOS To SmartNICs And DPUs (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Heavy Networking 570: Dell Brings The SONiC NOS To SmartNICs And DPUs (Sponsored)
On today's sponsored Heavy Networking podcast we examine the use of SmartNICs and DPUs to offload networking and security processes. We also discuss the use of the SONiC network OS to run on SmartNICs and DPUs, with P4 as a programming layer. Dell Technologies is our sponsor, and our guest from Dell is Ihab Tarazi, Sr. VP and Networking CTO.Enough Is Enough: What Happens When Law Enforcement Bends Laws to Access Data
Tutanota co-founder Matthias Pfau explains how a recent court order is a wake-up call to end the encryption debate once and for all In a world increasingly reliant on the Internet in our day-to-day lives, there’s no turning back on encryption. Encryption is a critical security tool for citizens, businesses, and governments to communicate confidentially […]
The post Enough Is Enough: What Happens When Law Enforcement Bends Laws to Access Data appeared first on Internet Society.
Build Zero Trust rules with managed devices
Starting today, your team can use Cloudflare Access to build rules that only allow users to connect to applications from a device that your enterprise manages. You can combine this requirement with any other rule in Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform, including identity, multifactor method, and geography.
As more organizations adopt a Zero Trust security model with Cloudflare Access, we hear from customers who want to prevent connections from devices they do not own or manage. For some businesses, a fully remote workforce increases the risk of data loss when any user can login to sensitive applications from an unmanaged tablet. Other enterprises need to meet new compliance requirements that restrict work to corporate devices.
We’re excited to help teams of any size apply this security model, even if your organization does not have a device management platform or mobile device manager (MDM) today. Keep reading to learn how Cloudflare Access solves this problem and how you can get started.
The challenge of unmanaged devices
An enterprise that owns corporate devices has some level of control over them. Administrators can assign, revoke, inspect and manage devices in their inventory. Whether teams rely on management platforms or a simple spreadsheet, businesses can Continue reading
Inside Cloudflare: Preventing Account Takeovers
Over the last week, Cloudflare has published blog posts on products created to secure our customers from credential stuffing bots, detect users with compromised credentials, and block users from proxy services. But what do we do inside Cloudflare to prevent account takeovers on our own applications? The Security Team uses Cloudflare products to proactively prevent account compromises. In addition, we build detections and automations as a second layer to alert us if an employee account is compromised. This ensures we can catch suspicious behavior, investigate it, and quickly remediate.
Our goal is to prevent automated and targeted attackers regardless of the account takeover technique: brute force attack, credential stuffing, botnets, social engineering, or phishing.
Classic Account Takeover Lifecycle
First, let's walk through a common lifecycle for a compromised account.
In a typical scenario, a set of passwords and email addresses have been breached. These credentials are reused through credential stuffing in an attempt to gain access to any account (on any platform) where the user may have reused that combination. Once the attacker has initial access, which means the combination worked, they can gain information on that system and pivot to other systems through methods. This is classified Continue reading
End User Security: Account Takeover Protections with Cloudflare
End user account security is always a top priority, but a hard problem to solve. To make matters worse, authenticating users is hard. With datasets of breached credentials becoming commonplace, and more advanced bots crawling the web attempting credential stuffing attacks, protecting and monitoring authentication endpoints becomes a challenge for security focused teams. On top of this, many authentication endpoints still rely just on providing a correct username and password making undetected credential stuffing lead to account takeover by malicious actors.
Many features of the Cloudflare platform can help with implementing account takeover protections. In this post we will go over several examples as well as announce a number of new features. These include:
- Open Proxy managed list (NEW): ensure authentication attempts to your app are not coming from proxy services;
- Super Bot Fight Mode (NEW): keep automated traffic away from your authentication endpoints;
- Exposed Credential Checks (NEW): get a warning whenever a user is logging in with compromised credentials. This can be used to initiate a two factor authentication flow or password reset;
- Cloudflare Access: add an additional authentication layer by easily integrating with third party OATH services, soon with optional enforcement of managed devices (NEW);
- Rate Limiting Continue reading
Nokia Service Routing Certification and my experience
Introduction Many times I heard that certification is just wasting time. And only real experience does matter. Of course, real experience is important. But often It’s so hard to get experience. E.g. your current job can’t give you opportunities to work with some technologies and you can’t get a new promotion or change a job, because you don’t have some experience. A typical loop. And in my opinion, certification is one of the suitable tools to break this loop and expand your opportunities.
Benefits of every certification:
- We always need motivation for learning something. Every certification consists of several levels. Step by step approach. Levels are goals for us. And it helps to keep motivation on a high level. And every achieved level helps to feel more confident.
- Every certification program has proper learning tools. Self-study guides, books, online/offline courses, etc. It helps to save time so we can just start to study.
- Certification is not the main goal. Preparing is the main goal. And preparing results. For example, notes. Notes were useful before exams as well as they will be useful in the future.
Benefits of every certification:
- We always need motivation for learning something. Every certification consists of several levels. Step by step approach. Levels are goals for us. And it helps to keep motivation on a high level. And every achieved level helps to feel more confident.
- Every certification program has proper learning tools. Self-study guides, books, online/offline courses, etc. It helps to save time so we can just start to study.
- Certification is not the main goal. Preparing is the main goal. And preparing results. For example, notes. Notes were useful before exams as well as they will be useful in the future.
- Engineers Continue reading
Dealing with Cloud Challenges
Here’s a message I got from one of my subscribers (probably based on one of my recent public cloud rants):
I often think the cloud stuff has been sent to try us in IT – the struggle could be tough enough when we were dealing with waterfall development and monolithic projects. When products took years to develop, and years to understand.
And now we’re being asked to be agile and learn new stuff all the time about moving targets that barely have documentation at all, never mind accurate doco! We had obviously got into our comfort zone and needed shaking out of it!
Always interested to hear your experiences with the cloud networking though – it’s what I subscribed to ipspace.net for TBH as I think it’s the most complete reference source for that purpose and a vital part of enterprise networking these days!
Dealing with Cloud Challenges
Here’s a message I got from one of my subscribers (probably based on one of my recent public cloud rants):
I often think the cloud stuff has been sent to try us in IT – the struggle could be tough enough when we were dealing with waterfall development and monolithic projects. When products took years to develop, and years to understand.
And now we’re being asked to be agile and learn new stuff all the time about moving targets that barely have documentation at all, never mind accurate doco! We had obviously got into our comfort zone and needed shaking out of it!
Always interested to hear your experiences with the cloud networking though – it’s what I subscribed to ipspace.net for TBH as I think it’s the most complete reference source for that purpose and a vital part of enterprise networking these days!
Tech Bytes: Inside The Latest SASE Features Of Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access 2.0 (Sponsored)
oday on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we dive into Prisma Access 2.0 and how it differs from the first-generation version. We talk about cloud-delivered security, Zero Trust Network Access, the return of proxies, and the importance of user experience management for distributed work.
The post Tech Bytes: Inside The Latest SASE Features Of Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access 2.0 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Tech Bytes: Inside The Latest SASE Features Of Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access 2.0 (Sponsored)
oday on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we dive into Prisma Access 2.0 and how it differs from the first-generation version. We talk about cloud-delivered security, Zero Trust Network Access, the return of proxies, and the importance of user experience management for distributed work.Dridex Reloaded: Analysis of a New Dridex Campaign
Dridex is a banking Trojan. After almost a decade since it was first discovered, the threat is still active. According to a report published by Check Point [1], Dridex was one of the most prevalent malware in 2020. The recent Dridex campaign detected by VMware demonstrates that this ongoing threat constantly evolves with new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), which exhibit great differences with respect to the variants we’ve collected from campaigns since April 2020 (as discussed in the section Comparison with old Dridex samples).
In this blog post, we first examine the recent Dridex attack by looking into some of VMware’s NSX Advanced Threat Prevention telemetry, which showcases the magnitude of the campaign. We then present the analysis for the most distinctive aspects of the attack, from the techniques leveraged by the XLSM downloader to the main functionality of the DLL payloads. Finally, we provide a comparison to some other Dridex variants seen in the past, which leads to the conclusion that the Dridex variant from the January 2021 campaign is very different from previous variants.
The Dridex Campaign
The chart below shows Continue reading
The Insecurity of Ambiguous Standards
Why are networks so insecure?
One reason is we don’t take network security seriously. We just don’t think of the network as a serious target of attack. Or we think of security as a problem “over there,” something that exists in the application realm, that needs to be solved by application developers. Or we think the consequences of a network security breach as “well, they can DDoS us, and then we can figure out how to move load around, so if we build with resilience (enough redundancy) we’re already taking care of our security issues.” Or we put our trust in the firewall, which sits there like some magic box solving all our problems.
The problem is–none of this is true. In any system where overall security is important, defense-in-depth is the key to building a secure system. No single part of the system bears the “primary responsibility” for “security.” The network is certainly a part of any defense-in-depth scheme that is going to work.
Which means network protocols need to be secure, at least in some sense, as well. I don’t mean “secure” in the sense of privacy—routes are not (generally) personally identifiable information (there are always Continue reading