Google Fuses Security Analytics in Cloud Wars Quest

“I was told to buy a software or lose my computer: I ignored it.” A study of ransomware

“I was told to buy a software or lose my computer. I ignored it”: a study of ransomware Simoiu et al., SOUPS 2019

This is a very easy to digest paper shedding light on the prevalence of ransomware and the characteristics of those most likely to be vulnerable to it. The data comes from a survey of 1,180 US adults conducted by YouGov, an online global market research firm. YouGov works hard to ensure respondent participation representative of (in this case) the general population in the U.S., but the normal caveats apply.

We define ransomware as the class of malware that attempts to defraud users by restricting access to the user’s computer or data, typically by locking the computer or encrypting data. There are thousands of different ransomware strains in existence today, varying in design and sophistication.

The survey takes just under 10 minutes to complete, and goes to some lengths to ensure that self-reporting victims really were victims of ransomware (and not some other computer problem).

For respondents that indicated they had suffered from a ransomware attack, data was collected on month and year, the name of the ransomware variant, the ransom demanded, the payment method, Continue reading

Forcepoint Web Security Footprint Spans 160 Global PoPs

Toshiba Taps Cybera’s SD-WAN for Retail Terminals

Overcoming the Barriers to Micro-segmentation

It should come as no surprise how much emphasis organizations place on security today. Threats are becoming more and more sophisticated and the number of threats grow to uncontrollable rates every day.

One of the biggest downsides is that the rising cost of data breaches in 2019 alone, a global average of $3.92 million as reported by the Ponemon Institute and IBM Security July 2019 report, is enough to cause organizations to rethink or increase emphasis on their security strategies and how they can help secure their most important assets by improving the cyber hygiene in their organizations.

What is Cyber Hygiene?

Cyber hygiene refers to what an organization can do to improve their security postures around physical hardware, software, and applications.  If you’ve seen Pat Gelsinger’s keynote from 2017, he goes into the 5 pillars of good cyber hygiene and what organizations can do to improve basic and fundamental security for their business.

Over the last several years, VMware has been focusing on helping organizations move to Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) to improve their agility and meet the speed of business. As more organizations adopted the SDDC model, VMware found itself in a unique position Continue reading

Invisible mask: practical attacks on face recognition with infrared

Invisible mask: practical attacks on face recognition with infrared Zhou et al., arXiv’18

You might have seen selected write-ups from The Morning Paper appearing in ACM Queue. The editorial board there are also kind enough to send me paper recommendations when they come across something that sparks their interest. So this week things are going to get a little bit circular as we’ll be looking at three papers originally highlighted to me by the ACM Queue board!

‘Invisible Mask’ looks at the very topical subject of face authentication systems. We’ve looked at adversarial attacks on machine learning systems before, including those that can be deployed in the wild, such as decorating stop signs. Most adversarial attacks against image recognition systems require you to have pixel-level control over the input image though. Invisible Mask is different, it’s a practical attack in that the techniques described in this paper could be used to subvert face authentication systems deployed in the wild, without there being any obvious visual difference (e.g. specially printed glass frames) in the face of the attacker to a casual observer. That’s the invisible part: to the face recognition system it’s as if you are wearing a mask, Continue reading

Huawei Dodges German 5G Ban Despite US-Led Campaign

Thoma Bravo Scoops Up Sophos for $3.9 Billion

SEC 1. Data plane and control plane protection in the networking (Nokia, Cisco and Mellanox/Cumulus) for IPv4.

Hello my friend,

This is the third article where we use the Mellanox SN 2010 running Cumulus Linux. And today we cover enormously important topic: network security. More precisely, we will speak about the data plane and the control plane protection. Cisco IOS XR and Nokia SR OS accompany us in this journey.

Thanks

Special thanks for Avi Alkobi from Mellanox and Pete Crocker and Attilla de Groot from Cumulus Networks for providing me the Mellanox switch and Cumulus license for the tests. 

Disclaimer

This blogpost is the continuation of the previous one, where we have brought the Mellanox SN 2010 to the operational with Cumulus Linux 3.7.9 on board. If you want to learn the details about this process, you are welcomed to read that article.

Brief description

Each week you can find the news describing the security breaches. In the modern economy, where the Internet plays already a key role, all the connected businesses (and almost all businesses are connected) are on the risk caused by casual network scanning and brood force attacks. In addition to that, big companies and governments are quite often the attack targets for other companies, governments and criminals. Therefore, Continue reading

Weekly Wrap: AT&T Abandons Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands

Why Data Center Virtualization Doesn’t Cut It at the Edge

EU Fears Software, Suppliers as Greatest 5G Security Risks

Oracle Ups Ante Against Cloud Giants Amazon, Microsoft

Pushing Security From The Datacenter Out To The Edge

As readers of The Next Platform know, the edge – that area where the rapidly growing numbers of mobile, intelligent and connected devices live, running applications and generating mountains of data – is where a lot of the IT action is these days. …

Pushing Security From The Datacenter Out To The Edge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Versa SD-WAN License Sales Top 200,000

Cato and the Secure Access Service Edge: Where Your Digital Business Network Starts

Docker Enterprise: The First DISA STIG’ed Container Platform!

Docker Enterprise was built to be secure by default. When you build a secure by default platform, you need to consider security validation and governmental use. Docker Enterprise has become the first container platform to complete the Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) certification process. Thanks to Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for its support and sponsorship. Being the first container platform to complete the STIG process through DISA means a great deal to the entire Docker team.

The STIG took months of work around writing and validating the controls. What does it really mean? Having a STIG allows government agencies to ensure they are running Docker Enterprise in the most secure manner. The STIG also provides validation for the private sector. One of the great concepts with any compliance framework, like STIGs, is the idea of inherited controls.  Adopting a STIG recommendation helps improve an organization’s security posture. Here is a great blurb from DISA’ site:

The Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) are the configuration standards for DOD IA and IA-enabled devices/systems. Since 1998, DISA has played a critical role enhancing the security posture of DoD’s security systems by providing the Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). The STIGs Continue reading

Arm CEO Segars: Silicon Partners Can Now Create ‘Fully Unique Chips’

US Eyes Nokia, Ericsson Subsidies to Fight Huawei

Announcing the 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign Audit

Today, the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance released a new report, the “2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign Audit,” analyzing the 23 top current presidential campaigns and their commitment to email/domain protection, website security, and responsible privacy practices. OTA evaluated the campaigns using the same methodology we used to assess nearly 1,200 organizations in the main Online Trust Audit released in April.

An alarming 70% of the campaign websites reviewed in the audit failed to meet OTA’s privacy and security standards, potentially exposing visitors to unnecessary risks. Only seven (30%) of the analyzed campaigns made the Honor Roll, a designation recognizing campaigns that displayed a commitment to using best practices to safeguard visitor information. The 2020 campaigns, taken together as a sector, lagged behind the Honor Roll average of all other sectors (70%) in the 2018 Online Trust Audit, and were far short of the Honor Roll achievement of 91% by U.S. federal government organizations.

To qualify for the Honor Roll, campaigns must have an overall score of 80% or higher, with no failure in any of the three categories examined. The campaigns who made the Honor Roll are:

• Pete Buttigieg
• Kamala Harris
• Amy Klobuchar
• Beto O’Rourke
• Bernie Continue reading