Why is incident response automation and orchestration so hot?

I couldn’t attend the RSA Conference this year, but many cybersecurity professionals and my ESG colleagues told me that incident response (IR) automation and orchestration was one of the hottest topics in the halls of the Moscone Center—through the bar at the W hotel and even at the teahouse on the garden at Yerba Buena.   Was this rhetoric just industry hype? Nope. This buzz is driven by the demand side rather than suppliers. In truth, cybersecurity professionals need immediate IR help for several reasons:1. IR is dominated by manual processes. Let’s face it, IR tasks such as fetching data, tracking events or collaborating with colleagues depend upon the organizational, communications and technical skills of individuals within the security operations team. These manual processes ultimately get in the way of overall IR productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why is incident response automation and orchestration so hot?

I couldn’t attend the RSA Conference this year, but many cybersecurity professionals and my ESG colleagues told me that incident response (IR) automation and orchestration was one of the hottest topics in the halls of the Moscone Center—through the bar at the W hotel and even at the teahouse on the garden at Yerba Buena.   Was this rhetoric just industry hype? Nope. This buzz is driven by the demand side rather than suppliers. In truth, cybersecurity professionals need immediate IR help for several reasons:1. IR is dominated by manual processes. Let’s face it, IR tasks such as fetching data, tracking events or collaborating with colleagues depend upon the organizational, communications and technical skills of individuals within the security operations team. These manual processes ultimately get in the way of overall IR productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why is IR Automation and Orchestration So Hot?

I couldn’t attend the RSA Conference this year but many cybersecurity professionals and my ESG colleagues told me that incident response automation and orchestration was one of the hottest topics in the halls of the Moscone Center, through the bar at the W hotel, and even at the teahouse on the garden at Yerba Buena.   Was this rhetoric just industry hype?  Nope.  This buzz is driven by the demand side rather than suppliers.  In truth, cybersecurity professionals need immediate IR help for several reasons:1.      IR is dominated by manual processes.  Let’s face it, IR tasks like fetching data, tracking events, or collaborating with colleagues depend upon the organizational, communications, and technical skills of individuals within the security operations team.  These manual processes ultimately get in the way of overall IR productivity.  In a recent research project, infosec pros were asked: ‘Do you believe that your organization’s incident response efficiency and effectiveness are limited by the time and effort required for manual processes?’ Fifty-two percent of cybersecurity professionals responded, “yes, significantly” while another 41% said, “yes, somewhat.”  Furthermore, 27% of cybersecurity pros say they spend 50% or more of their Continue reading

CBRS Alliance: Shared spectrum services “a near-term opportunity”

The CBRS Alliance, which promotes LTE services in the shared 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service band, is riding high after signing up all of the Big 4 U.S. carriers, plus Samsung, and then seeing a slew of CBRS activity at the recent Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.Neville Meijers, VP of business development at Qualcomm Technologies and chairman of the board for the CBRS Alliance, says “there’s a lot of interest in the combination of unlicensed and shared spectrum” for a number of use cases being tested for public and private services.I caught up with Meijers shortly after MWC to get up to speed on the latest CBRS action.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CBRS Alliance: Shared spectrum services “a near-term opportunity”

The CBRS Alliance, which promotes LTE services in the shared 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service band, is riding high after signing up all of the Big 4 U.S. carriers, plus Samsung, and then seeing a slew of CBRS activity at the recent Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.Neville Meijers, VP of business development at Qualcomm Technologies and chairman of the board for the CBRS Alliance, says “there’s a lot of interest in the combination of unlicensed and shared spectrum” for a number of use cases being tested for public and private services.I caught up with Meijers shortly after MWC to get up to speed on the latest CBRS action.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s Azure cloud storage had a rough night

On Wednesday night into the early morning hours of Thursday Microsoft reported that its Azure cloud customers had difficulty provisioning storage resources, including in its Eastern US region.The service disruption had a domino effect that impacted many other services too, including its cloud-based SQL database platform. The issue was first reported at 21:50 UTC and was resolved by about 6:00 on Thursday.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What the AWS outage can teach us about WAN deployments +“Due to a incident in East US affecting Storage, customers and service dependent on Storage may have experienced difficulties provisioning new resources or accessing their existing resources in the region,” Microsoft reported on its Azure health status page. Other services impacted include: Azure Media Services, Application Insights, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Data Factory, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Cache, Azure Search, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hubs, Azure SQL Database, API Management and Azure Stream Analytics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco security advisory dump finds 20 warnings, 2 critical

It’s a bad week for all things network security as Cisco spewed out 20 Security Advisories and Alerts – two critical and three high-impact – that customers should be aware of and implement patches where they can.Cisco, like other big enterprise vendors, regularly issues security warnings but 20 in one day is an unusual amount for the networking giant. Others like Microsoft and Oracle issue tons of security bulletins monthly mostly without much fanfare – for example Microsoft for March, released 18 security bulletins split into nine critical and nine important security updates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco security advisory dump finds 20 warnings, 2 critical

It’s a bad week for all things network security as Cisco spewed out 20 Security Advisories and Alerts – two critical and three high-impact – that customers should be aware of and implement patches where they can.Cisco, like other big enterprise vendors, regularly issues security warnings but 20 in one day is an unusual amount for the networking giant. Others like Microsoft and Oracle issue tons of security bulletins monthly mostly without much fanfare – for example Microsoft for March, released 18 security bulletins split into nine critical and nine important security updates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi roundup: Pi Day, Remembrances of Pis Past, competitor corner, STEM and SKULLS

Since we’ve just had a Raspberry Pi anniversary, you might think that it’s excessive to trumpet another Pi-related holiday just one week later, but, well, Tuesday was Pi Day, this is the internet, and I’m afraid that’s just the way these things go.OK, so Pi Day isn’t, strictly speaking, a Raspberry Pi thing – around these parts, it’s more of a pie-in-the-face thing – but that didn’t stop the Raspberry Pi community from getting in on the act. The estimable Alex Bate over at the official Raspberry Pi Foundation blog put together a graphic to make sure everyone understands certain key points of terminology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi roundup: Pi Day, Remembrances of Pis Past, competitor corner, STEM and SKULLS

Since we’ve just had a Raspberry Pi anniversary, you might think that it’s excessive to trumpet another Pi-related holiday just one week later, but, well, Tuesday was Pi Day, this is the internet, and I’m afraid that’s just the way these things go.OK, so Pi Day isn’t, strictly speaking, a Raspberry Pi thing – around these parts, it’s more of a pie-in-the-face thing – but that didn’t stop the Raspberry Pi community from getting in on the act. The estimable Alex Bate over at the official Raspberry Pi Foundation blog put together a graphic to make sure everyone understands certain key points of terminology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You Know How Networks Work, Want To Know How Everything Else Works? Here’s Some Books

How Does Internet Work - We know what is networking

I know, this is not about networking but I received few great feedbacks to my posts about the matter so I decided to share with you the materials I used to write it. It’s not about networking, but it is about everything. QUANTA?! I was writing about quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution process few months ago (which are network related). When I started to write those articles I was not aware that it will take me more that two months to write something close to understandable about quantum world. As it came out, like many times before, I was in

You Know How Networks Work, Want To Know How Everything Else Works? Here’s Some Books

IDG Contributor Network: What the AWS outage can teach us about WAN deployments

The outage that hit Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service earlier this month might have been unusual in its impact, but not in its cause—a configuration error. Service providers suffer outages for all sorts of reasons. Backhoes take out local access loops. Seismic events and fishing trawlers cut underwater cables. And, yes, humans make mistakes.RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day About three years ago, I was called in by a customer to help address a problem in their MPLS network. At the time, I ran MPLS Experts, a predecessor of SD-WAN Experts, and had developed a reputation for knowing a thing or two about global MPLS/VPLS services. The customer was noticing packets with unknown IPs on its carrier-managed private network. After we reviewed the logs, the cause became apparent: One of the carrier techs had misconfigured the VRF/VFI identifiers, accidentally connecting a different customer to their private network.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What the AWS outage can teach us about WAN deployments

The outage that hit Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service earlier this month might have been unusual in its impact, but not in its cause—a configuration error. Service providers suffer outages for all sorts of reasons. Backhoes take out local access loops. Seismic events and fishing trawlers cut underwater cables. And, yes, humans make mistakes.RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day About three years ago, I was called in by a customer to help address a problem in their MPLS network. At the time, I ran MPLS Experts, a predecessor of SD-WAN Experts, and had developed a reputation for knowing a thing or two about global MPLS/VPLS services. The customer was noticing packets with unknown IPs on its carrier-managed private network. After we reviewed the logs, the cause became apparent: One of the carrier techs had misconfigured the VRF/VFI identifiers, accidentally connecting a different customer to their private network.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Crime ring used Amazon, eBay to sell stolen printer ink

Apparently, big bucks can be made selling stolen printer ink cartridges online.A dozen suspects are accused of pulling in more than US$12 million by selling the stolen cartridges and retail electronics on Amazon and eBay, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said on Wednesday.Sixty-four-year-old Richard Rimbaugh allegedly led the operation for more than 20 years by recruiting people to steal the goods from retail stores across 28 states.Rimbaugh and his "theft crews" allegedly went out each week to steal new merchandise, which also included computer software, Schneiderman said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Crime ring used Amazon, eBay to sell stolen printer ink

Apparently, big bucks can be made selling stolen printer ink cartridges online.A dozen suspects are accused of pulling in more than US$12 million by selling the stolen cartridges and retail electronics on Amazon and eBay, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said on Wednesday.Sixty-four-year-old Richard Rimbaugh allegedly led the operation for more than 20 years by recruiting people to steal the goods from retail stores across 28 states.Rimbaugh and his "theft crews" allegedly went out each week to steal new merchandise, which also included computer software, Schneiderman said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The FCC chief’s call to action could push 5G along faster

U.S. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has pledged his agency will respond more quickly to new technology proposals, a move that might influence the direction of 5G development around the world.Pai was appointed by President Donald Trump in January. In his first major policy address on Wednesday, Pai directed Federal Communications Commission staff to follow a little-known section of U.S. communications law that says the agency should decide within a year whether a new technology or service is in the public interest."Going forward, if a petition or application is filed with the FCC proposing a new technology or service, we'll supply an answer within a year," Pai said in his speech at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AMD reveals Ryzen 5 prices as it sidesteps performance questions

As AMD reveals its Ryzen 5 prices and release date, the company marks an important transition: After launching its eagerly awaited Ryzen 7 chip for high-end PCs, AMD hopes to parlay that goodwill into mainstream success.AMD said it will ship its Ryzen 5 desktop processors on April 11, the same day it will begin accepting its first orders for the chip. All of the four new Ryzen 5 chips will be priced at less than $250, the same price range that Intel currently offers for its own Core i5 chips at. However, the number of cores and threads that the Ryzen 5 offers pushes into Intel’s Core i7 territory, potentially offering much more value for the price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Smackdown: Office 365 vs. G Suite management

When you choose a productivity platform like Microsoft’s Office 365 or Google’s G Suite, the main focus is on the platform’s functionality: Does it do the job you need?That’s of course critical, but once you choose a platform, you have to manage it. That’s why management capabilities should be part of your evaluation of a productivity and collaboration platform, not only its user-facing functionality.You’ve come to the right place for that aspect of choosing between Office 365 and Google G Suite.[ InfoWorld’s deep look: Why (and how) you should manage Windows 10 PCs like iPhones. | The essentials for Windows 10 installation: Download the Windows 10 Installation Superguide today. ] Admin console UI. Both the Office 365 and G Suite admin consoles are well designed, providing clean separation of management functions and clear settings labels, so you can quickly move to the settings you want and apply them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Smackdown: Office 365 vs. G Suite management

When you choose a productivity platform like Microsoft’s Office 365 or Google’s G Suite, the main focus is on the platform’s functionality: Does it do the job you need?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

10 steps to becoming a horrible IT boss

It’s legendary: A CIO promotes his best developer into a management role, losing an excellent programmer and gaining a bad manager.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)