Thoughts on incident response automation and orchestration

Just this week, I was reviewing several interviews I conducted with cybersecurity professionals on their organizations’ processes and tools for incident response (IR) automation and orchestration. Here are a few things that jumped out at me:1. IR is still often anchored by basic tools, manual processes, and key personnel. While trouble ticketing and ITSM tools are pervasive and fairly mature, too many enterprise organizations still “ham and egg” it through incident response. In other words, they rely on paper forms, spreadsheets, email handoffs and some socially challenged security analyst who’s really good a finding compromised systems and malicious network traffic. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thoughts on incident response automation and orchestration

Just this week, I was reviewing several interviews I conducted with cybersecurity professionals on their organizations’ processes and tools for incident response (IR) automation and orchestration.  Here are a few things that jumped out at me: 1.      IR is still often anchored by basic tools, manual processes, and key personnel.  While trouble ticketing and ITSM tools are pervasive and fairly mature, too many enterprise organizations still “ham and egg” it through incident response.  In other words, they rely on paper forms, spreadsheets, email handoffs, and some socially-challenged security analyst who’s really good a finding compromised systems and malicious network traffic. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Aruba president Dominic Orr to step down at end of the month

Dominic Orr, the president of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Aruba, will retire at the end of January in order to spend more time with his family and pursue personal interests, the company announced this week.Orr has been the president of Aruba, which was acquired by HPE in 2015, for 11 years. He’s a veteran of the networking industry, having worked at Nortel Networks, Alteon, and Bay Systems in his lengthy career. Taking over for Orr will be Aruba founder Keerti Melkote, who currently serves as senior vice president and general manager.“Dom has created the unique ‘customer first, customer last’ culture, innovator's mindset, and the making business personal attitude that are all cornerstones of our organization’s DNA that we will continue to carry forward,” said Melkote. “While he will certainly be missed, he leaves the organization well-positioned to continue to grow and prosper.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Viptela taps former Cisco, Dell-EMC exec to lead SD-WAN charge

Praveen Akkiraju Praveen Akkiraju Software-Defined WAN vendor Viptela today announced industry veteran and former Cisco and Dell EMC executive Praveen Akkiraju will become its new CEO as the company looks to increase its presence in the rapidly-budding market. +More on Network World: The new rulers of the cybersecurity realm: Automation, Analytics Artificial Intelligence+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Viptela taps former Cisco, Dell-EMC exec to lead SD-WAN charge

Praveen Akkiraju Praveen Akkiraju Software-Defined WAN vendor Viptela today announced industry veteran and former Cisco and Dell EMC executive Praveen Akkiraju will become its new CEO as the company looks to increase its presence in the rapidly-budding market. +More on Network World: The new rulers of the cybersecurity realm: Automation, Analytics Artificial Intelligence+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: SVALT D2 dock cools notebook for higher performance

The scoop: SVALT D2 dock/cooling fan, by Svalt Design, about $200.What is it? The SVALT D2 is a solid, pyramid-like device with a notch in front and a flat top. The idea behind the dock is that you take a compatible Macintosh notebook (check here for compatibility) and put it into clamshell mode connected to an external display (and a USB mouse/keyboard). While in this mode, the built-in heat sink on the SVALT D2 helps cool the notebook, bringing about higher performance for the notebook (the theory being that cooler notebooks allow for faster notebook performance).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Aruba President Dominic Orr retiring—Thanks for the memories

This week Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, announced its President, Dominic Orr, is retiring at the end of the month and turning the helm over to Aruba co-founder and CTO Keerti Melkote. This ends a 10-year run by Orr, who took over as CEO in 2006. During that time, Aruba has arguably been the technology leader in business Wi-Fi and has been one of the few vendors that have managed to not get trampled by Cisco despite numerous predictions that they would. This should be a smooth transition because in actuality, HPE Aruba has been co-run by both Melkote and Orr, as the company has been planning on Orr’s retirement from some time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 amazing Raspberry Pi clusters

Single boardsImage by Mark GibbsThe Raspberry Pi family of single board computers transformed education and has become one of the drivers of the Internet of Things revolution. These boards are low-cost, well-featured, and easily available. So what do you get when you take a bunch of Raspberry Pi boards and wire them together? An incredibly cheap and surprisingly high performance parallel computing system that’s not only valuable in education but can also solve some useful, real world problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GoDaddy revokes nearly 9,000 SSL certificates issued without proper validation

GoDaddy, one of the world's largest domain registrars and certificate authorities, revoked almost 9,000 SSL certificates this week after it learned that its domain validation system has had a serious bug for the past five months.The bug was the result of a routine code change made on July 29 to the system used to validate domain ownership before a certificate is issued. As a result, the system might have validated some domains when it shouldn't have, opening the possibility of abuse.Industry rules call for certificate authorities to check if the person requesting a certificate for a domain actually has control over that domain. This can be done in a variety of ways, including by asking the applicant to make an agreed-upon change to the website using that domain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GoDaddy revokes nearly 9,000 SSL certificates issued without proper validation

GoDaddy, one of the world's largest domain registrars and certificate authorities, revoked almost 9,000 SSL certificates this week after it learned that its domain validation system has had a serious bug for the past five months.The bug was the result of a routine code change made on July 29 to the system used to validate domain ownership before a certificate is issued. As a result, the system might have validated some domains when it shouldn't have, opening the possibility of abuse.Industry rules call for certificate authorities to check if the person requesting a certificate for a domain actually has control over that domain. This can be done in a variety of ways, including by asking the applicant to make an agreed-upon change to the website using that domain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Amazon is the current king of the virtual assistants

Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant was impossible to miss at CES 2017. The surprise hit service that powers Amazon's smart home hub, Echo, is being embedded into a growing arsenal of connected products, inside and outside the home. In many ways, Alexa is the feature of the moment for consumer electronics such as refrigerators, vacuums, DVR boxes, robots, TVs, washers and dryers, cars, and an important product category in which Amazon has thus far failed spectacularly: smartphones. Amazon was center stage during the annual tech gathering in the desert, as dozens of companies announced plans to integrate Alexa into their upcoming products. Ford, LG, Whirlpool, GE, Lenovo, Samsung, Hyundai and Huawei are a few of the big names that joined the race to bring Alexa to the masses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s DHS pick urges more coordination on cyberthreats

President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Homeland Security chief wants to forge closer ties with the private sector in the cyber arena.Gen. John F. Kelly (Ret.), a more than four-decade veteran of the Marine Corps, appeared this week before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for his confirmation hearing, the second of Trump's appointees to begin that process.In his testimony on cybersecurity, Kelly noted the challenges of keeping pace with an ever-evolving spate of threats from a variety of actors, and stressed the importance of the government coordinating its defense efforts and intelligence with the private-sector firms that could be targeted by attackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s DHS pick urges more coordination on cyberthreats

President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Homeland Security chief wants to forge closer ties with the private sector in the cyber arena.Gen. John F. Kelly (Ret.), a more than four-decade veteran of the Marine Corps, appeared this week before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for his confirmation hearing, the second of Trump's appointees to begin that process.In his testimony on cybersecurity, Kelly noted the challenges of keeping pace with an ever-evolving spate of threats from a variety of actors, and stressed the importance of the government coordinating its defense efforts and intelligence with the private-sector firms that could be targeted by attackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC chief accuses AT&T and Verizon of violating net neutrality—but it probably doesn’t matter

AT&T and Verizon are probably violating the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules by allowing third-parties to pay for subscribers’ data usage.That’s the determination FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler provided in a letter to several U.S. Senators on Wednesday, along with a report on the matter from The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. But Wheeler is set to step down as FCC Chair once President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office next Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s CIA nominee grilled on his advocacy of surveillance database

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency wants to create a massive surveillance database by resurrecting a U.S. telephone records collection program, but some senators questioned what limits he would accept.CIA nominee Mike Pompeo, currently a Republican representative from Kansas, has called on Congress to reverse its mid-2015 decision to rein in the phone metadata collection program run by the National Security Agency, a sister agency to the CIA that focuses on signals intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC chief accuses AT&T and Verizon of violating net neutrality—but it probably doesn’t matter

AT&T and Verizon are probably violating the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules by allowing third-parties to pay for subscribers’ data usage.That’s the determination FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler provided in a letter to several U.S. Senators on Wednesday, along with a report on the matter from The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. But Wheeler is set to step down as FCC Chair once President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office next Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s CIA nominee grilled on his advocacy of surveillance database

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency wants to create a massive surveillance database by resurrecting a U.S. telephone records collection program, but some senators questioned what limits he would accept.CIA nominee Mike Pompeo, currently a Republican representative from Kansas, has called on Congress to reverse its mid-2015 decision to rein in the phone metadata collection program run by the National Security Agency, a sister agency to the CIA that focuses on signals intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here