As we discussed in the first post of our Making an Impact with Security Awareness Training series, organizations need to architect training programs around a clear definition of success, both to determine the most appropriate content to deliver, and also to manage management expectations. The definition of success for any security initiative is measurable risk reduction, and that applies just as much to security awareness training.
Mike and Rich discuss the latest Wired piece in Notpetya and how advanced attacks, despite the hype, are very much still alive and well. These days you might be a victim not because you are targeted, but because you are a pivot to a target or share some underlying technology. As a new Apache Struts vulnerability rolls out, we thought it a good time to re-address some fundamentals and evaluate the real risks of both widespread and targeted attacks.
We have long been fans of security awareness training. As explained in our 2013 paper Security Awareness Training Evolution, employees remain the last line of defense, and in all too many cases those defenses fail. We pointed out many challenges facing security awareness programs, and have since seen modest improvement in some of those areas. But few organizations rave about their security awareness training, which means we still have work to do.
In this episode we review the lessons of this year’s Black Hat and DEF CON. In particular, we talk about how things have changed with the students we have in class, now that we’ve racked up over 5 years of running trainings on cloud security. then we delve into one of the biggest, and most confusing, trends… the mysteries of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Considering our opinions of natural intelligence, you might guess where this heads…
Mike and Rich discuss the ugly reality that GDPR really is a thing. Not that privacy or even GDPR are bad (we’re all in favor), but they do require extra work on our part to ensure that policies are in place, audits are performed, and pesky data isn’t left lying around in log files unexpectedly.
After considering the challenges of existing network security architectures (RIP Moat) we laid out a number of requirements for the new network security. This includes the needs for scale, intelligence, and flexibility. That’s all well and good, but how do you get there? We’ll wrap up this series by discussing a couple key architectural constructs which will influence how you build your future network security architecture.
In our last post we bid adieu to The Moat, given the encapsulation of almost everything into standard web protocols and the movement of critical data to an expanding set of cloud services. Additionally, the insatiable demand for bandwidth further complicates how network security scales. So it’s time to reframe the requirements of the new network security. Basically, as we rethink network security, what do we need it to do?
The young people today laugh at folks with a couple decades of experience when they rue about the good old days, when your network was snaked along the floors of your office (shout out for Thicknet!), and trusted users were on the corporate network, and untrusted users were not.
Now that you’ve revisited your important use cases, and derived a set of security monitoring requirements, it’s time to find the right fit among the dozens of alternatives. To wrap up this series we will bring you through a reasonably structured process to narrow down your short list, and then testing the surviving products. Once you’ve chosen the technical winner, you need to make the business side of things work – and it turns out the technical winner is not always the solution you end up…
Now that you understand the use cases for security monitoring, our next step is to translate them into requirements for your strategic security monitoring platform. In other words, now that you have an idea of the problem(s) you need to solve, what capabilities do you need to address them? Part of that discussion is inevitably about what you don’t get from your existing security monitoring approach – this research wouldn’t be very interesting if your existing tools were all peachy.