Cisco Archives

Cisco

Internet of Things Demands Visibility-Driven Security

December 1, 2014 Scott Harrell

In an earlier blog, I discussed essentials for visibility-driven security and the importance of having both visibility and correlation to quickly assess events in real-time. In this post, we will examine the different dimensions of visibility across the attack continuum and how crucial it is to have these dimensions in place in order to defend against known and emerging threats. Visibility-driven capabilities are critical if cybersecurity professionals are to do their job effectively. In order to accurately see what’s really happening across dynamic, changing, environments and provide a full understanding of malicious incidents, visibility must provide an accurate picture of users, devices, data, threats, and the relationships between them. And it must do so in near real-time and across a wide range of infrastructures to support new business models related to mobility, cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT). For many security breaches, the gap between the time of compromise and the […]

IoT Security: The Next-Generation Matters Now

November 11, 2014 Marc Blackmer

As a cyber security professional, I spend most of my days speaking with customers and colleagues about all of the nefarious ways “the bad guys” can wreak havoc and how we can best defend ourselves. The topics we discuss often include situational awareness, defense-in-depth, threat intelligence, and new cyber security paradigms we may find ourselves adopting as the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves. I would assert that these are extremely important topics to sort out. But there’s a very important element not being discussed: the question of who will sort them out. Simply put: what difference does it make if you have the world’s greatest technology if nobody in your organization knows what to do with it? Cisco estimates that there will be a deficit of one million skilled cyber security professionals over the next five years. By 2015, 90 percent of jobs in the developed world will require some set of […]

Uncle Sam Taking a Back Seat in Cyber Defense | Bloomberg

October 29, 2014 Paul Roberts

Bloomberg has a story on the collaborative, private sector effort to thwart an industrial hacking campaign linked to Chinese intelligence. The effort, which involved firms like FireEye and iSight Partners “demonstrates for the first time a private-sector model that they believe can move faster than investigations by law enforcement agencies,” the report said. From the article: The take-down largely bypassed traditional law enforcement tools, relying instead on cooperation between companies that are normally fierce competitors. Coalition members — which include Microsoft Corp., Cisco Inc. and Symantec Corp. — say they can act faster than governments because they operate global Internet systems and have business relationships with tens of thousands of companies. Read more via China-Linked Hacking Foiled by Private-Sector Sleuthing – Businessweek.

Essentials for Visibility-Driven Security

October 27, 2014 Scott Harrell

Visibility is surprisingly tricky. The security industry offers many disparate tools to provide customers “visibility” into what is happening on their networks. Among them are tools that track what applications are on the network, tools for enumerating and tracking software vulnerabilities, tools for determining when sensitive data has left a network, tools that indicate when attacks are underway and tools that identify and analyze network data flows – to name just a few. Of course, layered on top of all this “visibility” are further systems that correlate and analyze what the mission-specific tools are seeing. Promises of a “single pane of glass” aside, the result is often a mishmash of data and events that require skilled security practitioners to analyze and interpret. The mishmash, in turn, leads to errors in analysis and prioritization. Albert Einstein famously said “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” So it is in the information security industry, where a common refrain is “you can’t protect […]

Convergence of M2M and IoT signals Major Cultural Shift

October 20, 2014 Paul Roberts

Required reading for Monday: TechCrunch has a nice little explainer article by @ArtyomAstafurov (of DeviceHive) that talks about the evolution of machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies into the Internet of Things and how the two technology trends are now indistinguishable- and are poised to cause large-scale disruption. To quote Astafurov: “IoT separates itself from M2M not only in the simplicity and quantity of devices involved, but also by how the devices communicate with each other…Whereas M2M tends to rely on point-to-point exchanges between individual devices, IoT communications involve dispersed devices sharing data through a central server, resulting in exponentially more data based on the relationships and patterns that emerge.” And the IoT will drive massive investment in products and technologies that can capture, aggregate and analyze consumer data. This will be akin to the kind of investment corporations put into ERP (enterprise resource planning) tools a decade ago, he says. Though the focus of IoT right […]