firewall

Dusting For Malware’s Bloody Prints

Malicious software is nothing new. Computer viruses and worms have been around for decades, as have most other families of malware like remote access tools (RATs) and key loggers. But all our experience with malware hasn’t made the job of knowing when our organization has been hit by it any easier. In fact, recent news stories about breaches at Home Depot, Target, Staples and other organizations makes it clear that even sophisticated and wealthy corporations can easily overlook both the initial compromise and endemic malware infections – and at great cost. That may be why phrases like “dwell time” or “time to discovery” seem to pop up again and again in discussions of breach response. There’s no longer any shame in getting “popped.” The shame is in not knowing that it happened. Greg Hoglund says he has a fix for that latter problem. His new company, Outlier Security, isn’t “next generation […]

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Cisco Updates ASA Security Appliance To Tackle Zero Day Malware

We’re used to writing about all the things that are changing in the security field: the onslaught of mobile devices and connected ‘stuff,’ the advent of ‘advanced’ and ‘persistent’ adversaries, the destruction of the network perimeter. But all this talk about change can obscure the fact that so much has not changed. Companies still maintain perimeters, after all, and they rely on nuts-and-bolts technologies to defend them. But these days, those products need to do more – especially in the area of ‘advanced threats’ that are likely to slip past traditional antivirus and IDS products. Enter Cisco Systems, which on Tuesday announced a new version of its ‘next generation firewall‘: the Cisco ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) with FirePOWER Services. The appliance is the first to make full use of technology from Cisco’s acquisition of Sourcefire last year. Specifically, the latest ASA integrates Sourcefire’s Advanced Malware Protection (or AMP) technology, which gives the […]

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Robots welding in a production line

IoT Set To Transform Manufacturing, Security is Obstacle| IDG Connect

The folks over at IDG Connect have a good overview of what the German Government calls “Industry 4.0” but many of us just think of as a branch of the Internet of Things. The blog post by Andy Roxburgh, the Vice-President of Systems and Service in Schneider Electric’s Industry Business, predicts that automation and intelligent machinery will lead to a transition from human-intensive low wage manufacturing to machine centric “smart” manufacturing that lowers costs by taking humans out of the equation and using automation to create faster, more effective and nimble manufacturing processes. “Manufacturers need to prepare for a world where value is re-defined,” Roxburgh says. “Winning companies will be those who automate their operations and use data to create the smartest processes.” No surprise: security is one major obstacle on the road to Industry 4.0 (as we’ve written before). “Universally connected devices, more data, and a boom of cloud-based technology means manufacturers and users have more […]

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Phishing

TRUST: Threat Reduction via Understanding Subjective Treatment

It has become obvious (to me, anyway) that spam, phishing, and malicious software are not going away. Rather, their evolution (e.g. phishing-to-spear phishing) has made it easier to penetrate business networks and increase the precision of such attacks. Yet we still apply the same basic technology such as bayesian spam filters and blacklists to keep the human at the keyboard from unintentionally letting these miscreants onto our networks. Ten years ago, as spam and phishing were exploding, the information security industry offered multiple solutions to this hard problem. A decade later, the solutions remain: SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). Still: we find ourselves still behind the threat, rather than ahead of it. Do we have the right perspective on this? I wonder. The question commonly today is: “How do we identify the lie?” But as machine learning and data science become the new norm, I’m […]

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Zombie Zero Underscores Supply Chain Threat

A security start-up, TrapX Security, made a splash this week with the story of a new piece of malware, Zombie Zero, which wormed its way into logistics and shipping firms on shipping scanners sold by a Chinese firm. The malware was discovered during a trial demonstration of TrapX’s technology at a shipping and logistics firm. It was implanted on embedded versions of Windows XP that ran on the scanning hardware and in a software image that could be downloaded from the manufacturing firm’s website. “This malware was shipped to large logistics companies embedded in the operating system,” Carl Wright, an Executive Vice President at TrapX told The Security Ledger. TrapX declined to name the firm on whose behalf it worked or the manufacturer whose scanners were compromised. It said 16 of 64 scanners sold to the victim firm were found to contain malware. Published reports also note that malware say scanners with another variant of the same malware […]

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