In December 2015, more than 200,000 Ukrainians found themselves without power during a blackout cause by a cyberattack launched from within the Russian Federation. The attack was carried out by a spear-phishing campaign that was used to install malware on energy company computers. The malware, dubbed BlackEnergy, was specifically designed for use against industrial control…

On average, it takes 170 days to detect an advanced attack, 39 days to contain it and 43 days to remediate it, according to a Ponemon study. Security threats are pervasive and constantly evolving. Today’s cybercriminals are smarter, bolder and more ambitious than in years past. The IT landscape is changing to accommodate mobility, cloud…

The standard defenses of IT security are fairly well-known: Firewalls, anti-virus, passwords and more. But what was sufficient yesterday is no longer enough in a security landscape where social engineering and advanced persistent threats run rampant. Next-gen firewall technologies offers significant enhancements and improvements on their predecessors. Application visibility is much better with Palo Alto…

With all of the recent excitement about the “Shellshock” code execution vulnerability in the UNIX bash shell, and the somewhat older news about SSL vulnerabilities, I am reminded once again about the need for organizations to formally manage information security as part of an ongoing process.

Starting in Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software version 9.3.1, Cisco has added inline Security Group Tagging (SGT) support to the ASA-5500X and 5585X product lines. If you are not familiar with SGT aka TrustSec, it allows you to tag a packet with an identity field as it travels through the network. Why would anyone…

We are in the middle of security conference season. Therefore, it’s not entirely unexpected to see headlines from Black Hat and other conferences discussing “grave” security threats, and what they mean to our ability to protect our organizations and ourselves.