There has been a sharp increase in the perceived value of AI technologies in hacking, according to a report from Bugcrowd platform, which surveyed 1,300 ethical hackers and security researchers.
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While programs like CTEM may be upcoming, Gartner® Hype Cycle for Security Operations recommends making incremental shifts early on.
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Authors/Presenters:Pooria Namyar, Microsoft and University of Southern California; Behnaz Arzani and Ryan Beckett, Microsoft; Santiago Segarra, Microsoft and Rice University; Himanshu Raj and Umesh Krishnaswamy, Microsoft; Ramesh Govindan, University of Southern California; Srikanth Kandula, Microsoft
Our sincere thanks to USENIX, and the Presenters & Authors for publishing their superb 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '24) content, placing the organizations enduring commitment to Open Access front and center. Originating from the conference’s events situated at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara; and via the organizations YouTube channel.
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See how a recent FTC settlement highlights the need for effective loyalty fraud prevention strategies to mitigate risk, secure customer data, and minimize financial loss.
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via the respected Software Engineering expertise of Mikkel Noe-Nygaard and the lauded Software Engineering / Enterprise Agile Coaching work of Luxshan Ratnaravi at Comic Agilé!
The post Comic Agilé – Mikkel Noe-Nygaard, Luxshan Ratnaravi – #309 – Prioritising with Management appeared first on Security Boulevard.
CA/B testing: Ludicrous proposal draws ire from “furious” systems administrators.
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Fortinet has made generally available a version of the CNAPP it gained that is now integrated with the Fortinet Security Fabric, an orchestration framework the company developed to centralize the management of its cybersecurity portfolio.
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The geopolitical conflict between Israel and its adversaries has shifted into the digital sphere, where sophisticated cyberattacks have become a primary tool for targeting critical sectors. In recent months, cyberattacks have exposed Israeli defense data, diplomatic communications, and sensitive civilian information. Among the prominent players in this cyberwarfare is the Handala Group, a hacktivist entity …
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Authors/Presenters:Zili Meng, Xiao Kong, Jing Chen, Bo Wang. Mingwei Xu, Rui Han, Honghao Liu, Venkat Arun, Hongxin Hu, Xue Wei
Our sincere thanks to USENIX, and the Presenters & Authors for publishing their superb 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '24) content, placing the organizations enduring commitment to Open Access front and center. Originating from the conference’s events situated at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara; and via the organizations YouTube channel.
The post USENIX NSDI ’24 – Hairpin: Rethinking Packet Loss Recovery in Edge-based Interactive Video Streaming appeared first on Security Boulevard.
A survey of IT professionals by Hornetsecurity found that while the number of ransomware victims are paying the ransoms, more of the data is being lost. In addition, while ransomware protection is a top priority, many feared their organizations were unprepared for an attack.
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Conventional wisdom suggests best-of-breed is the only way to secure your clouds. But what of hybrid attack paths that cross security domains — like those exploited in the SolarWinds and Capital One breaches? Exposing the gaps attackers exploit to move laterally requires visibility and context across security silos.
Insidious attacks like those associated with the 2020 SolarWinds breach — which compromised the software supply chain — frequently progressed from on-premises to cloud infrastructures completely unchecked. Others, like the 2019 Capital One breach, exploited a vulnerable web application to ultimately compromise client data stored in cloud infrastructure. These are just two examples of high-profile cloud breaches that traversed traditional security silos, making them challenging to prevent using siloed approaches.
Whether you’re responsible for securing cloud environments, or the entirety of your attack surface, even the best point tools will not give you the level of visibility needed to expose and close the gaps that attackers exploit to move across environments and compromise high-value targets.
Cloud-related breaches in the past 18 monthsSource: Tenable, 2024 Cloud Security Outlook: Navigating Barriers and Setting Priorities
In this blog, we explore the SolarWinds and Capital One breaches, including the techniques used by attackers, and the security conventions that contributed to their success. More importantly, we explore how you can augment your existing security practices and understand the elusive attacker's perspective to help you shut down even the most sophisticated threat actors.
“Combined with the use of sophisticated authentication exploits, [the SolarWinds breach] also leveraged vulnerabilities and major authentication protocols, basically granting the intruder the keys to the kingdom, allowing them to deftly move across both on-premises and cloud-based services, all while avoiding detection.”
— Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), Chairman, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, SolarWinds Hearing, Feb. 23, 2021
SolarWinds: Even the best cloud security solutions were ineffectiveThe breach of the SolarWinds Orion infrastructure management platform will go down in history as one of the costliest when measured in terms of total financial impact — estimated at nearly $1 billion — and sheer number of organizations affected. The United States government alone invested over $750 million to upgrade security systems in response. Insurers paid out $90 million in claims. And SolarWinds spent $40 million in just the first year, plus an additional $25 million to settle investor lawsuits.
Beyond the financial impact, the attack — which embedded malicious code into SolarWinds Orion software— introduced a layer of suspicion into a previously trusted and almost routine supply chain process used by countless vendors and customers.
Attackers reportedly directed by the Russian intelligence service first breached the SolarWinds development environment and injected the malicious code, known as Sunburst, into the Orion platform before the final build process. The software was then automatically sent to nearly 18,000 organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, numerous government organizations in other countries, as well as leading enterprises including Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks. The Sunburst code provided a back door attackers could use to gain initial entry into target organizations, along with machine privileges.
Threat actors did not honor security silosThe breaches of SolarWinds customers that followed frequently exploited the back door in the Orion software to gain an initial foothold on premises before moving laterally to the cloud. Attackers were able to move to the cloud despite varying degrees of existing cloud security tools, network segmentation and multi-factor authentication (MFA) in use at the targeted organizations.
After gaining initial access to the networks of the targeted organizations, attackers used popular tools and techniques to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and move laterally to high-value targets. For example, using mimikatz, attackers frequently accessed credentials stored as LSA Secrets to create a rogue domain controller in Microsoft Active Directory, ultimately leading to control over the Active Directory Federation Service.
Techniques used in the SolarWinds breachesSource: Tenable, October 2024
Attackers then forge SAML tokens, bypassing MFA and allowing them to move laterally to clouds using SAML for SSO, such as Microsoft Azure and Office 360. Attackers were not only able to give themselves full administrative privileges, but they were authenticated as legitimate users. Once authorized to access the respective cloud, they were effectively unstoppable by traditional cloud security.
40% of organizations using Active Directory have unpatched critical or high severity vulnerabilities that are frequently exploited by attackers.
— Tenable Research, based on data from 9,000 organizations using Active Directory
Capital One: Without relationship context, security was an illusionUnlike the SolarWinds breach, the Capital One breach targeted the company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure and demonstrates the ease with which an attacker can move across security silos frequently seen in cloud infrastructure.
Web applications offer a primary way in for attackersSource: Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, Web applications were the number one ways-in vector, used in upwards of 60% of non-error, non-misuse breaches.
The attacker, a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineer, initially exploited an externally facing web application to gain machine privileges. They leveraged the machine identity to access credentials and elevate privileges further. And they ultimately exploited a misconfiguration to discover and exfiltrate sensitive data stored in cloud object storage. The result? Sensitive data from more than 100 million Capital One users was compromised.
What is not immediately obvious is that each of these findings is typically identified by separate security tools (and teams) — web application scanning, cloud security posture management (CSPM), and cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) respectively. Independently, all lacked the technical and business context needed to identify the criticality and entirety of the attack path.
Techniques used in the Capital One breachSource: Tenable, 2024
A better approach to securing the modern attack surfaceSo what lessons can we take from these attacks, and how can we apply them in the context of our existing security program to drive better outcomes?
Source: Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report
The challenge, of course, is that traditional security tools are not designed with these considerations in mind.
Exposure management unifies visibility, insight and actionThe role of exposure management platforms, such as Tenable One, is to unify visibility, insight and action across the attack surface. Tenable One not only discovers asset, identity and risk relationships across multi-cloud environments, it also discovers on prem IT, operational technology (OT) and internet of things (IoT) assets and identities.
Exposure management is a preventative security strategy that leverages deep context, in the form of business-aligned asset, identity and risk relationships to distinguish ordinary risk findings from true exposure that can have a material impact on an organization. What makes exposure management different is that it looks at the entire attack surface (cloud, IT, OT, IoT, identities, applications), and the full spectrum of preventable risk (vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, human and machine privileges) which enable all breaches, exposing and closing viable attack paths before a breach can begin.
For example, Tenable One’s inventory includes human and machine identities and privileges from Active Directory — provided by Tenable Identity Exposure. This information is integrated with multi-cloud identities and privileges – provided by Tenable Cloud Security. Combined, they enable Tenable One to map technical and business relationships across traditional security boundaries, prioritizing attack paths such as those used in the SolarWinds and Capital One breaches.
The short video below demonstrates how Tenable One can uncover and bridge visibility gaps exploited in the SolarWinds and Capital One breaches t so users can remediate high exposure attack paths before they can be exploited by attackers.
Source: Tenable, October 2024
Tenable One’s capabilities set it apart from other exposure management platforms in two key ways:.
To learn more about exposure management, download the whitepaper “Hackers Don’t Honor Security Silos: 5 Steps To Prioritize True Business Exposure.”
Learn more about Tenable products featured in this blogThe post At Nearly $1 Billion Global Impact, the Best Cloud Security Couldn’t Stop This Hybrid Attack Path. Lesson: Map and Close Viable Attack Paths Before Breaches Begin. appeared first on Security Boulevard.
Managing multiple tools and platforms can create blind spots that leave your organization vulnerable to threats. But with Veriti’s 50+ integrations, you can eliminate these gaps and achieve total security control. By seamlessly connecting every aspect of your security stack—from network security to endpoint protection—Veriti provides you with real-time insights and safe remediation across your […]
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Importance of Being NIST Compliant
The Benefits of Meeting NIST Cybersecurity Standards
Achieve Continuous NIST Compliance with FireMon
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) security standards have become a core competency for organizations aiming to strengthen their cybersecurity posture. Whether you’re in government contracting, healthcare, or other sectors that handle sensitive data, adhering to NIST Cybersecurity Framework guidelines ensures your business operates within the highest standards of regulatory compliance.
This article provides a comprehensive guide to NIST security compliance, including the various frameworks and the benefits they offer your organization.
What is NIST?NIST is a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, established in 1901 to promote innovation and industrial competitiveness. Today, it is best known for developing standards and frameworks that help businesses and government entities protect their information systems from cyber threats.
The guidelines set by NIST are particularly important in the realm of cybersecurity. Its frameworks and guidelines, especially those in the NIST Special Publication 800 series, are widely adopted across industries. These standards focus on protecting sensitive information, securing hybrid cloud environments, and ensuring that organizations can effectively manage risk.
What is NIST Compliance?NIST compliance is an ongoing process that requires continual evaluation, adjustment, and documentation to ensure that your organization follows specific practices. Many organizations use the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), the Risk Management Framework (RMF), and other guidelines to create a comprehensive security strategy.
Importance of being NIST CompliantNIST compliance standards are vital for several reasons. First and foremost, it helps organizations build a strong defense against growing cyber threats. Today, cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and compliance with cybersecurity standards helps ensure that organizations have the necessary controls to prevent breaches.
Additionally, compliance is often a requirement for government contractors and businesses in regulated industries. Adopting NIST security frameworks signals to clients, stakeholders, and regulators that your organization takes cybersecurity seriously.
Another important aspect is data security. Whether you’re handling cloud security or dealing with sensitive customer information, being NIST compliant helps in safeguarding critical files and documents from unauthorized access or attacks.
Non-compliance with NIST guidelines can lead to significant consequences for organizations:
Achieving and maintaining continuous NIST security compliance offers the following benefits:
Enhanced Security PostureBy adopting NIST cybersecurity standards, organizations can create a more secure environment. The guidelines help businesses identify, detect, protect, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents.
Improved Risk ManagementNIST’s risk management-focused frameworks, like the NIST RMF, help businesses prioritize their cybersecurity efforts, making sure that the most critical areas are addressed first.
Regulatory ComplianceIn certain industries, compliance is a legal requirement. For example, government contractors must adhere to NIST 800-171 standards. By following NIST, you can ensure your organization is compliant with federal requirements.
Competitive AdvantageCompanies that are NIST compliant have an edge over competitors who may not meet these high standards. Being able to demonstrate robust cybersecurity measures builds trust with clients and partners.
ScalabilityNIST frameworks are designed to be flexible and adaptable, meaning they can grow with your business. Whether you’re a small enterprise or a large corporation, these security frameworks can be tailored to meet your unique needs. They are also helpful when adopting a zero trust architecture.
See how FireMon security cloud protects users and applications Five main NIST FrameworksNIST offers five frameworks, each designed to address specific aspects of cybersecurity, data risk management, privacy, and workforce development.
1. NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)Perhaps the most widely recognized of NIST’s offerings is the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). It provides a set of guidelines for managing cybersecurity risks such as ransomware, and improving an organization’s security posture.
The CSF is composed of five key functions:
The framework is flexible and can be adapted by organizations of any size or sector. While it’s not mandatory, the NIST CSF has become a de facto standard in many industries, including finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.
2. NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF)The NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF) is designed to help organizations manage risks associated with information systems. It provides a structured approach for integrating cybersecurity and risk management into the system development lifecycle.
The RMF includes seven steps to help organizations better identify potential vulnerabilities and implement controls to reduce risk:
With data being crucial to organizations, the NIST Privacy Framework focuses on helping organizations manage data privacy risks. Like the CSF, this framework is built around a set of core functions:
This framework is especially important for organizations handling sensitive personal data, ensuring they meet regulatory requirements like the GDPR or HIPAA.
4. NIST AI Risk Management FrameworkThe NIST AI Risk Management Framework is designed to address risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI) systems. As AI becomes more prevalent, managing its potential risks is crucial. The framework helps organizations assess the risks posed by AI algorithms, including biases, ethical concerns, and decision-making flaws.
5. NICE Workforce Framework for CybersecurityThe NICE Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity is focused on the human element of cybersecurity. This framework helps organizations develop a skilled cybersecurity workforce by outlining the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for various roles. It provides guidance on recruiting, training, and developing cybersecurity professionals.
Achieve continuous NIST Compliance with FireMonAchieving and maintaining NIST security compliance is not a one-time effort. To ensure continuous compliance, organizations must frequently assess their systems, document their controls, and adapt to evolving threats. This is where tools like FireMon come into play.
FireMon provides out-of-the-box and customizable assessments to help ensure compliance with standards like NIST 800-53 and NIST 800-171. FireMon automatically identifies rules that require analysis based on real-world events and documents rule recertification and justification to aid in compliance audits.
Knowing what you have in your environment is a cornerstone of your network security policy and, ultimately, successful compliance with NIST. By leveraging FireMon, businesses can eliminate 100% of their blind spots and monitor changes and modifications to the network through discovery, mapping, and alerting on topology changes across the entire enterprise, including multi-cloud environments. [AM4]
Essential network controls are often steeped in process and interpretation, making them difficult to budget and implement. This comprehensive list of essential network security controls mapped to NIST requirements can help reduce confusion and show you how to maintain compliance.
Download the Solution Brief and discover how FireMon can help your organization achieve NIST Security Compliance.
Frequently asked questions Is NIST Compliance Mandatory?No, NIST compliance is not mandatory for all organizations. However, it is required for U.S. government contractors and organizations in certain regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance.
That said, many businesses voluntarily adopt NIST cybersecurity standards to enhance their security posture and meet customer or partner expectations.
What Is the Difference Between NIST 800-53 and NIST 800-171?NIST 800-53 focuses on the security and privacy controls for federal information systems and organizations. It’s broad in scope, covering various types of information and systems.
NIST 800-171, on the other hand, is more specific, focusing on protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in non-federal systems, often required by contractors working with federal agencies.
How Does NIST Differ from SOC2 and ISO?NIST frameworks are focused on security guidelines and standards developed by the U.S. government. SOC2 is an auditing standard developed by the AICPA, focusing on non-financial controls related to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. ISO 27001 is a global standard for information security management systems (ISMS).
While all three focus on security, NIST is more prescriptive and government-oriented, whereas SOC2 and ISO are more process-oriented and globally recognized.
How Often Should I Review My NIST Compliance?Organizations should review their NIST compliance regularly, ideally on an annual basis, or whenever there are significant changes to their systems or threat landscape. Regular reviews help ensure that your security controls remain effective and up-to-date with evolving cybersecurity threats.
What Happens If I Violate NIST Compliance Requirements?Violating NIST compliance requirements can have serious consequences, particularly for organizations in regulated industries or those contracting with the U.S. government. Non-compliance can result in penalties, loss of contracts, or reputational damage.
Additionally, organizations may face increased vulnerability to cyberattacks if they do not adhere to NIST cybersecurity standards.
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One of the trickiest problems organizations face with securing their software supply chain is making risk decisions without really understanding where the biggest threats lie in their software, whether open source or commercial. Even with a full slate of application security testing (AST), without modernizing your approach with software supply chain security (SSCS) tools, it can be difficult to get a sweeping view of how all of the different deployed components and packages play into an overall threat posture.
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Our founder Simon Moffatt will be a panellist at the Think Digital Identity and Cyber Security for Government event next week in London. The adoption of Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is a huge concern for organisations in both the public and private sectors. As the role of cryptography has risen in the past decade its […]
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Discover the 7 top compliance audit software solutions for 2024, designed to streamline your compliance processes.
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Panduit partners with Hyperview to replace its SmartZone Cloud software product offerings with Hyperview’s cloud-based DCIM platform TINLEY PARK, Ill. & Vancouver, British Columbia – October 16, 2024: Panduit, a global leader in innovative electrical and network infrastructure solutions, and Hyperview, the leading cloud-based data center infrastructure management (DCIM) platform, are excited to ...
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NIS2 is an EU cybersecurity directive that covers an incredibly broad set of services including but not limited to Energy, Transportation, Finance, Healthcare, and Digital Infrastructure. The legislation is designed to ensure that these critical services maintain a consistent set of minimum responsibilities when it comes to managing their risk and responding to security incidents. […]
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Authors/Presenters:Ayush Goel and Jingyuan Zhu, University of Michigan; Ravi Netravali, Harsha V. Madhyastha
Our sincere thanks to USENIX, and the Presenters & Authors for publishing their superb 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '24) content, placing the organizations enduring commitment to Open Access front and center. Originating from the conference’s events situated at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara; and via the organizations YouTube channel.
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