Daily Tech Digest - August 10, 2024

What to Look for in a Network Detection and Response (NDR) Product

NDR's practical limitation lies in its focus on the network layer, Orr says. Enterprises that have invested in NDR also need to address detection and response for multiple security layers, ranging from cloud workloads to endpoints and from servers to networks. "This integrated approach to cybersecurity is commonly referred to as Extended Detection and Response (XDR), or Managed Detection and Response (MDR) when provided by a managed service provider," he explains. Features such as Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), which are typically included with firewalls, are not as critical because they are already delivered via other vendors, Tadmor says. "Similarly, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is being merged into the broader XDR (Extended Detection and Response) market, which includes EDR, NDR, and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR), reducing the standalone importance of EDR in NDR solutions." ... Look for vendors that are focused on fast, accurate detection and response, advises Reade Taylor, an ex-IBM Internet security systems engineer, now the technology leader of managed services provider Cyber Command. 


AI In Business: Elevating CX & Energising Employees

Using AI in CX certainly eases business operations, but it’s ultimately a win for the customer too. As AI collects, analyses, and learns from large volumes of data, it delivers new worlds of actionable insights that empower businesses to get personal with their customer journeys. In the past years, businesses have tried their best to personalise the customer experience – but working with a handful of generic personas only gets you so far. Today’s AI, however, has the power to unlock next-level insights that help businesses discover customers’ expectations, wants, and needs so they can create individualised experiences on a 1-2-1 level. ... In human resources, AI further presents opportunities to help employees. For example, AI can elevate standard on-the-job training by creating personalised learning and development programmes for employees. Meanwhile, AI can also help job hunters find opportunities they may have overlooked. For example, far too many jobseekers have valuable and transferable skills but lack the experience in the right business vertical to land a job. According to NIESR, 63% of UK graduates are mismatched in this way. 


The benefits and pitfalls of platform engineering

The first step of platform engineering is to reduce tool sprawl by making clear what tools should make up the internal developer platform. The next step is to reduce context-switching between these tools which can result in significant time loss. By using a portal as a hub, users can find all of the information they need in one place without switching tabs constantly. This improves the developer experience and enhances productivity. ... In terms of scale, platform engineering can help an organization to better understand their services, workloads, traffic and APIs and manage them. This can come through auto-scaling rules, load balancing traffic, using TTL in self-service actions, and an API catalog. ... Often, as more platform tools are added and as more microservices are introduced - things become difficult to track - and this leads to an increase in deploy failures, longer feature development/discovery times, and general fatigue and developer dissatisfaction because of the unpredictably of bouncing around different platform tools to perform their work. There needs to be a way to track what’s happening throughout the SDLC.Adoption - how (and is it possible) to force developers to change the way they work


The irreversible footprint: Biometric data and the urgent need for right to be forgotten

The absence of clear definitions and categorisations of biometric data within current legislation highlights the need for comprehensive frameworks that specifically define rules governing its collection, storage, processing and deletion. Established legislation like the Information Technology Act, which were supplemented by subsequent ‘Rules’ for various digital governance aspects, can be used as a precedent. For instance, the 2021 Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules were introduced to establish a robust complaint mechanism for social media and OTT platforms, addressing inadequacies in the Parent Act. To close the current regulatory loopholes, a separate set of rules governing biometric data under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 should be considered. ... The ‘right to be forgotten’ must be a basic element of it, recognising people's sovereignty over their biometric data. Such focused regulations would not just bolster the safeguarding of biometric information, but also ensure compliance and accountability among entities handling sensitive data. Ultimately, this approach aims to cultivate a more resilient and privacy-conscious ecosystem within our dynamic digital landscape.


6 IT risk assessment frameworks compared

ISACA says implementation of COBIT is flexible, enabling organizations to customize their governance strategy via the framework. “COBIT, through its insatiable focus on governance and management of enterprise IT, aligns the IT infrastructure to business goals and maintains strategic advantage,” says Lucas Botzen, CEO at Rivermate, a provider of remote workforce and payroll services. “For governance and management of corporate IT, COBIT is a must,” says ... FAIR’s quantitative cyber risk assessment is applicable across sectors, and now emphasizes supply chain risk management and securing technologies such as internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), Shaw University’s Lewis says. Because it uses a quantitative risk management method, FAIR helps organizations determine how risks will affect their finances, Fuel Logic’s Vancil says. “This method lets you choose where to put your security money and how to balance risk and return best.” ... Conformity with ISO/IEC 27001 means an organization has put in place a system to manage risks related to the security of data owned or handled by the organization. The standard, “gives you a structured way to handle private company data and keep it safe,” Vancil says. 


Why is server cooling so important in the data center industry?

AI and other HPC sectors are continuing to drive up the power density of rack-mount server systems. This increased computer means increased power draw, which leads to increased heat generation. Removing that heat from the server systems in turn requires more power for high CFM (cubic feet per minute) fans. Liquid cooling technologies, including rack-level-cooling and immersion, can improve the efficiency of the heat removal from server systems, requiring less powerful fans. In turn, this can reduce the overall power budget of a rack of servers. When extrapolating this out across large sections of a data center footprint, the savings can add up significantly. When you consider some of the latest Nvidia rack offerings require 40KW or more, you can start to see how the power requirements are shifting to the extreme. For reference, it’s not uncommon for a lot of electronic trading co-locations to only offer 6-12KW racks, which are sometimes operated half-empty due to the servers requiring more power draw than the rack can provide. These trends are going to force data centers to adopt any technology that can reduce the power burden on not only their own infrastructure but also the local infrastructure that supplies them.


Cutting the High Cost of Testing Microservices

Given the high costs associated with environment duplication, it is worth considering alternative strategies. One approach is to use dynamic environment provisioning, where environments are created on demand and torn down when no longer needed. This method can help optimize resource utilization and reduce costs by avoiding the need for permanently duplicated setups. This can keep costs down but still comes with the trade-off of sending some testing to staging anyway. That’s because there are shortcuts that we must take to spin up these dynamic environments like using mocks for third-party services. This may put us back at square one in terms of testing reliability, that is how well our tests reflect what will happen in production. At this point, it’s reasonable to consider alternative methods that use technical fixes to make staging and other near-to-production environments easier to test on. ... While duplicating environments might seem like a practical solution for ensuring consistency in microservices, the infrastructure costs involved can be significant. By exploring alternative strategies such as dynamic provisioning and request isolation, organizations can better manage their resources and mitigate the financial impact of maintaining multiple environments.


The Cybersecurity Workforce Has an Immigration Problem

Creating a skilled immigration pathway for cybersecurity will require new policies. Chief among them is a mechanism to verify that applicants have relevant cybersecurity skills. One approach is allowing people to identify themselves by bringing forth previously unidentified bugs. This strategy is a natural way to prove aptitude and has the additional benefit of requiring no formal expertise or expensive testing. However, it would also require safe harbor provisions to protect individuals from prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. ... The West’s adversaries may also play a counterintuitive role in a cybersecurity workforce solution. Recent work from Eugenio Benincasa at ETH Zurich highlights the strength of China’s cybersecurity workforce. How many Chinese hackers might be tempted to immigrate to the West, if invited, for better pay and greater political freedom? While politically sensitive, a policy that allows foreign-trained cybersecurity experts to immigrate to the US could enhance the West’s workforce while depriving its adversaries of offensive talent. At the same time, such immigration programs must be measured and targeted to avoid adding tension to a world in which geopolitical conflict is already rising. 


Cross-Cloud: The Next Evolution in Cloud Computing?

The key difference between cross-cloud and multicloud is that cross-cloud spreads the same workload across-clouds. In contrast, multicloud simply means using more than one public cloud at the same time — with one cloud hosting some workloads and other clouds hosting other workloads. ... That said, in other respects, cross-cloud and multicloud offer similar benefits — although cross-cloud allows organizations to double down on some of those benefits. For instance, a multicloud strategy can help reduce cloud costs by allowing you to pick and choose from among multiple clouds for different types of workloads, depending on which cloud offers the best pricing for different types of services. One cloud might offer more cost-effective virtual servers, for example, while another has cheaper object storage. As a result, you use one cloud to host VM-based workloads and another to store data. You can do something similar with cross-cloud, but in a more granular way. Instead of having to devote an entire workload to one cloud or another depending on which cloud offers the best overall pricing for that type of workload, you can run some parts of the workload on one cloud and others on a different cloud. 


Will We Survive The Transitive Vulnerability Locusts

The issue today is that modern software development resembles constructing with Legos, where applications are built using numerous open-source dependencies — no one writes frameworks from scratch anymore. With each dependency comes the very real probability of inherited vulnerabilities. When unique applications are then built on top of those frameworks, it turns into a patchwork of potential vulnerability dependencies that are stitched together with our own proprietary code, without any mitigation of the existing vulnerabilities. ... With a proposed solution, it would be easy to conclude that we have fixed the problem. Given this vulnerability, we could just patch it and be secure, right? But after we updated the manifest file, and theoretically removed the transitive vulnerability, it still showed up in the SCA scan. After two tries at remediating the problem, we recognized that two variable versions were present. Using the SCA scan, we determined the root cause of the vulnerability had been imported and used. This is a fine manual fix, but reproducing this process manually at scale is near-impossible. We therefore decided to test whether we could group CVE behavior by their common weakness enumeration (CWE) classification. 



Quote for the day:

"You are the only one who can use your ability. It is an awesome responsibility." -- Zig Ziglar

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