Taking Security Strategy to the Next Level: The Cyber Kill Chain vs. MITRE ATT&CK
There are 2 models that can help security professionals harden network resources
and protect against modern-day threats and attacks: the cyber kill chain
(CKC) and the MITRE ATT&CK framework. The CKC, developed by Lockheed
Martin more than a decade ago, provides a high-level view of the sequence of a
cyberattack from initial reconnaissance through weaponization and action. While
it is widely used by security teams, it has its limitations. For example, host
attack behaviors are not included in the model, and attackers may bypass or
combine multiple steps. The newer MITRE ATT&CK framework maps closely to the
CKC but focuses more on cyberresilience to withstand emergent threats. This
open-source project also provides substantial support for tracing host attack
behaviors. ... Present-day attacks utilize encryption over the network, making
it very difficult to detect attack behaviors via the network itself. To overcome
this limitation, enterprises typically deploy host security products alongside
their network security products. Host security products might include
traditional antivirus programs, endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions
or endpoint protection platforms (EPPs).
Why Cloud Databases Need to Be In Your Tech Stack
Companies need to operate at a constantly increasing scale — more data, more
speed, more customer touchpoints. IDC estimates that there will be 41.6 billion
connected IoT devices, or “things,” generating 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data in
2025. The only way to keep up with this moving train is to have a cloud database
that can handle huge amounts of data and can do so with extreme agility and low
latency. There are two types of scaling: horizontal (adding more nodes to a
system) and vertical (adding more resources to a single node). Relational
databases of old are not elastic, as in they cannot scale based on the volume
and velocity of data access. They are built more like airplanes. If you want to
add 20 more seats to your flight, you have to get a new plane that is built with
20 more seats. In other words, you can’t extend this plane to accommodate 20
more passengers. This is vertical scaling. Cloud databases are built more like
trains. If you want to add 20 more seats to your popular train route, all you
have to do is add another coach. On the other hand, cloud databases are more
like trains. If you want to add 20 more seats to your popular train route, all
you have to do is add another coach.
Report: Organ Transplant Data Security Needs Strengthening
The newest criticism comes from a federal watchdog review of the Health
Resources and Services Administration and the nonprofit United Network of Organ
Sharing. As of January, nearly 107,000 individuals were candidates on the Organ
Procurement and Transplantation Network waitlist. OPTN is designated by the
federal government as a "high-value asset." UNOS, which manages its network at
the administration's behest, lacked system monitoring and only had draft
procedures for access controls when federal auditors conducted their review. The
OPTN "is a very 'just in time' system where the time between an organ becoming
available and getting it into the right patient can be measured in days or even
hours," says Benjamin Denkers, chief innovation officer at consultancy
CynergisTek. "Hackers breaching the system could create any number of
disruptions to the system connecting available organs with patients in need." A
statement from an UNOS spokeswoman shared with Information Security Media Group
notes that auditors concluded that "OPTN security controls 'protect the
confidentiality, integrity, and availability of transplant data.'"
Spinning uncertainty into success
The Upside of Uncertainty delivers helpful takeaways and, perhaps most
important, offers anyone struggling with a murky future the courage to
persevere. The book also contains useful insights into shifting one’s
perspective in tough times, describing entrepreneurial heuristics that can
help shrewd thinkers tap into potential opportunity. For example: pressing on
when uncertainty emerges, even at the risk of failure; reframing failure as an
opportunity for learning and adaptation; exploiting resources and skills at
hand instead of investing too deeply in research before experimenting; and
thinking entrepreneurially by leveraging existing resources in new ways. They
cite the example of Pokémon Go, which was created by a multiplayer-game
designer and digital mapping expert who’d helped create what became Google
Maps. He realized that Google Maps’ geopositioning technology could be paired
with Pokémon characters to form an engaging augmented reality game. Similarly,
the founders of Traveling Spoon, a startup that connects food-focused
travelers with local home cooks, saw entrepreneurial potential hiding in plain
sight when a local woman shared a delicious homemade meal with them in
Mexico.
Design For Security Now Essential For Chips, Systems
“There’s a real danger in
security, because of its complications and being really hard to understand, to
run into the equivalent of what in sustainability is called green-washing,”
said Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director, solutions and ecosystem at
Cadence. “This is ‘secure-washing,’ and while there may be government
regulations, it’s all about customers in the commercial world. Semiconductor
companies and system vendors have to serve their end customers, and for them
it’s like selling insurance. You really didn’t know that you needed security
until you ran into a real issue. That’s when they say, ‘If I just would have
had insurance.’ But how to implement it is really an intricate issue, and it’s
hard to understand from technology perspective. I fear it may be similar to a
clean energy ‘Energy Star’ sticker on a washing machine, which may just mean,
‘Yes, I have documented processes.’ That’s why I think there’s a danger of
secure-washing, where the end consumer is lulled into a sense that ‘this thing
is secure,’ without really understanding what’s underneath, who confirmed it,
and what the process was. That’s why standardization is crucial. But it also
needs to be transparent.”
The risks of neglecting data governance
Data governance will make or break your organisation’s reputation. The impact
of the brand degradation that businesses are likely to suffer once their lax
approach to data protection is revealed could be significant. No one wants to
transact with a business that will not protect their data. In fact, data
protection is set to become the next ‘badge of honour’ for businesses. Whilst
sustainability, diversity and fair trade have previously been accolades that
customers look for when choosing which businesses to interact with, being a
data guardian is a growing phenomenon. The reputational impact that a GDPR
fine can have on a business is, therefore, huge and can result in significant
customer loss. With the growth of competition in many markets, it is easy for
customers to find an alternative. Financially, this loss will often amount to
more than the fine itself. Such negligence can also have a negative impact on
your supply chain. As with customers, partners, suppliers, and service
providers will also choose not to work with organisations who fail to comply
with standards such as GDPR.
Choosing the Right Cloud Infrastructure for Your SaaS Start-up
The first consideration is the company’s ability to manage the infrastructure,
including the time required, whether humans are needed for the day-to-day
management, and how resilient the product is to future changes. If the product
is used primarily by enterprises and demands customization, then you may need
to deploy the product multiple times, which could mean more effort and time
from the infra admins. The deployment can be automated, but the automation
process requires the product to be stable. ROI might not be good for an
early-stage product. My recommendation in such cases would be to use managed
services such as PaaS for infrastructure, managed services for the
database/persistent, and FaaS—Serverless architecture for compute. ... And the
key to fast development to release is to spend more time in coding and testing
than in provisioning and deployments. Low-code and no-code platforms are good
to start with. Serverless and FaaS are designed to solve these problems. If
your system involves many components, building your own boxes will consume too
much time and effort. Similarly, setting up Kubernetes will not make it
faster.
Edge infrastructure: 7 key facts CIOs should know about security
There is no blanket security solution that will mitigate every risk – that’s
true at the edge, in the cloud, and in your datacenter or corporate offices.
Your IT stack has multiple layers; even a single application has multiple
layers. Your security posture should, too. Edge computing boosts the case for
a multi-layered approach to security. This whitepaper describes a layered
approach to container and Kubernetes security. While the details may differ in
an edge environment, the core concept here remains relevant: A well-planned
mix (or layers) of processes, policies, and tools – that lean heavily on
automation wherever possible – is vital to securing inherently distributed
systems. ... “You have to ensure that you enforce security controls at the
granularity of the edge location, and that any edge location that is breached
can be isolated away without impacting all the other edge locations,” says
Priya Rajagopal, director of product management at Couchbase. This is similar
in concept to limiting “east-west” traffic and other forms of isolation and
segmentation in container and Kubernetes security. There’s no such thing as
zero risk – things happen.
How to Optimize Your Organization for Innovation
Building a culture that encourages creativity usually requires starting small
and supporting frequent iteration. “Be willing to try ideas and approaches
that may not work,” suggests Christine Livingston, managing director in the
emerging technology practice at business consulting firm Protiviti.
Employee-led technology advisory teams and initiative groups allow staffers to
feel a sense of ownership while finding solutions to complex issues, observes
Susan Tweed, vice president of enterprise technologies at analytics,
artificial Intelligence and data management software and services provider
SAS. “People can participate in ways that maximizes their strengths,” she
says. “Some participants may be great at throwing out ideas while others love
the challenge of digging deep to validate the solutions identified as the best
options.” Giving teams the freedom to experiment is essential. “When teams are
offered the space to create, try, fail, and try again, they are given the
opportunity to learn from those experiences and bring that insight into their
next projects,” Hapanowicz says.
Protect the Pipe! Secure CI/CD Pipelines With a Policy-Based Approach
Improved security for production systems has forced attackers to look for
other avenues. The improvements may be due to the increase in cloud and
managed services and general security awareness and availability of tools.
With the adoption of programmable infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-Code
(IaC), build, and delivery systems now have access to production systems. This
means a compromise in the build system can be used to access production
systems and, in the case of a software vendor, access to customer
environments. Applications are increasingly composed of hundreds of OSS
and commercial components. This increases the application exposure and
presents several ways to add malicious code to an application. All of these
factors contributed to attackers shifting focus to Continuous Integration and
Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) systems as an easier target to infiltrate multiple
production systems. Therefore, it is essential that organizations give equal
consideration to securing our CI/CD pipelines, just as they do their
production workloads.
Quote for the day:
"Superlative leaders are fully
equipped to deliver in destiny; they locate eternally assigned destines." --
Anyaele Sam Chiyson
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