Data drives us at Devo—and although most organizations would benefit from a more data-driven approach, recent research shows organizations are grappling with the challenges of accessing and using operational data for business benefit. Data volumes are continuing to grow, fueled by machine data from a multitude of sources. But there is often a significant gap between the volume of data collected and the operational benefits that can be gained from that data.

We recently discussed data security requirements for federal contractors and now we are doing a deeper dive into one of the trickier compliance factors: reporting cyber incidents.

In early August, I will be leading a couple of sessions at the Community College Cyber Summit about cyber security fundamentals. I’ve also been spending time working with my amazing colleagues here at Tripwire on a really cool new offering for DevOps pipelines – Tripwire for DevOps (learn more here). Spending so much time going back and forth from “back to basics” and “the future of development” had me thinking that securing DevOps is really Back to the Future.

It’s hardly a controversial statement to say that DevOps is changing the way that organizations build and deploy applications. There’s plenty of material, stories, whitepapers and whole companies that demonstrate this trend. There are, however, a couple of things that make a discussion about security and DevOps important.

Despite living in a world where the internet is becoming ever-more fundamental to everyday life, there is currently a world-wide shortage of cyber security professionals who are able to keep it all secure. Within four years this shortage is expected to reach 1.8 million. According to a recent study, only 35% of the enterprises involved felt they were adequately staffed to deal with cyber-attacks. 35% is not a good percentage.

Data generated by various devices connected in a network and operations being carried out on them is called as log data and we have already discussed why log management is important, considering the exponentially increasing number of attacks and their sophistication. Further, in the last blog post, we dealt with questions that you must your cloud-based log management service provider.

From performance information to fault and intrusion detection, logs can provide you a lot more things with regard to what is happening on your systems and network along with the timestamps and order of the events. Logs can be invaluable for resource management, instruction detection, and troubleshooting. More importantly, logs can provide an admissible evidence for forensic purposes in the aftermath of an incident. The following sections provide a deep dive into some use-cases of logs.

Federal contractors are private entities that fulfill governmental needs. As such, they are trusted with sensitive, private federal information which makes them obvious targets for cyber attacks. The government has recently ramped up data security requirements for federal contractors, demanding more software, hardware and accountability from them.

TL;DR Bucket upload policies are a convenient way to upload data to a bucket directly from the client. Going through the rules in upload policies and the logic related to some file-access scenarios we show how full bucket object listings were exposed with the ability to also modify or delete existing files in the bucket.

When I speak with clients about their approach to managing their IT services, many organisations mention ITIL practices as a cornerstone to their approach. This is hardly surprising since the ITIL framework describes a sensible methodology for IT management, looking at the use of technology through the lens of what the business needs.