Let’s get one thing out there from the get-go. Being a Bulletproof consultant is awesome. I haven’t been coerced to say that. I mean, let’s start with that brand name. How cool is it to say I work for Bulletproof? I have several T-shirts with the logo emblazoned across the chest. Sometimes, I even wear them on a non-work day.

September was another busy month for product development at AlienVault, an AT&T Company. We are excited that the AlienVault Agent is getting great traction with our USM Anywhere user base, and we are continuing to add feature enhancements to the Agent. You can keep up with all of our regular product releases by reading the release notes in the AlienVault Product Forum.

The latest research from Blueliv has found that the number of compromised credentials detected in North American botnets grew 141% from the last quarter. The spike between the March to May and June to August quarters came alongside declines in other regions analyzed. Russia and Europe saw a 22% decrease and Asia saw a 36% decrease.

An effective container security strategy consists of many parts. Organizations should first secure the build environment using secure code control along with build tools and controllers. Next, they should secure the contents of their containers using container validation, code analysis and security unit tests. Finally, they should develop a plan to protect their containers in production systems by focusing on runtime security, platform security and orchestration manager security.

The first article in this series examined configuration hardening—essentially looking at ports, processes and services where security configuration management (SCM) is key. The second article looked at application and version hardening strategies. This third installment will discuss the role of automation in the coming of age of what’s called “continuous hardening.”

A series of high-profile data breaches in 2017 made it clear that it's becoming more difficult to protect your and your customer's sensitive information from nefarious agents. As businesses expand, they develop and implement security policies that help protect their sensitive information from outsiders.

Google is shutting down its Google+ social network following the disclosure of a software glitch within Google+ that resulted in the exposure of personal-profile data belonging to hundreds of thousands of Google+ users. The glitch was live for close to three years, but Google elected to not make the breach public out of fear of regulation.

The first article in this series examined configuration hardening, essentially looking at ports, processes and services as the “doors, gates and windows” into a network where security configuration management (SCM) becomes the job of determining which of these gateways should be open, closed, or locked at any given time. Now it’s time to look at application and version hardening.

Although many organizations are shifting security to the left and embracing the integration of security tools into their continuous integration / continuous delivery pipelines, there are others who have different wants and needs.

Last week, we spoke about the common issues that come up throughout a penetration test. We left out what many of our penetration testers think of as the ‘biggest issues’, however, as the finished article rivalled Dickens at his wordiest. Still, they’re definitely worth raising, as some of the most common issues that emerge from a penetration test don’t involve misconfigurations, vulnerabilities or hacking of any kind.