Adversarial machine learning (ML) is a hot new topic that I now understand much better thanks to this talk at Black Hat USA 2020. Ariel Herbert-Voss, Senior Research Scientist at OpenAI, walked us through the current attack landscape. Her talk clearly outlined how current attacks work and how you can mitigate against them. She skipped right over some of the more theoretical approaches that don’t really work in real life and went straight to real-life examples. ​

Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach, used to start his training camp each season with a talk about doing the basics. He’d tell the players that they start with the basics, then he’d take a football and hold it up and tell them, “This is a football.” In football, as in life and IT Security, starting with the basics is the most important step you can take. Don’t assume anything. So, let us begin with the basics. CIS is the Center for Internet Security.

Chaos is never good for business, but the reality is that it’s the state in which many companies live on a daily basis. The global pandemic shut down offices and dispersed workforces to employees’ homes and other socially-distanced locations. Without data governance plans to support remote workers, employees scavenged for, and used, tools and processes that helped them get their jobs done, often with little regard for long-time implications or risk to the company.

In this blog, I will walk you through the process of configuring both Filebeat and Zeek (formerly known as Bro), which will enable you to perform analytics on Zeek data using Elastic Security. The default configuration for Filebeat and its modules work for many environments; however, you may find a need to customize settings specific to your environment.

The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), drafted by the Department of Defense (DoD), is a new standard set to enhance supply chain security and augment the NIST SP 800-171—Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations. A key difference between the NIST SP 800-171 and a CMMC is the removal of a self-attestation component in favor of a third-party assessor model.

Remember that high school teacher who was never more than one chapter ahead of their students? Well that is me, in this blog. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

VPN stands for virtual private network. It allows you to hide your public IP address and browse privately on the internet without being tracked or watched. Basically, a VPN offers you a thick layer of privacy when using your home Wi-Fi or public. These networks were originally designed for big businesses and governments that wanted to keep their activities secret and secure.

Phishing attacks are a common attack vector for financial services organizations. Effective and simple to launch, phishing attacks challenge financial firms to protect their mobile workforce and harden their customer-facing apps. Mobile phishing, in particular, bypasses traditional perimeter defenses such as secure email gateways by targeting users via personal email, SMS and social messaging apps.

Adding a little bit of structure into one's affairs never hurts, especially when it comes to IT business processes and IT assets. To this end, various frameworks offer blueprints for achieving key organizational objectives like compliance and security. Three of the more popular IT governance frameworks—COBIT, ITIL, and TOGAF—are widely used by enterprises in this regard—let's see how they compare when it comes to bolstering cybersecurity and digital resilience.

LXC (LinuX Containers) is a OS-level virtualization technology that allows creation and running of multiple isolated Linux virtual environments (VE) on a single control host. These isolation levels or containers can be used to either sandbox specific applications, or to emulate an entirely new host. LXC uses Linux’s cgroups functionality, which was introduced in version 2.6.24 to allow the host CPU to better partition memory allocation into isolation levels called namespaces .