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

One of the requests we often get is how to securely forward logs to the USM sensor. To forward logs securely, the one component that is required is an SSL certificate. By default, USM has a self-signed certificate that will allow sending secure logs over port 6514. Some platforms, such as Palo Alto Networks, require publicly signed certificates by default. In this blog, we will walk through the process of generating a publicly signed certificate for use with USM.

No one wants to be the next Equifax. Just thinking about their company’s name being in a headline along with the words “security breach” is enough to keep CISOs up at night. Much like Fight Club, however, the first rule of data breaches is: You do not talk about security breaches...unless you’re mandated by notification laws like GDPR. Even though organizations don’t reveal much publicly, their concern is reflected in the amount of money spent to prevent cyber attacks.

I witnessed the transition from bespoke authentication to standards-based authentication. It’s time to do the same for authorization. Twenty years ago, almost everything in the IT world was on-premises: hardware and software, including the tools you used to verify who your users were and what they could do in your systems.

Netskope, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Proofpoint are joining together to help better safeguard organizations by delivering an integrated, Zero Trust security strategy that is designed to protect today’s dynamic and remote working environments at scale.

Did you know that in the United States, the Social Security Number was never intended to become the defacto method for physical identification? On its surface, this may come as a shock given how ubiquitously SSNs are used for this exact reason, but looking beneath the surface, we find that SSNs are terrible forms of identification. Ignoring the security concerns of a nine digit numeric code, an SSN is not for universal identification.

Healthcare providers heavily leverage technology. In his talk, Seth Fogie, information security director at Penn Medicine takes apart different vendor systems at the “fictitious” Black Hat Clinic. Fogie gives a lot of examples and drives home the point that you shouldn’t just look at network security … you have to dig deep into the applications to ensure the security of your data.

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. ​