Recently I attended another great Evanta CIO event, and in the course of a day packed with excellent talks and knowledge-sharing opportunities, I had the opportunity to sit down and discuss the topic of network and security transformation with Stuart Hughes, the CIDO at Rolls Royce. Stuart shared his experiences over the past 18 months, discussing how the pandemic—among other things—had changed his strategic approach to security.
A squid proxy server has two major functions. First, it is an intermediary proxy. Second, it provides cache services for popular network protocols including HTTP and FTP. The use of proxies and cache services makes up a better internet user experience. Proxies provide added layers of security and cache services that make loading processes faster. Obviously, getting both services from a single provider is highly efficient.
The next iteration in the history of technology convergence emerged with Gartner’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). Networking and security vendors have been integrating capabilities for decades, and market adoption of these integrations has only accelerated due to innovations such as virtualization and cloud computing. From a networking perspective, routing of traffic extends far beyond IP and MAC addresses to now include application steering and transport-agnostic overlay networks.
Understanding what to audit in a network can be chaotic and confusing. Building a complete network security checklist is crucial for organizations with computers connected to the internet or to each other. Think of it like an antivirus scan you might run on your computer to find Trojans or malware, except you’re scanning your entire network to find anything that may cripple it.
Cloud misconfigurations represent something that’s plaguing many organizations’ cloud adoption efforts. For example, a 2020 report found that 91% of cloud deployments contained at least one misconfiguration that left organizations exposed to potential digital threats. Those weaknesses contributed to more than 200 data breaches between 2018 and 2020, noted SC Magazine, with those security incidents exposing more than 30 billion records.
Fragmentation and aggregation attacks (FragAttacks) are WLAN vulnerabilities discovered by Mathy Vanhoef, who created this webpage to provide more information about them. Three of these vulnerabilities are 802.11 specification design flaws, and they are probably as old as the 802.11 specification itself. Aggregation was added in 802.11n, which means this vulnerability has been in the design for over 10 years. Nine of these vulnerabilities are implementation flaws.
On May 8th, I was at a gas station filling up my car before a trip I was taking when the news about a cyberattack against a large pipeline company broke. The attack led them to halt all operations. Ultimately, the incident stemmed from a ransomware infection in which a well-known threat actor took volumes of corporate data in just two hours and made their demands including the threat to block and encrypt the company’s network. They even threatened to release the data to the internet.
The Biden Administration published a new executive order (EO) to strengthen the digital security of U.S. federal government networks. Published on May 12 by The White House, the executive order covered much of what many media outlets reported would appear in the draft. This included the issue of supply chain security. For example, the EO stated that the U.S. federal government will begin requiring developers to make security data about their tools publicly available. It also said that the U.S.
Home and public wi-fi hot spots are firmly a part of everyday life, more so since COVID where many work from home as well as those public spaces setup to help relive the monotony of being stuck at home. Whether you are at home or in a public space establishing some good habits to ensure security of the data you throw over the Internet is worth focusing on.
As per UK DCMS’s data breaches survey, about 32% of businesses in the UK have faced a form of cybersecurity threat between 2018 and 2019. As a result of these network security vulnerabilities, these businesses incurred costs on lost data and many other damages that totalled £4,180.
