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.

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.

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.