2010 was a fascinating year for cloud computing and virtualization. VMWare locked down the VMSafe program, spurring acquisition of smaller vendors in the program with access to the special APIs. Cloud computing security moved from hype to hyper-hype at the same time some seriously interesting security tools hit the market. Despite all the confusion, there was a heck of a lot of progress and growing clarity. And not all of it was from the keyboard of Chris Hoff.
In our last post, we covered the first level of incident response: validating and filtering the initial alert. When that alert triggers and your frontline personnel analyze the incident, they’ll either handle it on the spot or gather essential data and send it up the chain.
As someone who has covered data security for nearly a decade, some days I wonder if I should send Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, whoever wrote the HITECH act, and the Chinese hacker community a personal note of gratitude. If the first wave of data security was driven by breach disclosure laws and a mixture of lost laptops and criminal exploits, this second wave is all about stopping leaks and keeping your pants on in public. This year I’ve seen more serious interest in large enterprises to…
Global Threats. APT. Botnets. Infected Web Pages. Grannies with shotguns. We expect to see anything and everything it takes for vendors to get your attention, including never before seen awards and security metrics. Some ask “Why the hype?” The value of content security — both inbound filtering to prevent unwanted garbage from coming into the network, as well as detection of unwanted activity like surfing for porn or sending company secrets to your cousin as investment advice — is proven. All…
OMG, it’s 6 days and counting to the 2011 RSA Conference. Yes, they moved the schedule up a few months, so you now can look forward to spending Valentine’s Day with cretins like us, as opposed to your loved ones. Send thank-you notes to…
2010 was an interesting year for the network security space. There has been a resurgence in interest and budget projections for spending, largely for perimeter security. Part of this is a loosening of the budget purse strings, which is allowing frustrated network security folks to actually start dreaming about upgrading their perimeters. So there will be plenty of vendors positioning to benefit from the wave of 2011 spending.
Everyone’s process is a bit different, but through our research we have found that the best teams tend to gear themselves through three general levels of response, each staffed with increasing expertise. Once the alert triggers, your goal is to filter out the day-to-day crud junior staffers are fully capable of handling, while escalating the most serious incidents through the response levels as quickly as possible. Having a killer investigation team doesn’t do any good if an incident never…
There’s something I have always struggled with as an analyst. Because of the, shall we say, ‘aggressiveness’ of today’s markets and marketers, most of us in the analyst world are extremely cautious about ever saying anything positive about any vendors. This frequently extends to entire classes of technology, because we worry it will be misused or taken out of context to promote a particular product or company. Or, as every technology is complex and no blanket statement can possibly account for…
I’ve been on Twitter for a few years now, and over that time I’ve watched not only its mass adoption, but also how people changed their communication habits. One of the most unexpected changes (for me) is how many people now use Twitter Direct Messages as instant messaging.
My wife says to me, “I seem to be getting your junk mail. Somebody just sent me Data Security Quiz results.” I have no idea what she means, so she forwarded me the email from the National Information Security Assocation (NISA). I confess that I had never heard of this organization before, and I really don’t know what they do. Apparently they quizzed a number of real estate agents and brokers around the country to find out how much they knew about data security. The results were emailed as a way…