Protecting personal information in your databases is a bigger deal than ever, what with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect in May and California passing a new Consumer Privacy Protection Act. Knowing what personal information you have in your systems and where it resides is a precondition to managing it effectively. My friend and colleague Luke Probasco, product manager at Townsend Security has posted a nice listing of security standards with lists of the sensitive data elements that each of them identifies; see What Data Needs to Be Encrypted in MongoDB? If you are interested in Read More
Archives for Security
Are Secure Applications Possible?
For the past few years, a number of us in the security space have been talking about (1) the criticality of building secure applications; and (2) the importance of auditing open source components for security flaws. If you have not been following along, applications deployed over the Internet are a leading target, if not the leading target for sophisticated attackers. This Secodis blog entry cites the Verizon 2017 Data Breach Report indicating that 29.5% of breaches where caused by web application attacks, and the Sonatype 2017 State of Software Supply Chain Report, indicating that 80 – 90% of an applications Read More
References for Data Security talk
This is a list of references I have assembled for the talks on Data Security that I am presenting at XPlor17, Enterprise Data World, and Data Summit this spring: Intel Security – Grand Theft Data CyberCriminals and their APT and AVT Techniques InfoSec Institute: Anatomy of an APT Attack: Step by Step Approach Forrester: Transform Your Security Architecture And Operations For The Zero Trust Ecosystem Forrester: The Future Of Data Security And Privacy: Growth And Competitive Differentiation Forrester Wave: Data Loss Prevention Suites Q4, 2016 Data Guardian’s Definitive Guide to Data Loss Prevention Guide to Cyber Threat Hunting (Digital Guardian) Read More
The Rise of the Threat Hunter
Where I left off in my first entry about the RSA Expo was suggesting that “Threat Hunting” seemed to be arising as a new approach to protecting the enterprise from cyber-threats. Threat Hunting is predicated on the fact that the perimeter is crumbling and attackers are getting more sophisticated, so you can expect Advanced persistent Threats (APTs) to be in progress on your network, and you should find them before the steal something important. “EndGame” sponsored this nice little “Hunter’s Handbook”; I picked up a hard copy at the show. It talks about the process of hunting, and what technologies Read More
RSA Expo Reflections
I spent two days in the Expo at this year’s RSA Conference, and came out of it dizzy and exhausted. I learned a few things. One is that this is an area that has been getting a lot of funding over the past couple years. The sucking sound you heard in San Francisco this week is the sound of data scientists and machine learning experts being sucked into the cyber-security vortex; I suspect that cyber-security is the reason salaries in those fields are continuing to increase. Everybody is pitching their “AI” or machine learning based solution keep you from getting Read More
