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Posted by Melissa Stevens in Cloud Security, Cybersecurity
Last October I posted a list of my favorite information security themed infographics, and would you believe it (?!), our readers seem to love these graphics just as much as I do! So, for your viewing pleasure, I have curated 10 new information security infographics that have appeared online since January 2012, covering topics ranging from application security to cloud security, and device and social media security.
Enjoy!
1) With incidents of social phishing on the rise, Veracode released this infographic in March detailing how individuals and Enterprises can protect themselves while socializing online.
2) CounterTack research posted this infographic highlighting the worldwide spend on information security products in 2012, which is expected to reach $32 Billion. Where does your organization spend its budget?
3) This is one of the most popular infographics on my list; I think I’ve seen it on dozens of websites in the past few days. If you haven’t seen it, take a look and see how Backgroundcheck.org has summarized findings from the 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report by wired.com.
4) Critical application breaches have highlighted the need for programmers to practice “safe coding” as SQL injections and data leakage have become preferred methods of breach for many hackers. This infographic from Veracode showcases the top vulnerabilities and tips for staying safe.
5) IBM defined 2011 as the year of the breach (read the IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report for more details). That said, this infographic from backgroundcheck.org outlines the worst security breaches as monitored by Verizon since 2004, and the impact these breaches had on the organizations and their customers.
6) Here’s another great infographic illustrating the major breaches of 2011, provided by BusinessWeek.
7) “Cloud” is one of the most popular terms in IT these days. Here are two infographics highlighting concerns around information security in the cloud.
- CIO.com- “How Secure is the Cloud?“
- Interxion- “Biggest Concerns with Cloud Security“
8 ) Financial organizations hold onto a lot of consumer information and store a lot of sensitive data. It’s no wonder these organizations are targets for breach. This infographic, created by Century Link Business, features lessons learned from some high profile breaches and preventative measures others are taking to protect themselves.
9) Bit9, one of Q1 Labs’ Security Intelligence Partners, recently released the results of their own data breach survey (download the full report here). The results are featured in this great infographic reminiscent of a Pacman game!
10) Another concern of IT security workers is securing mobile workers, especially in the ever-popular BYOD environment. This infographic summarizes the findings of a recent report, The Impact of Mobile Devices on Information Security, sponsored by Check Point Software Technologies.
Have you seen any other great infographics on the web? Please share your links in the comments below!
PS- Check out this infographic that just came out yesterday from IBM, “Mobile Device Defense: A Do or Die Dilemma”!
Posted by Melissa Stevens in Cybersecurity, Security Intelligence, SIEM
Have your security practices been guided by old wives’ tales and horror stories of installations past? In this article for Security Week, Chris Poulin explains why it’s time to revisit your security posture, especially when it comes to SIEM and Security Intelligence. Don’t let superstition influence your strategy!
“Another area where superstitious habits aren’t effectively influenced through SFP [self fulfilling prophecy] is information security. And yet we continue to spend a good part of our security technology budget on the latest iteration of firewall technology–application firewalls, UTM gateways, data diodes–and anti-virus, the perennial favorite, even though conservative figures estimate that A/V protects endpoints from less than 50% of current malware. Granted, much of this spend is aimed at preventing data leakage, which is a positive shift from the perimeter defense strategy, designed primarily to keep out external threats.”
Read the full article to learn how a next generation SIEM, the cornerstone of Security Intelligence, can help keep your organization protected against today’s threats, and why Chris thinks trying to operate without Security Intelligence is equivalent to insanity!
Posted by Melissa Stevens in In the Industry, Log Management, Security Intelligence, SIEM
What mysteries lie solved in the mounds of unstructured data in our world? What value is there in standardizing data, as the World Health Organization is attempting to do with medical service codes?
In his latest contribution to Security Week, Chris Poulin asks these questions and delves into the value normalization could bring to data, especially in a security context. Imagine if event data followed a standard classification system, instead of being a mish-mash of vendor specific formats made up by software developers? Could event data then be more easily used to your advantage?
“There are already taxonomies for classifying vulnerabilities in the form of the Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) database and Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB), but not so with events. Every vendor creates their own log formats and many vendors have many formats, perhaps from acquiring multiple software applications or simply not having a development standard. In many cases the software developers just make up their own events, following neither a prescribed format for the fields nor the text within the fields. This makes parsing and categorizing events from a wide range of vendors difficult, and yet it’s a critical undertaking: normalization is the foundation of cross-system data mining and correlation.
There are a couple of main strategies for dealing with the lack of event standardization:
• Store it, perhaps making a best effort to parse the data into common, or normalized, fields, and wrap a flexible search engine around it;
• Invest significant effort into parsing and normalizing the data
The first is the simpler of the two but is largely relegated to post-event analysis; the latter requires more effort but lends itself to real-time correlation and early threat detection. The difference is log management vs. SIEM.”
Click here to read the full article, “Working toward a Unified Security Model.” To learn more about the difference between log management and SIEM, and to gain an understanding of what a next generation security intelligence solution can bring to your organization, read this whitepaper, “The IT Executive Guide to Security Intelligence: Transitioning from SIEM to Total Security Intelligence.”
Posted by Melissa Stevens in Cybersecurity, Log Management, SIEM, Threat Management
image via prweb.com
Businesses today can’t afford to ignore the customer insight and connections they can gain through social media. Being able to connect with your customers and prospects where they already are offers unprecedented access into their lives and lets you build relationships that extend the value of your brand. But aside from the great benefits you can gain, there’s also a dark side organizations need to consider and be prepared to address.
We’ve moved on from the age-old discussion of social media the “time- drainer”, and whether or not employee access should be blocked for productivity reasons. The conversation instead should be about something much more serious: protecting the vital information and assets of your organization from breach. In this article from USA Today, some very staggering statistics are cited that remind us that social media isn’t simply the utopian data-mine we’ve heard of. The information that businesses are finding so valuable for building relationships is also giving power to hackers just waiting to break in. Some highlights:
- “In most of the high-profile breaches we’ve seen in the past 12 months, hackers used social engineering to get an initial foothold inside the company,” says Hugh Thompson, RSA conference program committee chair. “It isn’t a generic stranger trying to deceive your employees; it’s someone who knows them through online reconnaissance.”
- Web traffic of 5,500 PC users in 20 nations was analyzed and it was found that 1 : 60 Facebook postings and 1 : 100 Twitter posts carried malicious code.
- “Companies now routinely permit employees to connect their personally owned smartphones and tablet PCs into company systems, creating a myriad of fresh pathways into corporate networks. A recent Juniper Networks survey of applications available for all mobile device operating systems [found] 28,472 malicious mobile apps in 2011, a 155% increase from the 11,138 malicious apps that existed in 2010.”
So what can you do about these new persistent threats?
You need to adopt security intelligence to monitor activity and content to and from social networks and independent devices. You need a security intelligence platform that can monitor your entire network, giving you complete visibility into everything going on across your network. Preferably, you need a solution that can automatically detect new devices and provide instant monitoring. You want to be alerted to new risks and vulnerabilities as they appear. And you want context to be able to understand what the data you are collecting means, and access to advanced reporting and analytics that can help you dive into and address redflags immediately.
To learn more, and to evaluate what a next generation log management and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution can do for your organization, download this white paper, “Five Practical Steps to Protecting your Organization Against Breach.”
Posted by Melissa Stevens in Cybersecurity
It’s not news to security experts; they’ve been saying it for ages. But for the rest of us (and by us, I mean people like me, who work in marketing, accounting, and so forth, and have little understanding of how our behaviors online could be compromising network security) one of the more recent Anonymous breaches is a strong reminder that it’s people who are the weakest link in any security policy.
This might come across as a “duh” moment, but organizations who make it a practice to constantly train ALL employees on online security practices are going to have a huge advantage when it comes to staying safe. As a marketeer, I am online all the time. I do my best to keep things locked down:
– bolt my lap top to my desk
– follow prompts and reminders to keep my passwords varied and secure
– remember to send passwords in separate emails if I need to share log in information with new users
–Encrypt and password protect attachments
–Check with security when I’m not sure about a link I’ve been sent
You get the gist. I work for a security company, so of course, we have people out there looking to make sure we follow the rules. And knowing that someone is watching me makes me all the more vigilant (you can call me a brown-noser, but I hate getting in trouble!).
It always amazes me when I see these articles and am reminded that not all organizations operate this way, even though really, we all should be. In today’s hacker-fueled “targets of choice” environment, it’s really important that security professionals take their job to the next level. That means not only relying on technology and policies to keep their networks safe; it means investing time and energy to make sure that everyone with network access has been trained and retrained and possibly certified. Some people might see that as over kill, but I just see it as being prepared.
What are you doing to make sure your employees are taking necessary precautions to keep your network safe? Please share your insights below.
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