Michael Hardy

Everybody knows that modernizing legacy systems brings better security along with all of the other improvements in power and efficiency. It seems, however, that despite what everybody knows, a large number of federal IT leaders don’t believe it. A recent survey showed that 59 percent of respondents…

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain. — Commander Montgomery Scott, on sabotaging the much-ballyhooed, transwarp-capable USS Excelsior. Scotty crippled the newer Starfleet vessel so that the renegade Admiral James Kirk and his small band of loyal companio…

By now you’ve probably heard that Cisco’s new, intent-driven network brings you the capability to monitor encrypted network traffic for malware, without decrypting it. But maybe you aren’t clear on just what that means or why it matters. Simon Blissett, writing on Cisco’s Financial Services blog cha…

Although cloud security has improved tremendously over the years, public cloud still gives some federal IT managers pause. To at least some federal IT managers, the idea of trusting sensitive data to a public cloud provider is not much more appealing than spending a night in an abandoned house while…

In the never-ending escalation of cyber threats, an emerging type of attack could dramatically raise the stakes. Called Destruction of Service (DeOS), these attacks could soon become common — and devastating. As outlined in Cisco’s Midyear Cybersecurity Report (download it here), behavior such as lo…

You didn’t think WannaCry was the end of the ransomware story, did you? This week, a new ransomware exploit began sweeping Europe and apparently made its way into the United States in a matter of hours. Although many press accounts identified the malware as Petya, Cisco’s Talos threat analysis team…

Cisco’s announcement of The Network. Intuitive last week might have seemed to some like an overwhelming amount of information. As experts begin to sort through it, though, a clear consensus is emerging: Intuitive networking is important. Many of Cisco’s customers seem to already understand jus…

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is the core of the president’s recent cybersecurity executive order, and even before it became the foundation of a mandate it was darn good advice. However, there is no one easy way to align a given IT organization with the framework; each one has its own unique cons…

If President Trump gets his way in the next fiscal budget, Federal Agencies will get nearly $100 billion to spend on IT. The problem: The president never gets his budget request passed as written, and this president is attracting an unusual number of Congressional critics from within his own party,…