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Omar Santos

Principal Engineer

Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) Security Research and Operations

Omar Santos is an active member of the cyber security community, where he leads several industry-wide initiatives and standards bodies. His active role helps businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to increasing the security of their critical infrastructures.

Omar is the author of more than twenty (20) books and video courses, as well as numerous white papers, articles, and security configuration guidelines and best practices. Omar is a principal engineer of the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), where he mentors and leads engineers and incident managers during the investigation and resolution of cyber security vulnerabilities. Additional information about Omar's current projects can be found at this website, and you can follow Omar on Twitter: @santosomar

Articles

October 5, 2015

SECURITY

Improvements to Cisco’s Security Vulnerability Disclosures

Cisco is committed to protecting customers by sharing critical security-related information in different formats. Guided by customer feedback, Cisco’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is seeking ways to improve how we communicate information about Cisco product vulnerabilities to our…

September 20, 2015

SECURITY

SYNful Knock: Acting to protect Cisco customers

The security of our customers is critical, and when needed, we pull out all stops to protect them. Cisco participates in a large ecosystem of partners, industry peers (yes, that includes competitors), and non-profits that provides insight and awareness into a multitude of security threats. We also h…

September 17, 2015

SECURITY

SYNful Knock: Protect Your Credentials, Protect Your Network

Interest in IT security has never been higher. So when a new type of attack comes along, it attracts the attention of our customers and others in the industry. Earlier this week Cisco and Mandiant/Fireye released information about the so-called SYNful Knock malware found on Cisco networking devices.…

September 15, 2015

SECURITY

SYNful Knock: Detecting and Mitigating Cisco IOS Software Attacks

Historically, threat actors have targeted network devices to create disruption through a denial of service (DoS) situation. While this remains the most common type of attack on network devices, we continue to see advances that focus on further compromising the victim’s infrastructure. Recently, the…

June 4, 2015

SECURITY

SHA512 Checksums for All Cisco Software

Cisco continues to strengthen the security in and around its products, solutions, and services. This week Cisco began providing a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) 512 bits (SHA512) checksum to validate downloaded images on www.cisco.com. Cisco already provided a Message Digest 5 (MD5) checksum as the sec…

March 9, 2015

SECURITY

Mitigations Available for the DRAM Row Hammer Vulnerability

This blog post was authored by Troy Fridley and Omar Santos of Cisco PSIRT. On Mar 9 2015, the Project Zero team at Google revealed findings from new research related to the known issue in the DDR3 Memory specification referred to as “Row Hammer”. Row Hammer is an industry-wide issue tha…

September 25, 2014

SECURITY

Looking Forward to Cisco’s Internal Security Conference: SecCon 2014

Cisco’s internal security conference (SecCon) is just around the corner and this year marks our seventh anniversary! In previous years SecCon participants heard from a renowned privacy specialist, a Chief Security Officer from a large customer, a cyber security coordinator for two U.S. Presidents, a…

November 12, 2013

SECURITY

Security: Front and Center at Cisco Live Cancun 2013

This year I was honored to be able to present and participate at Cisco Live Cancun, which took place last week. Many attendees from North, Central and South America and the Caribbean came to discover innovative ways that networking technologies can help them reach new markets and understand which so…

October 30, 2013

SECURITY

Your Device Is Wide Open on the Internet!

Stop-think-connect is not only for kids. Everyone, including nerds like me and network and security professionals, should pay more attention before connecting any device to the Internet. Routers (wireless and wired), industrial control systems, video surveillance cameras, fire alarm systems, traffic…