Security

The concept of crowd sourcing cyber intelligence may sound like an unstructured process, but there’s more to it than that. First, you need to remember that all crowds consist of collections of individuals contributing to the community knowledge base. Second, someone has to take responsibility for ga…

Summary On April 16th at 11:00pm GMT, the first of two botnets began a massive spam campaign to take advantage of the recent Boston tragedy. The spam messages claim to contain news concerning the Boston Marathon bombing. The spam messages contain a link to a site that claims to have videos of explos…

I’m sure this has never happened to you. You choose a web security appliance based on user count and expected traffic profiles. Then marketing rolls out a successful video campaign that goes viral and your users complain about slow internet performance. You’re under the gun to complete your global w…

I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural signing of National Cybersecurity Excellence Partnership agreements yesterday. Key stakeholders in attendance included National Security Agency Director, General Keith Alexander, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Dr. Pat Gallagher of the National Institute of St…

Security is a tough nut that can’t be cracked by one alone—neither technology nor research, neither corporations nor start-ups, and neither products nor processes. None of these alone can crack the security nut. The most important part of the problem and solution is people! Nothing beats the efforts…

Wow! We just published our tenth bundle of Cisco IOS Software Security Advisories and what a ride it’s been!! Way back when in the fall of 2008 when we produced our first Cisco IOS Software Security Advisory bundle, we had no idea of the impact that this delivery format would have on us intern…

When we talk about using the network to gather threat intelligence on a global basis, the question arises: how does someone apply that intelligence to protecting their local IT infrastructure? The key lies in maintaining a high degree of situational awareness. This begins with understanding what you…

A couple of weeks ago, I announced a new name and a new mission for the group I lead at Cisco. I’ll do my best to minimize reader exposure to boring administrative details, but the long and the short of it is that the former Cisco Global Government Solutions Group (GGSG) has become the Cisco Threat…

If you’re an end-user or manager of software that has publicly known security vulnerabilities, wouldn’t you want to know about it? If you’re a software developer, wouldn’t you want to know if there are third-party software vulnerabilities that may impact your applications or products?  D…