Security

This post was authored by Aleksandar Nikolic, Warren Mercer, and Jaeson Schultz. Summary MiniUPnP is commonly used to allow two devices which are behind NAT firewalls to communicate with each other by opening connections in each of the firewalls, commonly known as “hole punching”. Various software i…

When dealing with TLS connections, it is important to understand how a client (in most cases this is a web browser) will be acting. Let’s quickly check some of the steps that are happening when a TLS connection is made. A web server will send its certificate down to the requesting client during the…

Introduction TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a cryptographic protocol that provides privacy for applications. TLS is usually implemented on top of common protocols such as HTTP for web browsing or SMTP for email. HTTPS is the usage of TLS over HTTP, which is the most popular way of securing commun…

[ed. note – this post was authored jointly by John Stuppi and Dan Hubbard] The Domain Name Service (DNS) provides the IP addresses of intended domain names in response to queries from requesting end hosts. Because many threat actors today are leveraging DNS to compromise end hosts monitoring D…

Defending a network against threats of growing complexity requires a mix of technology and policies that are as sophisticated as the campaigns created by attackers. A necessary component to an efffective defense includes tackling the low-hanging fruit—that is, basic tasks such as patching vulnerabil…

Today’s attackers deploy complex and clever threats that are difficult to combat with just one method of defense. In some cases, defenders must go beyond tools for detecting attacks and devise a different approach for obstructing our adversaries’ ability to operate. As detailed in the Cisco 2016 Ann…

Our just-released 2016 Cisco Annual Security Report (ASR) presents a challenging cybersecurity landscape: cyber defense teams are fighting to keep up with rapid global digitization while trying to integrate dozens of vendor solutions, speed up detection, and educate their organizations from top to b…

This post was authored by Mariano Graziano. Malware sandboxes are automated dynamic analysis systems that execute programs in a controlled environment. Within the large volumes of samples submitted daily to these services, some submissions appear to be different from others and show interesting ch…

The first Patch Tuesday of 2016 has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release is relatively light with nine bulletins addressing 25 vulnerabilities. Six bulletins are rated c…