Securing Government: It all starts at the DNS Layer

There’s no doubt that today’s business technology landscape is vastly different than five or ten years ago. That’s especially true for the Federal Government in the United States. With initiatives like digital transformation, cloud-first strategies, and defending forward in cyberspace, the attack surface for malicious actors to exploit has become a wide target.

Cyberattacks against the US

Every week the public reads about the latest ransomware, cryptomining, insider threat, or phishing campaign impacting private industry and local governments; all terms that were far beyond the general public conversation until recently. Unfortunately, the Federal government and both its civilian and defense agencies face these same threats, but with potentially greater consequences. And we now find our nation’s defenses and infrastructure under constant cyberattack from nation-states and a variety of other adversaries.

DNS and cybersecurity

One common thread between cyber-attacks is external communication. From command and control traffic, to data exfiltration, to malware and fast flux attacks, malicious communication typically starts or is exploited at the DNS layer. That external communication can be monitored and protected from the inception of the conversation, instead of being dependent on stacks of security controls to decrypt and monitor processes, payloads, or files for malicious activity.

To trust the endpoint communications in today’s encrypted traffic landscape, reputation and machine learning can be employed to protect the asset and the mission. Cisco Umbrella gives missions the ability to leverage existing infrastructure on-base and integrate with mobile devices to protect the mobile warrior, while providing leadership a single source of truth for all external DNS requests.

Enabling security policy

That first line of defense allows missions to enable security policy that is enforced everywhere, while providing visibility into potential threats. Those threats are discovered by Cisco’s industry-leading threat intelligence group fighting the good fight: Talos. The Talos team protects your organization’s people, data, and infrastructure 24/7. Every day their researchers, data scientists, and engineers are actively collecting information about existing and developing threats. Then they use that data to deliver protection you need.

Through Cisco Umbrella, mission leaders can defend US assets from cyberattacks while providing advanced threat intelligence to their threat hunters through the exact same platform (with a service called Investigate). At Cisco we block over 20 billion malicious requests today. That’s twenty times greater than our closest competitor. So now is the time to put a cyber warfighter in the backpack of every hero thanks to Cisco Umbrella.

You’re invited: TechNet Cyber 2019

We invite you to drop by our booth (#2140) at this year’s AFCEA TechNet Cyber event on May 14-16 where you can get interactive with our latest demo stations featuring:

Comply to Connect; Enforcing Zero Trust Access showing ISE and Umbrella

Multi-Cloud Security; Protecting post perimeter networks, Stealthwatch Cloud, Firepower, Cisco Cloudlock, and DUO

Plus more demos featuring Analytics & Data Center, Collaboration, SD-Access, Optical Transport, Network Automation and Programmability and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Find out more at TechNet Cyber 2019.