security
Microsoft Patch Tuesday for December 2014: Light Month, Some Changes
This post was authored by Yves Younan. Today, Microsoft is releasing their final Update Tuesday of 2014. Last year, the end of year update was relatively large. This time, it’s relatively light with a total of seven bulletins, covering 24 CVEs. Three of those bulletins are rated critical and four ar…
Understanding and Addressing the Challenges of Managing Information Security – A More Responsive Approach
Just like bad weather conditions found in nature, such as typhoons, hurricanes, or snowstorms, technology system defects and vulnerabilities are inherent characteristics found in a cyber system environment. Regardless of whether it’s a fair comparison, weather changes are part of the natural environ…
Pros and Cons: Do-It-Yourself Approaches to Monitoring Shadow IT & Cloud Services
Shadow IT is estimated to be 20-40 percent beyond the traditional IT budget. The ease by which organizations can purchase apps and services from cloud service providers (CSP) contributes significantly to this spending. This is an eye-catching number worthy of investigation—not only to identify and r…
Step-by-Step Setup of ELK for NetFlow Analytics
Contents Intro Java Elasticsearch Logstash Kibana Intro The ELK stack is a set of analytics tools. Its initials represent Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a flexible and powerful open source, distributed, real-time search and analytics engine. Logstash is a…
Creating a More Secure Internet
Trust is a fundamental requirement for people to use the Internet with confidence, and Cisco continues to find opportunities to make the Internet even more secure. I am happy to share that we are a founding sponsor of a new public benefit consortium called the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)…
Endpoint Protection and Least Prevalence
Let’s face it, malware is everywhere now, and it’s here to stay. The statistics are staggering. According to the 2014 Cisco Annual Security Report, “100 percent of the business networks analyzed by Cisco had traffic going to websites that host malware” and 96 percent of the business networks analyze…
Reversing Multilayer .NET Malware
This post was authored by Dave McDaniel with contributions from Jaeson Schultz Recently, we came across a malware sample that has been traversing the Internet disguised as an image of a woman. The malware sample uses several layers of obfuscation to hide its payload, including the use of steganograp…
Working Smarter with Cisco Cloud Web Security
We listen to our customers all the time, and what they have been telling us about cloud security over the past 18 months is intriguing. There was a time when IT security leaders were clearly uncomfortable about the idea of trusting remotely delivered security; discussions about cloud security would…
Minimize Threats from Non-Corporate Mobile Apps
Our customers are continuing to feel the pain of having to increasingly support off-premise mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. The critical need to rapidly onboard these devices to connect to corporate services and applications pretty clearly provides business with a competitive advantage…