The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (Executive Order) sets out an ambitious plan for enhancing federal agency and supply chain security. Covering everything from cloud-first initiatives to zero trust architecture, the Executive Order covers many topics. It will likely have a wider reach than just Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies. For security operations center (SOC) teams, Section 6, “Standardizing the Federal Government’s Playbook for Responding to Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities and Incidents,” has the most significant impact on their day-to-day activities. 

We’re all seeing the market buzz

Extended Detection and Response(XDR) is getting a lot of attention these days. Given two, leading endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendors, SentinelOne and Crowdstrike, recently announced acquisitions of Scaylr and Humio, respectively, it seems more vendors are making the daily pivot to enter the XDR market.

Today we are ecstatic to share that we have been recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in Security Operations! [1] 

We, cybersecurity professionals, need to understand what happened in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. Though internal details are not public, based upon what little we know from the media, let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of the cybersecurity professionals who had to respond to this attack.

The term threat hunting spawns different ideas and has different meanings for seemingly everyone you talk to. Understanding what threat hunting is will help you better equip your security teams to respond to alerts and mitigate risk. But is it basic triage of known indicators of compromise (IOC) in a proactive manner or some magical Jedi skill that only masters can summon and execute?

Threat investigations are one of the most important tasks security analysts face today. To quantify the importance and complexity here are a couple of statistics from a recent IBM “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020.”  According to the report, the average time to detect and contain a data breach caused by a malicious actor was 315 days. That's a long time. Additionally, we’ve all heard the saying that “time is money” well how about this? “Organizations that are able to contain a data breach in less than 200 days saved an average of $1.12 million compared to organizations that took more than 200 days to contain a breach,” that is pretty compelling.  

Creating an incident response program and team is the core of any strong cybersecurity program. According to one 2020 report, 7 million data records are compromised every day. With a better understanding of incident response, you can mature your security posture to reduce data breach risks.

An introduction of the supply chain attack caused in the Orion update protocol of the Solarwinds network management software suite of 2020.

Introduction

You might have read several of our other network security blogs covering topics that people in  the cybersecurity field need to know. Now is an excellent time to talk about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

In our journey to be security practitioners, we must understand basic network-based techniques from both attackers and defender perspectives. Continuing on that track, let’s talk more about network scanning and its tools and techniques today.