Attacks on businesses of all sizes occur in essentially the same way. But they succeed much more often on smaller companies than on larger ones.
Information Week Analytics refers to small businesses as “filet mignon” for hackers and malware; it says the primary threat is external penetration into the business’s network.
Small businesses often rely on cheap, consumer-class technology, even at the external network interface—the router. Cheap routers jeopardize security, operational efficiency, and employee productivity. Their cost structure simply precludes business-class performance and security.
I don’t know about you , but I want to be well prepared for the March 30th Cisco announcement
Listening to Cisco SVP Bill Brownell’s invitation, we can definitely expect some very interesting product news, but more importantly a new round of conversations about the right fabric-infrastructure, especially in the context of cloud computing.
That’s why we will have special guests such as John McCool, Soni Jiandani and Tim Gillis in addition of Forrester Research and IDC (see my previous blog)
So as I was willing to be well prepared, I found this interesting blog from Ivan about data center fabric architecture , which obviously grabbed also the attention of some of our smart engineers
Today many organizations find themselves addressing concerns over their proprietary information being stolen and their systems being compromised. Some may view this as a single problem since, in most cases, system compromise is an overture to information theft. The most common ways in which computers are compromised include visiting a web site with malicious content, opening a harmful file — malicious or otherwise — attached to an e-mail message, running a program of dubious provenance and clicking the “yes” button on every message that pops up on the screen. Organizations are fighting back by installing virus scanners, blocking known malicious web sites, filtering incoming e-mail and locking down (aka “hardening”) operating systems as much as possible. But let us take a step back and think about this whole situation again.
Cryptography has been, and continues to be, the most important and ubiquitous aspect of security services (firewall, secure access, VPN, authentication). There is a vast number of cryptographic algorithms and techniques that provide information security features that are used in different protocols and functions. It is important to be able to understand the challenges, attacks, and concerns of cryptographic algorithms in order to be able to use them efficiently. Just as important is the ability to follow the latest developments in the field so that we can be “as secure as possible.” This post is trying to present the latest transformations in the cryptography field to raise awareness on what the status quo is on recommended algorithms and key sizes.
For corporations, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a widely publicized yet little understood topic. Does it exist? Is it a real threat? How can an organization tell if it is impacted?
The Cisco Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) is a global team of information security professionals responsible for the 24/7 monitoring, investigation and response to cyber security incidents for Cisco-owned businesses. CSIRT engages in proactive threat assessment, mitigation planning, incident detection and response, incident trending with analysis, and the development of security architecture. This article will provide the Cisco CSIRT team’s perspective on APT, and is the fifth in a series of blog posts on related issues from CSIRT’s point of view. As with the other posts, provided here are some real-world examples and techniques that will hopefully help organizations utilize existing tools and processes, or even understand gaps in security infrastructure. Read on to find out more.
