Cisco’s network is a massively complex environment that requires extensive monitoring and remediation. In today’s world of advanced threats and attacks, the company that possesses and positions its tools to preemptively identify and mitigate threats is the one left standing when the dust settles.

Cisco leverages its Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), a global organization comprised of information security professionals, to monitor, investigate, and respond to cyber security incidents 24×7. The Cisco CSIRT team forms part of the investigative branch of Cisco’s Information Security organization, protecting Cisco from security threats and the loss of its intellectual assets.

With a variety of security tools, CSIRT is able to detect and analyze malicious traffic throughout the network, including virus propagation, targeted attacks, and commonplace exploits. Because CSIRT continually identifies new security threats, the team needs some historical look-back at what occurred on the network. They also need a solution that can dissect the finer details of security incidents while facing the ever-present restrictions with data storage. StealthWatch, a NetFlow monitoring solution from Cisco partner Lancope, contains unique storage, interactivity, and parsing capabilities, to provide a more concise set of data for analysis.

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Tags: CSIRT, cybersercurity, incident response, Lancope

A few months ago we discussed the various ways that consumer PII is compromised. The recent attacks against Target and Neiman Marcus illustrate the constant threat that payment card accepting retailers of all sizes face. Yesterday Reuters reported that similar breaches over the holidays affected “at least three other well-known U.S. retailers”. Given the current onslaught, it’s a good time for retailers to examine their detection capabilities before a payment card data attack, while creating new goals for shortening remediation windows during and after an attack.

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Tags: Alina, Breach, Card, data, detection, Dexter, encryption, hardware, Lancope, malware, NSM, Payment, PII, POS, remediation, terminal, TRAC, Trackr

Most recently ESG/Vormetric came out with a threat report that highlighted the increase in insider threats & the significance to augment perimeter and host-based security. The rationale behind the increase was that more people are accessing the network, increase cloud and network traffic are making it difficult to isolate the problem.

Almost 50% of the organizations believe they are vulnerable to insider attacks and have or plan to invest dollars.

This is alarming!

The top methods noted for these insider threat vulnerabilities were abuse of access by privileged users, contractors, and other employees. Security professionals are finding it quite difficult to monitor the users, traffic, ports, etc to identify and mitigate insider threats. They must glean this information from multiple sources and many times need to translate the data. For example, “whose IP address is this and why is Mary from finance, who is supposed to be on vacation, downloading data from the payroll server?” This process slows the resolution time. The criticality of this type of contextual information is enormous to remediate quickly.

Security needs to be pervasive and consistent to manage these inside threats—so how does one do this? Integrate security into your infrastructure (wireless, wired, VPN)! Once security is woven into your infrastructure it provides the visibility and clarity to respond in a timely manner with a high degree of efficacy and is not dependent on distinct and isolated ingress points.

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Tags: insider threats, Lancope, network traffic, secure access, security, SIEM, vulnerabilities, webinar