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Black Hat Fireside Chat: Flexxon introduces hardened SSD drives as a last line defense

By Byron V. Acohido

Creating ever smarter security software to defend embattled company networks pretty much sums up the cybersecurity industry.

Related: The security role of semiconductors

Cutting against the grain, Flexxon, a Singapore-based supplier of NAND memory drives and storage devices, arrived at Black Hat USA 2023 calling for a distinctive hardware approach to repelling cyber attacks.

Flexxon recently introduced its X-PHY SSD drive which now comes embedded in certain laptop models from Lenovo, ASUS and HP. This innovation derives from security-hardened AI-powered memory and storage drives Flexxon supplies that go into medical equipment and industrial machinery.

I had the chance to get briefed about all of this by Flexxon’s founder and CEO Camellia Chan. For a full drill down

Black Hat Fireside Chat: The impactful role crowdsourced security intelligence must play

By Byron V. Acohido

From Kickstarter to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing has become a part of everyday life.

Sharing intel for a greater good

Now one distinctive type of crowdsourcing — ethical hacking – is positioned to become a much more impactful component of securing modern networks.

I had a terrific discussion about this at Black Hat USA 2023 with Casey Ellis, founder and CTO of Bugcrowd, a pioneer in the crowdsourced security market. Bugcrowd ushered in crowdsourced security with its launch in 2012, and today a covey of vendors have followed suit, each supplying intricate platforms to connect hackers with proven skillsets to companies that have particular needs.

“What we’ve got under the hood is effectively a dating website for people who are good at breaking into computers,” Ellis says.

Crowdsourced security vendors (others include Synack, Hacker One and Intigriti) make it seamless for companies to tap into a global network of software coders, and set them on

Black Hat Fireside Chat: How ‘enterprise browsers’ serve as a checkpoint to stop ChatGPT leakage

By Byron V. Acohido

For a couple of decades now, the web browser has endured in workplace settings as the primary employee-to-Internet interface. It’s really just assumed to be a given that a browser built for consumers is an acceptable application for employees to use to work.

Preserving privacy for a greater good

And despite advances, like sandboxing, browser isolation and secure gateways, the core architecture of web browsers has remained all-too vulnerable to malicious attacks.

There was a lot of buzz at Black Hat USA 2023 about advanced “enterprise browsers.” I visited with Uy Huynh, vice president of solutions engineering at Island.io, to discuss this. For a full drill down please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

Built on the Chromium open source code, Island’s Enterprise Browser recognizes the identity and considers the role of each user—be it an employee, contractor, or HR personnel. This granular visibility aids in rapid onboarding while also bolstering security protocols, Huynh explained.

This can serve as a “last mile” checkpoint to curtail Shadow IT; in particular,

Black Hat Fireside Chat: How to achieve API security — as AI-boosted attacks intensify

By Byron V. Acohido

API security has arisen as a cornerstone of securing massively interconnected cloud applications.

At Black Hat USA 2023, I had a great discussion about API security with Data Theorem COO Doug Dooley and Applovin CISO Jeremiah Kung. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

As a fast-rising mobile ad network going toe-to-toe with Google and Facebook, Applovin has been acquiring advanced security tools and shaping new practices to manage its API exposures. Kung described for me how Data Theorem’s API Secure is proving to be a vital weapon in Applovin’s security arsenal.

APIs have become the “lifeblood” of apps and thus a prime target for cyber criminals, Kung says. AppLovin has learned that it must mitigate API exposures from multiple angles, he told me.

Robust API security has become table stakes – for cloud-native companies like AppLovin as

Black Hat Fireside Chat: Horizon3.ai makes a strong case for continuous, self-service pentesting

By Byron V. Acohido

LAS VEGAS — Penetration testing, traditionally, gave businesses a nice, pretty picture of their network security posture — at a given point in time.

Related: Going on the security offensive

Such snapshots proved useful for building audit trails, particularly for companies in heavily regulated industries. However, manual pentests never really were very effective at shining a light on emerging cyber exposures of the moment.

Enter advanced pentesting. One of the hot topics at Black Hat USA 2023, which ramps up here this week in the desert heat, is how automation and machine learning are underpinning pentesting solutions deeply and continuously. This self-service, self-directed, continuous infrastructure pentesting approach allows organization to discover their exploitable attack surfaces and reduced their risk.

I had the chance to visit with someone in the thick of this important shift: Snehal Antani, CEO of Horizon3.ai, a San Francisco-based supplier of “autonomous” vulnerability

Black Hat Fireside Chat: Easy come, easy go access strengthens ‘Identity Threat Detection & Response’

By Byron V. Acohido

The rise of the remote workforce, post Covid-19, did nothing to make the already difficult task of doing Identity and Access Management (IAM) any easier for CISOs.

Related: Exposing Shadow IT

With Black Hat USA 2023 ramping up in Las Vegas next week, cybersecurity startup Trustle is championing a new product category—Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR)—which aims to enhance the capabilities of legacy IAM solutions.

Companies today are struggling to answer fundamental questions about their cloud environments, such as, who are my users and what can they access? How did they obtain this access? When they don’t need this access, do their identities still exist? Questions like these are a driving force behind the adoption of ITDR, which is becoming a crucial component in the realm of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and access management.

I had the chance to sit down with Trustle CEO Emiliano Berenbaum to learn just how ITDR can help companies much more efficiently manage user identities and access privileges, while also strengthening

Black Hat Fireside Chat: Taking the fight to the adversaries — with continuous, proactive ‘pen tests’

By Byron V. Acohido

Penetration testing – pen tests – traditionally have been something companies might do once or twice a year.

Related: Cyber espionage is on the rise

Bad news is always anticipated. That’s the whole point. The pen tester’s assignment is to seek out and exploit egregious, latent vulnerabilities – before the bad guys — thereby affording the organization a chance to shore up its network defenses.

Pen testing has limitations, of course. The probes typically take considerable effort to coordinate and often can be more disruptive than planned.

These shortcomings have been exacerbated by digital transformation, which has vastly expanded the network attack surface.

Guest expert: Snehal Antani, CEO, Horizon3.ai

I had the chance at Black Hat 2022 to visit with Snehal Antani and Monti Knode, CEO and director of customer success, respectively, at Horizon3.ai, a San Francisco-based startup, which launched in 2020. Horizon3 supplies “autonomous” vulnerability assessment technology.

Co-founder Antani previously served as the first CTO for the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)  and Knode was a commander in the U.S. Air Force 67th Cyberspace Operations Group. They argue that U.S. businesses need to take a wartime approach the cybersecurity. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

Horizon3’s flagship service, NodeZero, is designed to continuously assess an organization’s network attack surface to identify specific scenarios by which an attacker might combine stolen credentials with misconfigurations or software flaws to gain a foothold.