For technologists

GUEST ESSAY: Has shielding and blocking electromagnetic energy become the new normal?

By Nikoline Arns

Surrounded by the invisible hum of electromagnetic energy, we’ve harnessed its power to fuel our technological marvels for decades.

Tesla’s visionary insights from 1900 hinted at the potential, and today, we bask in the glow of interconnected networks supporting our digital lives. Yet, as we embrace this wave of connectivity, we often overlook the pressing need for protection.

Since 1984, when Japan’s pioneering 1G network blanketed the nation, we’ve been swept up in the excitement of progress. But let’s pause and consider—how often do we truly contemplate safeguarding ourselves from the very forces that fuel our interconnected world?

Link to identities

Over the past decade, mobile data traffic has surged an astonishing 4,000-fold, while an additional 400 million users have joined the digital realm over the past 15 years. As we venture into the era of 5G and witness the rise of private networks, the surge of electromagnetic charge is

ROUNDTABLE: CISA’s prominent role sharing threat intel could get choked off this weekend

By Byron V. Acohido

Once again, politicians are playing political football, threatening a fourth partial government shutdown in a decade.

Related: Biden’s cybersecurity strategy

As this political theater runs its course one of the many things at risk is national security, particularly on the cyber warfare front.

Given the divergent paths of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of representatives, federal agencies could see funding largely choked off on Sunday, resulting in the furloughing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

A wide range of federal government services, once more, would slow to a crawl — everything from economic data releases to nutrition benefits for poor children. And the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) may be forced to send home some 80 percent of its workforce, drastically shrinking its capabilities as a catalyst for public-private sharing of fresh

Byron Acohido · The inevitable rise of robust API security

Black Hat Fireside Chat: In a hyper-connected world, effectively securing APIs is paramount

By Byron V. Acohido

APIs. The glue of hyper connectivity; yet also the wellspring of risk.

Related: The true scale of API breaches

I had an enlightening discussion at Black Hat USA 2023 with Traceable.ai Chief Security Officer Richard Bird about how these snippets of code have dramatically expanded the attack surface in ways that have largely been overlooked.

Please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Traceable supplies systems that treat APIs as delicate assets requiring robust protection. At the moment, Bird argues, that’s not how most companies view them.

All too many organizations, he told me, have no clue about how many APIs they have, where they reside and what they do. A good percentage of APIs, he says, lie dormant – low hanging fruit for hackers who are expert at

Breaking News Q&A: What Cisco’s $28 billion buyout of Splunk foretells about cybersecurity

By Byron V. Acohido

There’s a tiny bit more to Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk than just a lumbering hardware giant striving to secure a firmer foothold in the software business.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins has laid down a $28 billion bet that he’ll be able to overcome challenges Cisco is facing as its networking equipment business slows, beset by supply chain issues and reduced demand, post Covid 19.

As a leading supplier of advanced security information and event management (SIEM) technology, Splunk happens to find itself in the thick of a tectonic shift. Network security is getting reconstituted. A new tier of overlapping, interoperable, highly automated security platforms is rapidly taking shape. In this milieu, SIEM systems have emerged as the telemetry ingestion engine, of choice, to help companies figure out how to effectively monitor — and securely manage — hyper-connected software.

Last Watchdog engaged Forrester Principal Analyst Allie Mellen in a discussion about the cybersecurity angle

GUEST ESSAY: Caring criminals — why some ransomware gangs now avoid targeting hospitals

By Zac Amos

Ransomware is a significant threat to businesses worldwide. There are many gangs that work together to orchestrate increasingly damaging attacks. However, some of these groups follow codes of conduct that prevent them from purposefully targeting hospitals.

In mid-March 2020, representatives from the cybersecurity website BleepingComputer contacted numerous ransomware gangs to ask if they’d continue targeting hospitals during the unprecedented COVID-19 public health threat.

Many responded by saying they already avoid hospitals and emergency services infrastructure. Others promised to cease attacking health care facilities until the pandemic eased.

An April 2020 study from VMware Carbon Black revealed a 148% ransomware increase between March and April 2020. However, it’s worth noting that health care was the seventh-most targeted industry during that time, when it was

Byron Acohido · Flexxon's X-PHY drive now available in laptops

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.

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

GUEST ESSAY: The timing is ripe to instill trust in the open Internet — and why this must get done

By Hannah Aubry

In today’s digital age, trust has become a cornerstone of building a better Internet.

Preserving privacy for a greater good

The Internet was designed as a platform for peer research, not for the vast scale and diverse uses we see today. Over the decades, it’s grown in a way that has left it with many inherent vulnerabilities.

These vulnerabilities, not borne out of malice, were the result of choices made with limited information available at the time.

Fastly addresses these technological vulnerabilities by utilizing tools like Rust and WebAssembly. Leveraging WebAssembly’s sandboxing capabilities allows us to isolate potential risks, while Rust provides the memory safety essential for our modern internet applications.

Taming the human side

But the challenges facing the internet don’t just lie in its technical foundations. The societal aspects of technology, the human side, have grown equally unruly.

The trust deficit we experience today is palpable. People are wary of technology and its creators. Our major platforms, tools integral to modern life, are now used as vehicles for misinformation and chaos. A disconnect exists between those

Older Articles »

The Last Watchdog

For technologists

GUEST ESSAY: Has shielding and blocking electromagnetic energy become the new normal?

By Nikoline Arns

ROUNDTABLE: CISA’s prominent role sharing threat intel could get choked off this weekend

By Byron V. Acohido

Black Hat Fireside Chat: In a hyper-connected world, effectively securing APIs is paramount

By Byron V. Acohido

Breaking News Q&A: What Cisco’s $28 billion buyout of Splunk foretells about cybersecurity

By Byron V. Acohido

GUEST ESSAY: Caring criminals — why some ransomware gangs now avoid targeting hospitals

By Zac Amos

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

By Byron V. Acohido

GUEST ESSAY: The timing is ripe to instill trust in the open Internet — and why this must get done

By Hannah Aubry