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RSAC Fireside Chat: Fusing ‘TIP’ and ‘SOAR’ to defend hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud networks

By Byron V. Acohido

When Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) first arrived a decade or so ago, they were heralded as breakthrough advances.

Related: Equipping SOCs for the long haul

TIP and SOAR may yet live up to that promise. I had an evocative discussion about this at RSA Conference 2023 with Willy Leichter, vice president of marketing, and Neal Dennis, threat intelligence specialist, at Cyware, which supplies a cyber fusion solution built around advanced TIP and SOAR services. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

TIP and SOAR may have been slightly ahead of the curve; today, they argued, TIP and SOAR align perfectly

RSAC Fireside Chat: A breakthrough in securing cloud collaboration — decentralized key storage

By Byron V. Acohido

Back in 2002, when I was a reporter at USA Today, I had to reach for a keychain fob to retrieve a single-use passcode to connect remotely to the paper’s publishing system.

Related: A call to regulate facial recognition

This was an early example of multifactor authentication (MFA). Fast forward to today; much of the MFA concept is being reimagined by startup Circle Security to protect data circulating in cloud collaboration scenarios.

I learned about this at RSA Conference 2023 from company Co-founder and CEO Phani Nagarjuna, who explained how Circle extends the use of encryption keys fused to biometrics and decentralizes where copies of

RSAC Fireside Chat: Dealing with the return of computing workloads to on-premises datacenters

By Byron V. Acohido

A cloud migration backlash, of sorts, is playing out.

Related: Guidance for adding ZTNA to cloud platforms

Many companies, indeed, are shifting to cloud-hosted IT infrastructure, and beyond that, to containerization and serverless architectures.

However, a “back-migration,” as Michiel De Lepper, global enablement manager, at London-based Runecast, puts it, is also ramping up. This is because certain workloads are proving to be too costly to run in the cloud — resource-intensive AI modeling being the prime example.

I had an evocative discussion about this with De Lepper and his colleague, Markus Strauss, Runecast product leader, at RSA Conference 2023. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. The duo outlined how

RSAC Fireside Chat: Reinforcing ‘Identity and Access Management’ to expose ‘shadow access’

By Byron V. Acohido

The world of Identity and Access Management (IAM) is rapidly evolving.

Related: Stopping IAM threats

IAM began 25 years ago as a method to systematically grant human users access to company IT assets. Today, a “user” most often is a snippet of code seeking access at the cloud edge.

At the RSAC Conference 2023, I sat down with Venkat Raghavan, founder and CEO of start-up Stack Identity. As Raghavan explained, the rapid growth of data and subsequent application development in the cloud has led to a sprawling array of identities and access points. This, he warned, has created a new problem: shadow access.

Shadow access refers to ungoverned and unauthorized access that arises due to

RSAC Fireside Chat: Uptycs emulates Google, Akamai to protect cloud-native apps and endpoints

By Byron V. Acohido

The inadequacy of siloed security solutions is well-documented.

Related: Taking a security-first path

The good news is that next-gen security platforms designed to unify on-prem and cloud threat detection and remediation are, indeed, coalescing.

At RSA Conference 2023 I visited with Elias Terman, CMO, and Sudarsan Kannan, Director of Product Management, from Uptycs, a Walthan, Mass.-based supplier of “unified CNAPP and EDR ” services.

They described how Uptycs is borrowing proven methodologies from Google, Akamai, SAP and Salesforce to harness normalized telemetry that enables Uptycs to correlate threat activity — wherever it is unfolding. Please give a listen to the accompanying podcast

RSAC Fireside Chat: The need to stop mobile apps from exposing API keys, user credentials in runtime

By Byron V. Acohido

As digital transformation accelerates, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have become integral to software development – especially when it comes to adding cool new functionalities to our go-to mobile apps.

Related: Collateral damage of T-Mobile hack

Yet, APIs have also exponentially increased the attack vectors available to malicious hackers – and the software community has not focused on slowing the widening of this security gap.

Mobile apps work by hooking into dozens of different APIs, and each connection presents a vector for bad actors to get their hands on “API secrets,” i.e. backend data to encryption keys, digital certificates and user credentials that enable them to gain unauthorized control.

I learned this from Ted Miracco, CEO of Approov, in a discussion we had

RSAC Fireside Chat: Counteracting Putin’s weaponizing of ransomware — with containment

By Byron V. Acohido

The ransomware plague endures — and has arisen as a potent weapon in geopolitical conflicts.

Related: The Golden Age of cyber espionage

Cyber extortion remains a material threat to organizations of all sizes across all industries. Ransomware purveyors have demonstrated their capability to endlessly take advantage of a vastly expanded network attack surface – one that will only continue to expand as the shift to massively interconnected digital services accelerates.

Meanwhile, Russia has turned to weaponing ransomware in its attempt to conquer Ukraine, redoubling this threat. Now that RSA Conference 2023 has wrapped, these things seem clear: ransomware is here to stay; it is not, at this moment, being adequately mitigated; and a new approach is needed to slow, and effectively put a stop to, ransomware.

I had the chance to visit with Steve Hahn, EVP Americas, at Bullwall, which is in the vanguard of security vendors advancing ways to instantly contain threat actors who manage to slip inside an organization’s network.

Guest expert: Steve Hahn, EVP Americas, Bullwall

Bullwall has a bird’s eye view of Russia’s ongoing deployment of ransomware attacks against Ukraine, and its allies, especially the U.S.

Weaponized ransomware doubly benefits Russia: it’s lucrative, generating  billions in revenue and thus adding to Putin’s war chest; and at the same time it also weakens a wide breadth of infrastructure of Putin’s adversaries across Europe and North America.

Containment is a logical tactic that could make a big difference in stopping ransomware and other types of attacks. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)