Steps forward

MY TAKE: Surfshark boosts ‘DIY security’ with its rollout of VPN-supplied antivirus protection

By Byron V. Acohido

Surfshark wants to help individual citizens take very direct control of their online privacy and security.

Thus, Surfshark has just become the first VPN provider to launch an antivirus solution as part of its all-in-one security bundle Surfshark One.

This development is part and parcel of rising the trend of VPN providers hustling to deliver innovative “DIY security” services into the hands of individual consumers.

It’s notable that this is happening at a time when Microsoft, Apple and Google are going the opposite direction – by natively embedding more consumer-grade security services into their popular operating systems, like Windows, Mac, IoS and Android. And let’s not forget the longstanding, multi-billion market of antivirus software subscriptions directed at consumers.

The consumer anti-virus vendors have been generating massive subscription revenue for two decades; though this market is mature and in a consolidation phase, it is not going to disappear anytime soon, as suggested by NortonLifeLock’s $8 billion buyout of Avast.

Last year I agreed to serve a one-year term on Surfshark’s advisory board. I accepted because I appreciated Surfshark’s emphasis on privacy and security — and saw it as a way to learn more about the consumer cybersecurity market.

GUEST ESSAY: The Top 5 myths about SIEM –‘security information and event management’

By Allie Mellen

One of the most commonly repeated phrases in the security industry is, “Security teams hate their SIEM!”

Related: The unfolding SIEM renaissance

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is not what it was 20 years ago. Don’t get me wrong, SIEMs do take work through deployment, maintenance, and tuning. They also require strategic planning. Yet, much to the chagrin of everyone who believed the vendor hype, they fail to provide the “single pane of glass” for all tasks in security operations promised so long ago.

With all that said, there are some aspects of the SIEM that have improved significantly over the past 20 years, despite a barrage of security marketing suggesting otherwise.

Further, there are innovations happening in the market today to bring forth a new era for the SIEM. This evolution is more aptly named security analytics platforms, which not only handle log ingestion and storage, but also more effectively address the detection and response use cases SOCs need.

Security analytics platforms combine SIEM, SOAR, and UEBA to cover the complete incident response lifecycle from detection, investigation, and response, in conjunction with other important use cases like compliance.

MY TAKE: What NortonLifeLock’s $8 billion buyout of Avast portends for consumer security

By Byron V. Acohido

So NortonLifeLock has acquired Avast for more than $8 billion.

This deal reads like to the epilogue to a book titled The First 20 Years of the Supremely Lucrative Antivirus Market. Way back in 1990, Symantec acquired Norton Utilities and made Norton the heart of its antivirus subscription offering.

This was around the same time antivirus vendors like Trend Micro, McAfee, Kaspersky, ESET, Sophos, Bitdefender, Avira, AVG and Avast were staking out turf in what they saw, very accurately, as a profitable new software subscription market.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. Norton got ‘demergered’ from Symantec in 2014 and then acquired LifeLock for $2.3 billion in 2017; Avast acquired AVG for $1.3 billion in 2016, for instance.

Meanwhile, native security is increasingly being built into popular operating systems, and there’s a trend toward beefing up application security, as well. These are eminently complex times. Companies are migrating to the cloud IT; consumers are working from home much more often.

NortonLifeLock and Avast appear to be betting on the next iteration of the huge and longstanding consumer antivirus market. Last Watchdog asked Forrester analyst Allie Mellen to connect the dots –- and clarify the significance — for individual consumers:

Author Q&A: In modern cyberwarfare ‘information security’ is one in the same with ‘national security’

By Byron V. Acohido

What exactly constitutes cyberwarfare?

The answer is not easy to pin down. On one hand, one could argue that cyber criminals are waging an increasingly debilitating economic war on consumers and businesses in the form of account hijacking, fraud, and extortion. Meanwhile, nation-states — the superpowers and second-tier nations alike — are hotly pursuing strategic advantage by stealing intellectual property, hacking into industrial controls, and dispersing political propaganda at an unheard-of scale.

Now comes a book by John Arquilla, titled Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare, that lays out who’s doing what, and why, in terms of malicious use of digital resources connected over the Internet. Arquilla is a distinguished professor of defense analysis at the United States Naval Postgraduate School. He coined the term ‘cyberwar,’ along with David Ronfeldt, over 20 years ago and is a leading expert on the threats posed by cyber technologies to national security.

Bitskrieg gives substance to, and connects the dots between, a couple of assertions that have become axiomatic:

•Military might no longer has primacy. It used to be the biggest, loudest weapons prevailed and prosperous nations waged military campaigns to achieve physically measurable gains. Today, tactical cyber strikes can come from a variety of operatives – and they may have mixed motives, only one of which happens to be helping a nation-state achieve a geo-political objective.

•Information is weaponizable. This is truer today than ever before. Arquilla references nuanced milestones from World War II to make this point – and get you thinking. For instance, he points out how John Steinbeck used a work of fiction to help stir the resistance movement across Europe.

Steinbeck’s imaginative novel, The Moon is Down, evocatively portrayed how ordinary Norwegians took extraordinary measures to disrupt Nazi occupation. This reference got me thinking about how Donald Trump used social media to stir the Jan. 6 insurrection in … more

Byron Acohido · The coming impact of SBOM: software bill of materials

Black Hat insights: How to shift security-by-design to the right, instead of left, with SBOM, deep audits

By Byron V. Acohido

There is a well-established business practice referred to as bill of materials, or BOM, that is a big reason why we can trust that a can of soup isn’t toxic or that the jetliner we’re about to board won’t fail catastrophically

A bill of materials is a complete list of the components used to manufacture a product. The software industry has something called SBOM: software bill of materials. However, SBOMs are rudimentary when compared to the BOMs associated with manufacturing just about everything else we expect to be safe and secure: food, buildings, medical equipment, medicines and transportation vehicles.

An effort to bring SBOMs up to par is gaining steam and getting a lot of attention at Black Hat USA 2021 this week in Las Vegas. President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order, issued in May, includes a detailed SBOM requirement for all software delivered to the federal government.

ReversingLabs, a Cambridge, MA-based software vendor that helps companies conduct deep analysis of new apps just before they go out the door, is in the thick of this development. I had the chance to visit with its co-founder and chief software architect Tomislav Pericin. For a full drill down on our discussion please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are the big takeaways:

Gordian Knot challenge

The software industry is fully cognizant of the core value of a bill of materials and has been striving for a number of years to adapt it to software development.

Byron Acohido · Advanced tactics needed to reduce email attacks

Black Hat insights: Deploying ‘human sensors’ to reinforce phishing email detection and response

By Byron V. Acohido

Human beings remain the prime target in the vast majority of malicious attempts to breach company networks.

Cybersecurity awareness training is valuable and has its place. Yet as Black Hat USA 2021 returns today as a live event in Las Vegas, it remains so true that we can always be fooled — and that the prime vehicle for hornswoggling us remains phishing messages sent via business email.

Cofense, a Leesburg, VA-supplier of phishing detection and response solutions, has set out to take another human trait – our innate willingness to help out, if we can — and systematically leverage our better instincts to help fix this while combining advanced automation technology to stop phishing attacks fast.

I had a lively discussion about this with Rohyt Belani, co-founder and CEO of Cofense, which started out as PhishMe in 2011.

Inspired by Homeland Security’s see-something-say-something anti-terrorism initiative, as well as by crowd-sourcing services like Waze, Cofense has set out to squash those phishing messages that circumvent Security Email Gateways and fool even well-intentioned employees. It is doing this essentially by training and encouraging employees, not just to be on high alert for phishing ruses, but also to deliver useful reconnaissance from the combat zone.

Byron Acohido · Retooling SOAR to automate security -- going forward

Black Hat insights: The retooling of SOAR to fit as the automation core protecting evolving networks

By Byron V. Acohido

In less than a decade, SOAR — security orchestration, automation and response — has rapidly matured into an engrained component of the security technology stack in many enterprises.

SOAR has done much since it entered the cybersecurity lexicon to relieve the cybersecurity skills shortage. SOAR leverages automation and machine learning to correlate telemetry flooding in from multiple security systems. This dramatically reduces the manual labor required to do a first-level sifting of the data inundating modern business networks

However, SOAR has potential to do so much more, observes Cody Cornell, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Swimlane. SOAR, he argues, is in a position to arise as a tool that can help companies make the pivot to high-reliance on cloud-centric IT infrastructure. At the moment, a lot of organizations are in this boat.

“Covid 19 turned out to be the best digital transformation initiative ever,” Cornell says. “It forced us to do things that probably would’ve taken many more years for us to do, in terms of adopting to remote work and transitioning to cloud services.”

Swimlane, which launched in 2014 and is based in Denver, finds itself in the vanguard of cybersecurity vendors hustling to retool not just SOAR, but also security operations centers (SOCs,) security information and event management (SIEM) systems, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools. A core theme at RSA 2021 earlier this year – and at Black Hat USA 2021, taking place this week in Las Vegas – is that the combining of these and other security systems is inevitable and will end up resulting in something greater than the parts, i.e. not just more efficacious security, but optimized business networks overall.

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The Last Watchdog

Steps forward

MY TAKE: Surfshark boosts ‘DIY security’ with its rollout of VPN-supplied antivirus protection

By Byron V. Acohido

GUEST ESSAY: The Top 5 myths about SIEM –‘security information and event management’

By Allie Mellen

MY TAKE: What NortonLifeLock’s $8 billion buyout of Avast portends for consumer security

By Byron V. Acohido

Author Q&A: In modern cyberwarfare ‘information security’ is one in the same with ‘national security’

By Byron V. Acohido

Black Hat insights: How to shift security-by-design to the right, instead of left, with SBOM, deep audits

By Byron V. Acohido

Black Hat insights: Deploying ‘human sensors’ to reinforce phishing email detection and response

By Byron V. Acohido

Black Hat insights: The retooling of SOAR to fit as the automation core protecting evolving networks

By Byron V. Acohido