Security

Networkworld

5 best practices for making smart-building LANs more secure

Power, they say, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. While that was said about politics, it sure seems like it was tailor-made for smart buildings.Facility-control technology is exploding because the concept is useful and often saves money. Unfortunately, smart devices have also proven to be an on-ramp for major intrusions. Smart buildings are surely absolutely powerful in a way; are they absolutely corruptible? Maybe, if we’re not very careful.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
If corruption means overall bad-ness, then hacking a smart building surely qualifies. It could let intruders mess with lights, heating and air conditioning, and maybe other critical systems, too. We also know from news stories that a hacker could use a successful smart building intrusion to sneak into other business applications, potentially compromising them and  critical company information. It’s important to address these risks, and that means starting with how they arise.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

Log4j hearing: ‘Open source is not the problem’

The high-tech community is still trying to figure out the long-term impact of the serious vulnerability found late last year in the open-source Apache Log4j software, and so is the US Senate.“Open source is not the problem,” stated Dr. Trey Herr, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative with Atlantic Council think tank during a US Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Government Affairs hearing this week. “Software supply-chain security issues have bedeviled the cyber-policy community for years.”Experts have been predicting a long-term struggle to remedy the Log4j flaw and its impact. Security researchers at Cisco Talos for example stated that Log4j will be widely exploited moving forward, and users should patch affected products and implement mitigation solutions as soon as possible.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

Major security vulnerability found in top servers

Security firm Binarly has discovered more than 20 vulnerabilities hiding in BIOS/UEFI software from a wide range of system vendors, including Intel, Microsoft, Lenovo, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, HPE, Siemens, and Bull Atos.Binarly found the issues were associated with the use of InsydeH20, a framework code used to build motherboard unified extensible firmware interfaces (UEFI), the interface between a computer’s operating system and firmware.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
All of the aforementioned vendors used Insyde’s firmware SDK for motherboard development. It is expected that similar types of vulnerabilities exist in other in-house and third-party BIOS-vendor products as well.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

Zero Trust is hard but worth it

At the end of last year, I heard from a long-time enterprise contact that had a major security concern. The company had installed three layers of security and just completed an audit. It showed that since thIey’d finished their installation they’d had five security incidents, and all of them had originated inside their security perimeter, bypassing most of their protection.Their question was what they did wrong and how they could fix it.What this company experienced is far from rare, and the source of their problems and the paths to correction are far from easy.We tend to think of security as a goal we can achieve with a simple toolkit. Not so. Security is the state you achieve by dealing with all likely threats, and every threat has to be addressed in its own unique way. Problems can come from hackers gaining access to an application or database from the outside, through things like stealing credentials or exploiting weak authentication.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

How to buy enterprise firewalls

Enterprise firewalls have been the quintessential security device for decades, standing guard at the perimeter, inspecting all inbound and outbound traffic for malware. So, what happens to firewalls as the perimeter fades away? They evolve.Today’s firewalls are an essential piece of the enterprise security puzzle. They’ve become the foundational device upon which security vendors have stacked all of their advanced features. Cloud-based, next-generation firewalls (firewall-as-a-service) are a core component of any secure access service edge (SASE) deployment. VPN remote access for work-at-home employees typically terminates at a firewall. And firewalls play a key role in zero-trust network access (ZTNA), serving as the device that enforces access control policies and network segmentation rules.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

How to shop for firewalls

Enterprise firewalls have been the quintessential security device for decades, standing guard at the perimeter, inspecting all inbound and outbound traffic for malware. So, what happens to firewalls as the perimeter fades away? They evolve.Today’s firewalls are an essential piece of the enterprise security puzzle. They’ve become the foundational device upon which security vendors have stacked all of their advanced features. Cloud-based, next-generation firewalls (firewall-as-a-service) are a core component of any secure access service edge (SASE) deployment. VPN remote access for work-at-home employees typically terminates at a firewall. And firewalls play a key role in zero-trust network access (ZTNA), serving as the device that enforces access control policies and network segmentation rules.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

Log4j flaw needs immediate remediation

After nearly two years of adopting major network and security changes wrought by COVID-19 and hybrid work, weary IT network and security teams didn’t need another big issue to take care of, but they have one: Stemming potential damage from the recently disclosed vulnerability in open source Java-logging Apache Log4j software.  Log4j or Log4Shell has been around a long time—it was released in January, 2001—and is widely used in all manner of enterprise and consumer services, websites, and applications. Experts describe the system as an easy-to-use common utility to support client/server application development.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

Palo Alto software advances end-to-end enterprise cloud security

Palo Alto Networks has bolstered its security software to better protect  enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.The company rolled out a new version of its core cloud-security package, Prisma Cloud 3.0, which includes the ability to code security directly into SaaS applications. The package includes a cloud-access security broker (CASB) to control access to cloud resources.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Prisma is a cloud-based security bundle that includes access control, advanced threat protection, user-behavior monitoring, and other services that promise to protect enterprise applications and resources. Managed through a single console, Prisma includes firewall as a service, Zero Trust network access and a secure web gateway. To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

3 steps to improve collaboration between networking and security pros

(Enterprise Management Associates finds that enterprises are trying to improve collaboration between their network-infrastructure and operations teams and their information-security and cybersecurity teams. This article discusses challenges faced by these teams based on a survey of 366 IT and security professionals detailed in the report “NetSecOps: Aligning Networking and Security Teams to Ensure Digital Transformation”, by EMA Vice President of Research Networking Shamus McGillicuddy.)To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Networkworld

3 steps to better collaboration between networking and security pros

(Enterprise Management Associates finds that enterprises are trying to improve collaboration between their network-infrastructure and operations teams and their information-security and cybersecurity teams. This article discusses challenges faced by these teams based on a survey of 366 IT and security professionals detailed in the report “NetSecOps: Aligning Networking and Security Teams to Ensure Digital Transformation”, by EMA Vice President of Research Networking Shamus McGillicuddy.)To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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