Federal Report: US Facing “Catastrophic” Cyber-Attack

The US is facing a “catastrophic cyber-attack” which could create lasting damage exceeding that of the many serious fires, floods and hurricanes the country has had to endure, according to a new analysis from a federal commission. The US Cyberspace Solarium Commission claimed in its report that the country faces multiple threats from cyber-criminals and nation states: IP theft that hinders long-term growth, critical infrastructure attacks, cybercrime and ransomware, espionage for geopolitical advantage and attacks designed to undermined democratic institutions.
“The digital connectivity that has brought economic growth, technological dominance and an improved quality of life to nearly every American has also created a strategic dilemma. The more digital connections people make and data they exchange, the more opportunities adversaries have to destroy private lives, disrupt critical infrastructure and damage our economic and democratic institutions,” the report noted.

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Cloud Security

Cisco Secure Application to Provide Business Risk Observability

Cisco | September 15, 2023

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Network Threat Detection

Juniper Networks Unveils the Industry’s First Distributed Security Services Architecture for Unmatched Scalability and Operational Simplicity

Business Wire | October 20, 2023

Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), the leader in secure, AI-driven networks, today announced the expansion of its Connected Security portfolio with new products and capabilities that empower organizations to seamlessly extend security services and Zero Trust policies across distributed data center environments. The new Juniper Connected Security Distributed Services Architecture uniquely integrates Juniper’s unified security management paradigm with best-in-class routing and AI-Predictive Threat Prevention to bring much-needed operational simplicity and scale to data center security. In addition, four new high-performance firewall platforms deliver unmatched performance in a compact footprint that minimizes cost, space and power consumption. With the adoption of edge computing, multicloud, 5G and IoT, business data is increasingly distributed across geographically dispersed locations, making it harder to secure and manage. To adapt to this changing environment, organizations need a new modern data center architecture that delivers reliability through automated data center operations, scalable performance to support the most stringent workloads (e.g., AI model training) and comprehensive data security, regardless of where the data resides. The newest enhancements to Juniper’s Connected Security portfolio provide a secure bridge for customers to facilitate their transition to a modern data center, at their own pace. This is achieved via the following unique innovations: Juniper’s Connected Security Distributed Services Architecture: Juniper is the first in the industry to deliver an architecture design that fully decouples the forwarding and security services layers that have traditionally been combined in a single firewall appliance. By decoupling these layers, customers can utilize their existing Juniper MX series routers as an intelligent forwarding engine and load balancer. This unique design gives customers independent scaling flexibility without chassis limitations, multi-path resiliency and cost efficiency. When coupled with Juniper Security Director Cloud, the operational experience is as simple as managing one logical element, regardless of the quantities and form factors of any additional firewall engines added to the architecture. AI-Predictive Threat Prevention: Building on Juniper’s Adaptive Threat Profiling and Encrypted Traffic Insights, AI-Predictive Threat Prevention automatically generates custom signatures unique to the customer’s environment through a proxy-less architecture. Coupled with AI, customers gain even more effective malware prevention at line rate. Additionally, the enhanced URL filtering solution provides more granular control, with more than 200 categories to choose from and support for up to 200 languages, as well as a new portal for better insights on web content and easy recategorization. The AI-powered security solution enables customers and partners to predict and find real threats faster, leaving human experts to focus on more strategic security tasks. Four new best-in-class high-performance firewalls: The new Juniper Networks SRX firewalls (SRX1600, SRX2300, SRX4300, SRX4700) are 1RU in size, scale up to 1.4 Tbps and include built-in Zero Trust capabilities, delivering the industry’s highest firewall throughput performance per rack unit. The new platforms feature wire-speed MACsec along with natively embedded TPM 2.0 chips and cryptographically signed device IDs that allow security administrators and network operators to easily verify the trust posture of devices remotely and mitigate the risks of supply chain attacks. These new firewalls, like the whole SRX family, support industry-standard EVPN-VXLAN Type 5 integration, providing full fabric awareness to security operators and allowing them to respond to threats faster. When combined with Juniper’s Connected Security Distributed Services Architecture, these additions to the Juniper SRX series family offer customers even more options to build and expand their data center architectures securely and with sustainability objectives top of mind.

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Software Security

SAIC Announces New Zero Trust Edge Capability

Business Wire | November 03, 2023

Science Applications International Corp. (NYSE: SAIC) today announced new, purpose-built Zero Trust security capabilities, which provide a solution to answer the Zero Trust pillars addressing data, identity, devices, networks, applications and workloads. The new Zero Trust security capabilities have been tested and validated on an AWS Snowball Edge and AWS Snow Family device with on-board storage and compute power for select Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities. AWS Snowball Edge can support local processing and edge-computing workloads in addition to transferring data between a user’s local environment and AWS. SAIC has brought together the best-in-class tools to deliver a mission-ready Zero Trust Edge capabilities that provides multi-level secure data processing and analytics and prioritizes data in a DDIL environment to transport back to the cloud, said Lauren Knausenberger, chief innovation officer at SAIC. This provides warfighters with a critical capability to extend their enterprise OCONUS, with the ability to run disconnected ops and rapidly adopt technologies and capabilities needed for mission success. This capability has the potential to be a critical enabler for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), with the ability to deploy at forward operating bases, on air platforms and at sea. Through the combined efforts of AWS; SAIC; Koverse, an SAIC company; Okta; CrowdStrike; Zscaler and Splunk, ready-to-install cybersecurity and Zero Trust technologies combine data and provide multi-level security from the edge through the enterprise. This capability meets the challenges of Wide Area Network (WAN) or no WAN connectivity by enabling offline compute capabilities and replicates mission-critical data after connectivity is restored. These components of software and hardware allow the capabilities to address the five pillars of the Zero Trust Maturity Model and therefore help increase cybersecurity posture at the edge. SAIC is an industry leader in cloud and cybersecurity, addressing Zero Trust security capabilities, including the latest capabilities which have been validated and tested on an AWS Snowball Edge device.

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