Security Audit and Compliance
Lumen Technologies | September 13, 2023
Lumen Technologies announces the launch of key security enhancements to its industry-leading secure access service edge product.
The company’s SASE Solutions represents a first-of-its-kind, fully digital experience for purchasing, configuring, and overseeing enterprise SASE.
The latest features incorporated into Lumen SASE Solutions are security service edge and cloud-hosted gateways.
On September 12, 2023, Lumen Technologies, a leading provider of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions, committed to advancing human progress through technology facilitating the connection of people, data, and applications, announced the addition of key enhancements to its landmark SASE product. The addition of new features makes lumen SASE solutions even more simplified and flexible for customers.
Lumen SASE Solutions represents a pioneering, entirely digital experience for purchasing, configuring, and managing enterprise SASE. This is a significant step in Lumen's ongoing efforts to drive innovation and foster growth. Notably, the SASE product improvements launch are a direct outcome of valuable customer feedback.
The Lumen SASE approach focuses on simplification in order to deliver flexible, secure, and scalable SASE solutions to organizations of all sizes and industries.
Senior Director of SASE Product Management at Lumen, Darren Wolner, said,
There has been a rapid adoption of cloud-based services as more organizations implement hybrid work, but security is paramount to any cloud-based experience. This means savvy organizations soon realized a whole new set of requirements and challenges. We quickly enhanced the product to fit their requirements.
[Source – Cision PR Newswire]
Darren mentioned that Lumen has a strong focus on meeting customer wants and needs. He cited the latest SASE updates as a prime illustration of this commitment.
The new capabilities added to Lumen SASE Solutions include:
Security Service Edge (SSE)
SSE encompasses a suite of integrated, cloud-centric security capabilities, which feature cloud-hosted gateways. These capabilities are designed to ensure secure access to websites, facilitate the safe sharing of sensitive data, and manage user permissions for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. These solutions are delivered in partnership with prominent SD-WAN and security providers.
Cloud-hosted Gateways
Cloud-hosted gateways offer organizations the flexibility to adopt 'grow as they go' network and security management features as they scale without the necessity of on-premises equipment.
In addition to the global expansion of Lumen technologies, customers based in the US can now deploy premise-based SASE services to locations in EMEA and Canada.
Pete Finalle, Research Manager with IDC, stated,
The new, hybrid perimeter – encompassing the main office down to the remote workforce – has collided with multi-cloud resources. This has created numerous networking and security complexities that are difficult to solve without a customer outcomes-based approach, which few companies can provide.
[Source – Cision PR Newswire]
Finalle pointed out that Lumen has a distinctive position to deliver real business outcomes through a comprehensive, cloud-based network security stack. This stack significantly benefits from Lumen's presence in both network and cloud infrastructure. Additionally, he mentioned that the company's digital customer experience and managed approach to resolving the intricate security and networking challenges allow them to mitigate the deployment and management difficulties that frequently hinder the adoption of SASE.
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Network Threat Detection
iTWire | October 30, 2023
Fortinet, the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, has announced the expansion of its Universal SASE offering to empower today’s hybrid workforce with FortiOS everywhere.
Ken Xie, founder, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer, said, The Fortinet operating system, FortiOS, is the industry’s only enterprise-grade converged operating system able to support all secure access service edge (SASE) functions, including firewall, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), secure web gateway, encryption/decryption, cloud access security broker (CASB), data loss prevention (DLP), and zero trust network access (ZTNA), whether deployed in an appliance or cloud-delivered from Fortinet.
“This approach enables over 30 converged networking and security functions to be managed through a single console. Fourteen of these functions are accelerated when deployed on our new FortiASIC Security Processor 5-based FortiGate 120G SASE appliance.”
Expanding Fortinet Universal SASE
Single-vendor SASE provides flexible access to critical resources and applications for users and devices. However, most enterprises rely on different vendors for each SASE function, which introduces significant challenges of controlling different operating system functionality and management consoles. Fortinet Universal SASE takes traditional single-vendor SASE one step further, providing consistent policies and controls on-prem and in the cloud while delivering seamless integration across all functions and deployments to better support today’s hybrid workforce while reducing information technology (IT) overhead.
FortiOS runs the full SASE stack, including a bi-directional firewall, SD-WAN, secure web gateway, encryption/decryption, CASB, DLP, and ZTNA. It also has the flexibility to run on an appliance in accelerated mode as well as in the FortiSASE cloud, providing consistent networking, security, and policy management for every edge. This is further enhanced by FortiGuard artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security services, such as intrusion prevention system (IPS), domain name system (DNS) filtering, URL filtering, anti-malware, sandboxing, and more.
This news expands Fortinet’s investment in Universal SASE by expanding the reach of its SASE stack in three key areas of the portfolio:
Worldwide coverage of FortiSASE cloud locations
FortiSASE, built on a global, scalable cloud network, delivers the same SASE stack as FortiGate appliances through its regional FortiSASE cloud locations. To deliver the best user experience and higher service availability, Fortinet now delivers over 100 FortiSASE cloud locations globally.
Bringing accelerated SASE to the campus and branch
To bring the full SASE stack to campus and branch locations, Fortinet is announcing the new FortiGate 120G SASE appliance. Because it is powered by Fortinet’s patented security processor 5 (SP5) custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), it can accelerate many elements of the SASE stack, such as delivering three gigabits per second (Gbps) of secure sockets layer (SSL) inspection—an average of six times faster than the industry average—for visibility into encrypted traffic at scale. The following Secure Compute Rating table provides a comparison between equivalent solutions:
Flexible consumption extended to Universal SASE
FortiFlex, Fortinet’s flexible consumption program, has now been extended to Fortinet Universal SASE solutions. The entire SASE stack from Fortinet can be consumed as part of FortiFlex, whether customers want to use on-prem or FortiSASE cloud-based services. FortiFlex offers usage-based licensing across cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises deployments to give IT teams the flexibility to continually right-size their deployments, reduce excessive procurement cycles for new security solutions, simplify the deployment and provisioning of new services, and maximise budget and return on investment by enabling IT teams to scale down or pause services as needed.
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Platform Security
PR Newswire | October 26, 2023
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX), (TSX: OTEX), today announced the Nastiest Malware of 2023, an annual ranking of the year's biggest malware threats. For six consecutive years OpenText Cybersecurity threat intelligence experts have analyzed the threat landscape to determine the most notorious malware trends. Ransomware has been rapidly ascending the ranks, with ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) now the weapon of choice for cybercriminals.
This year four new ransomware gangs, believed to be the next generation of previous big players, topped the list. Newcomer Cl0p takes the prize for this year's nastiest malware after commanding exorbitant ransom demands with its MOVEit campaign. Cl0p's efforts helped skyrocket the average ransom payment which is rapidly approaching three quarters of a million dollars. Black Cat, Akira, Royal, Black Basta also made their debut, joined by the always present, Lockbit.
A key finding this year is the RaaS business model is another win for the bad guys. Profit sharing and risk mitigation are top contributors to RaaS success along with the ability to easily evade authorities, said Muhi Majzoub, EVP and Chief Product Officer, OpenText. There is a silver lining as research shows only 29% of businesses pay ransom, an all-time low. These numbers indicate people are taking threats seriously and investing in security to be in a position where they do not need to pay ransom.
This year's list highlights the tenacity of cybercriminals as they continue to reinvent themselves, coming back stronger each time (often with new names). Their scrappy mentality allows them to go beyond the norm to find new ways to invade their target.
2023 Nastiest Malware
Cl0p, a RaaS platform, became famous following a series of cyberattacks, exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the MOVEit Transfer file software developed by Progress Software. MOVEit victims include such notable organizations as Shell, BBC, and the United States Department of Energy.
Black Cat, recognized in our 2021 Nastiest Malware report, believed to be the successor to REvil ransomware group, has built their RaaS platform on the Rust programming language. They made headlines for taking down MGM Casino Resorts.
Akira, presumed to be a descendant of Conti, primarily targets small to medium sized businesses due to the ease and turnaround time. Most notably, Akira ransomware targeted Cisco VPN products as an attack vector to breach corporate networks, steal, and eventually encrypt data.
Royal, suspected heir to Ryuk, uses Whitehat penetration testing tools to move laterally in an environment to gain control of the entire network. Helping aid in deception is their unique partial encryption approach that allows the threat actor to choose a specific percentage of data in a file to encrypt.
Lockbit 3.0, a main stain on the list and last year's winner, continues to wreak havoc. Now in its third epoch, Lockbit 3.0 is more modular and evasive than its predecessors.
Black Basta is one of the most active RaaS threat actors and is also considered to be yet another descendant of the Conti ransomware group. They have gained a reputation for targeting all types of industries indiscriminately.
To learn more about the findings of this year's Nastiest Malware analysis, visit the OpenText Cybersecurity Community, as well as tune in to our Nastiest Malware Webinar.
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