SOFTWARE SECURITY
Illumio | May 06, 2022
Illumio, Inc., the Zero Trust Segmentation company, today announced an expanded relationship with IBM Security and a new integration between the companies’ technologies for advanced end-to-end threat detection and response. The integration combines IBM Security QRadar XDR with Segmentation from Illumio to provide pre-attack protections for accelerated detection and automated containment and remediation capabilities to help defend against the impacts of aggressive cyberattacks, including ransomware.
“In 2021, over half of organizations globally reported suffering a ransomware attack that blocked access to critical systems or data,” said Frank Dickson, Program Vice President at IDC. “As ransomware, and the attackers behind it, continues to plague every industry, organizations must act now to bolster cyber and business resiliency. The best way firms can safeguard their organizations is to address the five core elements of a ransomware attack: initial compromise, lateral movement, privilege escalation, data exfiltration and the encryption. Given the complexity and difficulty of the task, security tools should be adaptable, scalable and emphasize real-time visibility to enable real-time action.”
The integration provides customers with enhanced visibility into network traffic and can help limit the potential spread of attacks by segmenting application networks. When an intrusion takes place, an attacker’s external communication and movement throughout an organization’s network can be quickly detected, denied, and analyzed with the help of Illumio and QRadar SIEM. This centralized visibility and analysis can help with the detection of threats and ransomware that moves, often undetected, throughout organizations. Beyond detection, Illumio’s integration with QRadar SOAR enables incident responders to activate Illumio’s emergency ransomware containment controls in near real time, helping them to reduce the impact of ransomware and accelerate the eradication and recovery process.
“The onslaught of ransomware attacks demands end to end visibility, advanced analytics and automated actions based on an open platform – which are the foundational elements on which QRadar XDR was designed. “By leveraging its open architecture and segmentation platforms like Illumio, QRadar XDR helps customers achieve early detection, orchestration, and rapid, automated response to ransomware and other fast-moving attacks.”
Chris Meenan, VP of Product Management at IBM Security
“In February 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reported ransomware incidents against 14 of the 16 U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, which signals the urgent business resilience risk it poses,” said John Skinner, VP, Business Development at Illumio. “Not only is ransomware today becoming more sophisticated and targeted, but incident rates are climbing. Successful detection and response depends on segmentation aligned with Zero Trust principles to isolate and stop ransomware before it spreads. Together, Illumio and IBM Security are empowering organizations to minimize the business impact of devastating attacks by combatting known risks at every phase.”
About Illumio
Illumio, the Zero Trust Segmentation company, prevents breaches from spreading and turning into cyber disasters. Illumio protects critical applications and valuable digital assets with proven segmentation technology purpose-built for the Zero Trust security model. Illumio ransomware mitigation and segmentation solutions see risk, isolate attacks, and secure data across cloud-native apps, hybrid and multi-clouds, data centers, and endpoints, enabling the world’s leading organizations to strengthen their cyber resiliency and reduce risk.
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SOFTWARE SECURITY
Bluum | June 14, 2022
Bluum, North America's leading education technology solutions provider, recently announced the launch of a comprehensive cybersecurity offering to schools. Cybersecurity needs and solutions for schools have evolved in recent years – even beyond those brought about by hybrid and remote learning – so Bluum responded with security solutions for people, processes and technology.
According to the SecurityScorecard 2018 report, education ranks last out of 17 industries in terms of cybersecurity, demonstrating that a legacy solution that only includes a first-generation firewall and antivirus software has long been rendered obsolete. Since 2016, there have been more than 1,300 publicly disclosed attacks in the U.S., which averages out to more than one K-12 cyber incident per school day. More than three million students have been affected by cybersecurity breakdowns since February 2018, with education institutions spending an average of $2.73 million to address the impact of a ransomware attack.
"With limited budgets, highly skilled IT personnel and time, K-12 organizations are hard-pressed to create a solid cybersecurity plan. "Cybersecurity is an incredibly technical and extensive area in IT that is rapidly evolving and needs to stay ahead of ever-evolving attack methods. Historically, school IT budget constraints have resulted in ineffective and outdated systems, so Bluum has developed comprehensive countermeasures to fill that void."
Bluum Vice President of Product Strategy and Growth Andre Vashilko
Whether cybersecurity incidents are caused externally or self-inflicted, Bluum can assist in preventative measures before, during and after the incidents and attacks. To get started, Bluum has debuted easy-to-use services to help schools assess their cybersecurity needs and identify immediate and future solutions.
Vulnerability scans and penetration testing will detect critical areas of concern and exposure in the infrastructure, while a complementary customer survey will provide further insights into a school's specific needs.
About Bluum
Bluum empowers educators with technology solutions that improve learning and make it more accessible, assisting more than 27 million students grow and flourish.
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SOFTWARE SECURITY
Sysdig | May 16, 2022
Sysdig, the unified container and cloud security leader, announced that Sysdig open source, the incident response standard for containers, has been extended to the cloud. Using system calls, Sysdig open source (Sysdig OSS) traditionally offers deep observability into running applications, as well as file system access and network activity, which speeds incident response and troubleshooting. Teams can quickly filter information from Sysdig OSS and take action. With the announcement of this new integration, these capabilities have been extended beyond containers to any cloud environment.
Today, Sysdig announced Edd Wilder-James has joined Sysdig from Google to lead the company’s open source ecosystem team.
The complexity of cloud-native applications – with countless components and variables – makes it extremely difficult for security analysts and system administrators to quickly triage alerts and debug problems. Sysdig OSS captures process, file system, and network activity in real time and with a high degree of granularity. The tool, which has nearly two million downloads and 6,850 GitHub stars, surfaces everything from executed commands and file system activity to network activity. Sysdig OSS then offers advanced filtering and troubleshooting capabilities, supporting root cause analysis for security and performance issues.Using a new plugin framework – originally developed by the open source community for the CNCF project Falco – Sysdig extends the number of sources Sysdig OSS can be connected with to anything that generates logs or events, including Azure, Google, and AWS CloudTrail logs. Going forward, every plugin developed for Falco can also be leveraged by Sysdig OSS. Using one tool, like Sysdig OSS, to observe events from the entire cloud-native environment streamlines investigations. Using a different tool for each environment adds complexity, which makes it massively harder to troubleshoot.
Sysdig’s Commitment to Open Source
Sysdig was founded as an open source company and Sysdig Secure and Sysdig Monitor were both built on an open source foundation to address the security challenges of modern cloud applications. Both projects were created by Sysdig to leverage deep visibility as a foundation for security, and they have become standards for container and cloud threat detection and incident response. Falco, which was contributed to the CNCF in 2018, is now an incubation-level hosted project with more than 45 million downloads.
Sysdig OSS and Falco can be used together as a powerful open source solution to reduce risk at runtime. Sysdig OSS acts as a flight recorder, capturing a detailed record for inspection. Falco acts as a security camera, continuously detecting unexpected behavior, configuration changes, intrusions, and data theft in real time. Teams can use Sysdig OSS and Falco together to detect and respond to threats.
“If you want to see what is going on inside an application, Sysdig OSS gives you that record. “Sysdig open source was the inspiration for Falco. While Falco will monitor and alert based on your policies, Sysdig open source will tell you what happened at a particular time, before and after the event. Having the ability to use both open source tools in the cloud is extremely powerful.”
Loris Degioanni, Founder and CTO of Sysdig
About Sysdig
Sysdig is driving the standard for cloud and container security. The company pioneered cloud-native runtime threat detection and response by creating Falco and Sysdig as open source standards and key building blocks of the Sysdig platform. With the platform, teams can find and prioritize software vulnerabilities, detect and respond to threats, and manage cloud configurations, permissions and compliance. From containers and Kubernetes to cloud services, teams get a single view of risk from source to run, with no blind spots, no guesswork, no black boxes. The largest and most innovative companies around the world rely on Sysdig.
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DATA SECURITY
ContraForce | December 28, 2021
DataTribe, a global cyber foundry that invests in and co-builds next-generation cybersecurity and data science companies, announced today a $2M seed investment in ContraForce, a leader in no-code security automation for small and medium-sized businesses.
ContraForce delivers a no-code security automation platform that makes cyber security accessible for small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources and expertise to defend themselves. In addition, ContraForce also brings this facility to security compliance; a critical feature, as customers, regulators and insurance companies are putting increasing pressure on small and mid-sized organizations to not only be secure, but also to prove it.
No longer is it acceptable for smaller organizations to be a step behind in their security and compliance. Hackers are increasingly targeting them for ransomware or as an entry point into a supply chain. Because small businesses typically have limited resources to cope with a cyber attack, cyber attacks can represent an existential risk for them. ContraForce enables small and mid-sized businesses to manage this risk with their easy-to-use, self-service platform to automate threat detection, response, and compliance.
“We are thrilled to announce DataTribe's most recent investment in ContraForce on the heels of the company winning the fourth annual DataTribe Challenge,” said John Funge, Managing Director at DataTribe. “By providing a sort of security and compliance ‘easy button’, ContraForce is filling a really significant gap. Just because an organization is small does not mean that it does not possess vital data, IP, or access to strategic networks. It is paramount that smaller organizations overcome the resource barriers to robust security. ContraForce’s unique approach dramatically lowers these barriers.”
“I am looking forward to working with DataTribe as we build on the ContraForce team's passion for simple and effective cybersecurity solutions designed for the needs of small and medium-sized businesses,”
Stan Golubchik, CEO and co-founder of ContraForce
ContraForce’s security and compliance solutions map security vulnerabilities to the industry standard MITRE ATT&CK framework. They create and adapt security detection and response capabilities in real-time, ensuring the environment is secured in hours across the cloud, network, endpoint, and users. By using ContraForce, an organization without dedicated security personnel can respond to threats without having to learn or write complex security detection code and response workflows.
About DataTribe
DataTribe is a startup foundry that invests in and co-builds world-class startups focused on generational leaps in cybersecurity and data science. Founded by leading investors, startup veterans, and alumni of the U.S. intelligence community, DataTribe commits capital, in-kind services, access to an unparalleled network, and decades of professional expertise to give their companies an unfair advantage. DataTribe is headquartered in the Washington-Baltimore metro area, in Fulton, Maryland.
About ContraForce
ContraForce is the new no-code security automation company. We focus on securing the small and medium-sized businesses by helping their security and IT teams work smarter, allowing them to implement automated operations that are effective in combating cyberattacks and demonstrating compliance. ContraForce is headquartered in McKinney, Texas and was founded and built by industry security and cloud experts from Armor, McAfee, and Intel. ContraForce's mission is to empower IT and Security teams and enable them to be more efficient.
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