Securing the Digital World

Understanding Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

09/19/2023 Secure access service edge (SASE – pronounced “sassy”) is a modern architectural framework that combines network security and wide area networking (WAN) capabilities into a unified cloud-based service. It is designed to provide secure and optimized access to network resources for users, regardless of their location or the devices they use. Secure access service edge represents a shift from the traditional approach of backhauling network traffic to centralized data centers for security inspection. Instead, it adopts a cloud-native model where security services are delivered from the cloud and applied directly at the network edge, close to the user and the resources they are accessing. Acronyms to Know Before we get […]
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Network Detection and Response: Strengthen Your Cybersecurity With NetWitness

08/24/2023 Millions of cybersecurity events occur every day, and as time and technology continue to progress, the means of these cyber attacks become more sophisticated and immensely more difficult to detect. Statistically speaking, if you are a business owner who stores and manages sensitive data, it is not a matter of if but when someone will attempt to access your networks and compromise your data. In fact, it’s highly likely that you have already been the target of a malicious attack, whether successful or unsuccessful, and you may not even be aware of it. In today’s article, we will be discussing network detection and response: what it is, how it works, […]
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Securing Secrets: Insights into Code Obfuscation Techniques

06/29/2023 Once a threat actor gains access to a network or tricks a user into downloading a malicious attachment. The next step is to download their payload, this could be a toolset or malware. Code obfuscation has become an important step for threat actors to accomplish this task.  Whether it is a webshell, or a utility program code obfuscation is often utilized during part of the command execution phase.  In this post we are going to review a recently observed phishing attack where the threat actor delivered the remote access tool known as “asyncrat”   through several different variations of code obfuscation.  As we have all seen many many times the […]
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How NetWitness Orchestrator Can Make Your SecOps More Efficient

06/07/2023 Security operations (SecOps) teams are battling a complex and ever-evolving challenge: Keeping an organization secure against cyberattacks from faceless, remote users in a technologically advanced world. With the rise of threats, new technologies, and increasingly sophisticated scams, staying ahead of the bad guys is more important than ever. That’s where security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) comes in to make your SecOps team more effective against attacks. A SOAR system automates what would be a manual process of identifying cyberattacks and making it easier to respond to those attacks. However, not all SOAR systems are created equal. NetWitness Orchestrator, a SOAR solution from NetWitness, is an invaluable tool for SecOps […]
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NetWitness is proud to join Black Hat Asia 2023 in the NOC

05/08/2023 This week, NetWitness proudly joins BlackHat in the Network Operations Center (NOC) at the BlackHat ASIA event, continuing our long-standing collaboration. As always, we’re here to provide top-notch SIEM, NDR, and SOAR services, standing shoulder to shoulder with our seasoned global threat-hunting team, which comprises Sales Engineering and Incident Response. 
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Cloud SIEM: A Thorough Breakdown

03/08/2023 If your business uses cloud technology for day-to-day operations — or is looking to start — our NetWitness Cloud SIEM will ensure that you can operate safely and securely!
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USMS and Broader Implications for Law Enforcement as Ransomware Targets

03/02/2023   The mission of the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) is “to enforce federal laws and provide support to virtually all elements of the federal justice system” through multiple disciplines. Its law enforcement (LE) focus, reach and scope make this week’s report of a recent cyberattack involving both ransomware and data exfiltration especially concerning. While this news is fresh, and the incident ongoing, it’s a good time for us all to reflect on why LE entities can be especially attractive targets to bad actors. As with all important things in life, it always pays off to understand motivations and incentives, and how they can drive behaviors and actions. Low-hanging fruit of […]
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Five Thoughts on Take Down of Hive

02/03/2023   The takedown of the Hive ransomware-as-a-service group has been in the news over the past week, and it’s good news indeed. Beyond the obvious benefits of disrupting this criminal enterprise, there are some other discrete takeaways which are particularly important to note. Cross-jurisdictional cooperation and coordination can be done, and done effectively. Any of us who have served on committees know about Parkinson’s Law, which correlates a group’s size to the amount of time needed to accomplish its goals: the bigger the group, the longer the time taken, even without a change in scope. The fact that this global law enforcement effort was a success is even more impressive […]
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Make it Costly: How to Deter Threat Actors by Escalating Their Costs

09/30/2022 Introduction Many years ago, I spoke at a @suitsandspooks panel in Washington, D.C. with some of the cybersecurity industry’s best and brightest minds. One of the topics addressed was the concept of active defense strategy in the commercial (private sector) world versus the public world. In those days the idea of ‘hacking back’ against a hostile, adversarial threat actor or group was discussed frequently, with some organizations and their leaders taking a more vocal stance (in both public and private sectors). The panel was fantastic: Dmitri Alperovitch (CrowdStrike), Greg Hoglund, Jeff Carr, me, and moderated by Anup Ghosh. A smart group of guys all with strong opinions on the subject […]
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UPDATE: What We Know About the Russia/Ukraine Conflict and How You Should Prepare Your Cybersecurity Capabilities

03/25/2022 UPDATED March 25, 2022: The Biden Administration released a statement on March 21 urging companies to strengthen their cybersecurity capabilities and protections in the face of potentially damaging cyber activity perpetrated by threat actors as part of the ongoing conflict. The Administration also urged organizations to execute a number of best practices for bolstering cyber defense capabilities. Additionally, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) website’s Shields Up page is an excellent resource to help prepare for disruptive cyber incidents. The NetWitness Incident Response team is available to assist organizations with enacting these recommendations, as well as several other services, and does not require organizations to be existing NetWitness customers […]
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The Apache Log4j Zero-Day Vulnerability: What You Need to Know

12/14/2021 When the Log4j vulnerability was revealed, the NetWitness team launched an immediate investigation into Log4j use within the NetWitness Platform, as well as actions to support its customers in identifying and remediating attempts to exploit the vulnerability in their own environments.
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Could Your Collaboration Tools be Hacker-Friendly?

11/19/2021 It’s back to the future. Companies and their employees are slowly returning to in-person work, with many organizations maintaining their hybrid workforce model. And this shift to remote work has resulted in an increasing reliance on web-based collaborative tools. In fact, a Gartner study found that usage of collaboration tools has nearly doubled over the last two years, going from 55% to 80% among workers. Many of these tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom, have been integral components of organizational productivity for years, but the change to a highly remote workforce has more deeply embedded these types of applications into business operating procedures. Realizing this opportunity, hackers and […]
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NetWitness: XDR, Visibility, and the Future of SOCs

09/16/2021 This overview introduces a downloadable XDR whitepaper by Frost & Sullivan, covering XDR and enhanced visibility, the value of XDR to the future of security ops, and why organizations should adopt XDR by focusing on 3 essential keys.
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Ransomware: A Beginner’s Guide to Threat Detection

08/11/2021 At NetWitness we know how devastating it can be to find your organization impacted by a ransomware attack, so we created this Ransomware FAQ. This intro to ransomware explains essential ransomware concepts to equip IT and non-IT professionals with deeper knowledge of this growing threat.
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XDR and Zero Trust: Partners in Threat Detection

08/10/2021 Zero Trust isn’t always part of the XDR conversation—but it should be. Here’s why the relationship of these threat detection partners is so critically important to an enterprise’s digital transformation security.
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A Peek Inside the Black Hat NOC with Grifter

07/20/2021 In this interview, Neil Wyler, a.k.a. Grifter, talks about how he got involved with Black Hat more than 20 years ago, and how the event’s network operations center (NOC) has evolved in that time to take on today’s modern cybersecurity challenges.
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Verifiable Credentials: The Key to Trust on the Next Web

07/14/2021 RSA once again secures the open web In 1994 the World Wide Web was at a crossroads. The technology that today we simply call “the web,” invented five years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee, was poised to become the de facto interface to the internet. Its document-based, human-centric, point-and-click model was wildly popular among the technologists of the day, and was beginning to see rapid uptake among the broader population of desktop software users. But something was missing: trust. Because the web was inherently open, any use case requiring trust between parties was impossible. All web traffic at that point traveled in clear text where it could be intercepted, and potentially […]
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Your Threat Intelligence Platform is Ready to SOAR

06/16/2021 When security is weaved in from the outset, the fabric you produce at the end of the project is stronger and safer. In the security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) space, that essential ingredient is a threat intelligence platform (TIP) capability.
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Securing the IoT Edge Ecosystem

03/22/2021 IoT Edge architecture is emerging to tackle the explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and systems. This open ecosystem approach enables contributions from many sources. RSA is doing its part to add security across the range of IoT Edge solutions.
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Future-Proofing Security Operations Centers

02/15/2021 Recommendations for building SOCs for the future.
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Strategies for Insider Threat Mitigation

09/09/2020 In Part II of this blog series, we examine strategies for insider threat risk mitigation including key tenants of data visibility and advanced analytics to provide organizations a road map for addressing this evolving threat.
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From the Ashes of Disruption Emerges Innovation and New Ways to Work

07/28/2020 RSA CTO Dr. Zulfikar Ramzan talks with ITPSmagazine about the security and risk challenges of transitioning employee and business operations back to physical locations and why this period of disruption may be a catalyst for a new era of innovation.
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Reimagining the SOC for the Future of Work

07/27/2020 Amy Blackshaw and Michael Adler talk with ITPSmagazine about ways to enable a successful virtual SOC and what organizations need to do to manage the growing threat of dynamic workforce risks.
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Managing Digital Risk in a New Age of Internet of Things

07/15/2020 IoT risk is digital risk. Manage it correctly to gain the full power of IoT.
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Security Considerations for the Dynamic Workforce

06/01/2020 The way we work has changed forever. From offices to homes and remote locations, what do security operations need to consider? And how do they need to adapt to this dynamic workforce? There are five security considerations that should be top of mind in this new reality.
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Operationalizing Incident Response

11/04/2019 Risk management, threat intelligence, and incident response come together in a sensible, practical, and operational detect and respond model to positively impact your cyber risk strategy. Staffing models (small and large), tools, and managed service providers can also be leveraged successfully.
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