RedSeal Cybersecurity Analytics Platform Achieves Rapid Success in Japan

RedSeal Announces Japan Subsidiary, Country Manager and Fujitsu Systems East Reseller Partnership

Sunnyvale, Calif. – July 21, 2016 –  RedSeal (redseal.net), the cybersecurity analytics company, today announced it has established a Japanese subsidiary, RedSeal KK. Led by newly appointed country manager, Hiroki Inoue, RedSeal KK will provide sales, marketing and technical support to its growing customer and distribution base. The RedSeal cybersecurity analytics platform has achieved fast traction in Japan through a strong distribution network, which has now been further enhanced with the addition of Fujitsu Systems East Ltd. (FEAST).

The network resilience and cybersecurity preparedness that RedSeal provides is resonating well in the Japan market as attention and investment in cybersecurity across corporate and government agencies grows. IDC Japan predicts 19 percent growth in the Japanese Cyber Security Market in 2016, reaching $2.7 billion.

“Our customers expect us to provide the most advanced cybersecurity solutions,” noted Keiichi Yamamura, corporate executive officer of Fujitsu Systems East Ltd. “With the addition of RedSeal to our cybersecurity offering, we can now deliver network security consulting, digital resilience monitoring, and verification services to our customers, helping them build highly resilient digital networks and businesses.”

This growth in Japan has, in part, been spurred by a series of high profile attacks, awareness of increased exposure around the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, and government initiatives including the Basic Act on Cybersecurity in 2013, and the recent creation of the National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) to coordinate government responses on cybersecurity-related issues.

“There is heightened awareness at the CEO level, and across government agencies in Japan, that measuring and maintaining digital resilience is a priority. RedSeal delivers exactly to this priority,” noted Ray Rothrock, chairman and CEO of RedSeal. “By providing organizations the tools to build digital resilience into their networks before attacks, we enable them to get ahead of the ongoing, automated, and ever more sophisticated attacks.”

The RedSeal cybersecurity analytics platform helps customers understand the state of their networks, measure resilience, verify compliance and accelerate incident response. It analyzes customers’ networks and automatically builds a virtual network model to provide continuous monitoring and visibility into potential vulnerabilities. The platform also delivers the RedSeal Digital Resilience Score, to measure, benchmark, and set targets to actively manage the digital resilience of a customer’s network and security infrastructure.

“We have built success on offering the best and most efficient network and security solutions available,” said Takao Tsubuki, president of Terilogy. “Partnering with RedSeal, we are now able to extend our solutions to include cybersecurity analysis solutions for network infrastructure.”

In addition, Susumu Watanabe, president of NVC (Network Value Components) commented, “NVC brings an unparalleled breadth and depth of world class network and security solutions to the Japan market. The RedSeal cybersecurity analytics platform is a valuable addition to our security portfolio.”

 ###

About RedSeal
RedSeal puts power in decision makers’ hands with the essential cybersecurity analytics platform for building digitally resilient organizations. RedSeal’s Digital Resilience Score, modeled after a creditworthiness score, measures how prepared an organization is to respond to an incident and quickly rebound. The company’s platform adds value to existing network devices by working with them and building a network model. With this, customers can understand the state of their networks, measure resilience, verify compliance, and accelerate incident response. RedSeal’s customers are Global 2000 corporations and government agencies that depend on the most sophisticated security. Founded in 2004, RedSeal is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and serves customers globally through a direct sales and channel partner network.

 

Contact:
Alexandra Laurelli
Finn Partners
+1 (303) 862-9530
alex.laurelli@finnpartners.com

Digital Defense: Cybersecurity and the Wendy’s Hack

FOODABLE WEBTV NETWORK | July 9, 2016

Fast food chain Wendy’s is the industry’s latest cyberattack victim. In fact, more than 1,000 of Wendy’s 6,500 locations across the United States were hit in a widespread credit/debit card hack.

It’s not an uncommon scenario: malware infects network; over a long period of time, said malware morphs, and spreads broadly and deeply throughout the network. It’s almost unavoidable these days, but a good digital defense can help.

“Cyberattacks are so advanced these days that if a hacker sets his sights on your network, you can bet he’ll get in,” said Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal, a cybersecurity company. “Being prepared when they get in is the essence of resilience.”

RedSeal and ForeScout Federal CTOs Explain how They Jointly Map, Identify and Increase the Resilience of Public Sector Networks

Last month, Wallace Sann, the Public Sector CTO for ForeScout, and I sat down to chat about the current state of cybersecurity in the federal government. With ForeScout, government security teams can see devices as they join the network, control them, and orchestrate system-wide responses.

Many of our customers deploy both RedSeal and ForeScout side by side. I wanted to take a look at how government security teams were dealing with ongoing threats and the need to integrate difference cybersecurity tools into the “cyber stack.”

Our conversation is lightly edited for better clarity.

Wayne:  Describe the challenges that ForeScout solves for customers.

Wallace:  We help IT organizations identify IT resources and ensure their security posture. There’s always an “ah-ha moment” that occurs during a proof of concept. We see customers who swear by STIG, and will say they only have two versions of Adobe. We’ll show them that there are 6-7 versions running.  We tell you what’s on the network and classify it.

Wayne:  We often say that RedSeal is analogous to a battlefield map where you have various pieces of data coming in to update the topography map with the current situation. By placing the data into the context of the topography, you can understand where reinforcements are needed, where your critical assets are and more.

RedSeal’s map gives you this contextual information for your entire enterprise network. ForeScout makes the map more accurate, adapting to change in real time. It lets you identify assets in real time and can provide some context around device status at a more granular or tactical level.

Wallace:  Many companies I speak to can create policies on the fly, but ensuring that networks and endpoints are deployed properly and that policies can be enforced is a challenge.

Wayne:  Without a doubt. We were teaching a class for a bunch of IT professionals, telling them that RedSeal can identify routes around firewalls. If the networking team put a route around it, the most effective firewall won’t work. The class laughed. They intentionally routed around firewalls, because performance was too slow.

Endpoint compliance typically poses a huge challenge too. RedSeal can tell you what access a device has, but not necessarily when it comes online. Obviously, that’s one of the reasons we’re partnering with ForeScout.

Wallace:  ForeScout can provide visibility that the device is online and also provide some context around the endpoint. Perhaps RedSeal has a condition that DLP is running on the endpoint. ForeScout could tell you that DLP is not loaded, and therefore no access allowed.

Wayne: Inventory what’s there. Make sure it’s managed. If not managed, you may not know you were attacked and where they came in or went. If you have that inventory, you can prevent or at least respond quicker.

Another important component is assessing risk and knowing what is important to protect. Let’s say we have two hosts of equal value. If Host 1 is compromised, you can’t leapfrog any further. No other systems will be impacted. If Host 2 is compromised, 500 devices can be compromised including two that may have command and control over payroll or some critical systems. Where do you want to put added security and visibility? On the hot spots that open you up to the most risk!  We put things into network context and enable companies to be digitally resilient.

Wallace:  With so many security concerns to address, prioritization is critical.

Wayne:  IoT is obviously a trend that everyone is talking about and is becoming an increasing concern for agency IT Security orgs. How is ForeScout addressing IoT?

Wallace:  ForeScout provides visibility, classification and assessment. If it has an IP address, we can detect it. Classification is where we are getting better. We want to be able to tell you what that device is. Is it a security camera? A printer? A thermostat? We can classify most common devices, but we want to be 75-90% accurate in device classification. The problem is that many new devices are coming out every day. Many you can’t probe traditionally; it could take the device down.  And, you can’t put an agent on it.  So, we’re using other techniques to passively fingerprint a device (via power over Ethernet, deep packet inspection, and more), so we can get to 95% accuracy.

Wayne:  Do you see a lot IoT at customer sites, and are they concerned?

Wallace:  Some don’t realize they have an issue. Many don’t know that IoT devices are on their networks. We are seeing more cases where we are asked to assess IoT environments and address it. Before, we weren’t asked to take action. We used to be asked how many Windows and Mac devices there were. Now, there is a movement by government agencies to put anything with an IP address (the OT side) under the purview of the CISO.

Wayne:  We see a lot of devices – enterprise and consumer – that aren’t coded securely. IoT devices should be isolated, not connected to your mission critical operating environment.

Wallace:  I was curious how RedSeal handles IoT?

Wayne:  If there is vulnerability scan data, it tells us what OS, applications running, active ports, host name, MAC address, etc.  Without that data, we can grab some device data, but with ForeScout, can get more context/additional data about the device. ForeScout can tell you the devices are there. RedSeal can ensure that it’s segmented the way it should be. We can tell you it’s there and how you can get to it, people need to make decisions and act. We show IoT devices as a risk.

Wayne:  What are some of the trends that you are seeing that need to be addressed at customer sites?

Wallace:  From a native cloud perspective, we are working on extending the customer on-premise environment and bringing visibility and control to the cloud.   We are also working on making it easier to get security products to work together.  People don’t have the resources for integration and ongoing management.  We’re working to orchestrate bi-directionally with various toolsets to provide actionable intelligence – advanced threat detection, vulnerability assessment, etc.

We can take intel from other vendors, and ForeScout gives us the who, what, when, where from an endpoint to determine if that device should be on a network.

For example, an ATD vendor can detect malware (find it in their sandbox).  They will hand us an incident of compromise (hash, code, etc.).  We’ll look for those IoCs on devices on the network and then quarantine those devices.

Wayne: Security vendors need to work together.  Customers don’t want to be tied to a single vendor.  Thanks for your time today.

 

For more information, visit our websites at RedSeal and ForeScout.

EU Parliament Approves New Cybersecurity Rules

POWER | July 8, 2016

The European Union (EU) parliament on July 6 approved the first community-wide rules designed to bolster cybersecurity throughout the EU.

According to the official statement, the new law “lays down security and reporting obligations for ‘operators of essential services’ in sectors such as energy, transport, health, banking and drinking water supply. EU member states will have to identify entities in these fields using specific criteria, e.g. whether the service is critical for society and the economy and whether an incident would have significant disruptive effects on the provision of that service.”

Let Legacy IT Systems Just Die

SIGNAL | July 8, 2016

Upgrading the federal IT infrastructure is urgent, but invest in next-generation networks.

Federal agencies need to address their aging legacy systems and need to do it now. The situation is so dire that some systems are more than 50 years old and running on 8-inch floppy disks, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

Cybersecurity Skill Shortage Increases Risk

SECURITY INFOWATCH | July 8, 2016

It was not a good day for the SOC.
Warnings had been emerging over the past few days, but none of them had resulted in crisp defensive action. The team was scrambling, and activity was extreme.
But nothing was happening. No one had seen anything like this before. It was pretty likely that this was a new, active attack, but what exactly was happening? What was the attack vector? What was the target?
No one had seen anything like this before.

Liberal Arts Supporter Ray Rothrock Named Distinguished Alumnus

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY | July 6, 2016

One of the marks of a great leader is humility—a trait manifested by Ray Rothrock ’77, one of the 2016 Distinguished Alumnus Award recipients. Given jointly by Texas A&M University and The Association of Former Students, this award recognizes Aggies for their professional excellence as well as their service to Texas A&M and their local communities.

Why 334M People Should Care About Friday, July 1

INFORMATION SECURITY BUZZ | July 1, 2016

Utility companies nationwide are angst-ing about Friday. Not because it’s a long weekend, but because July 1 marks the end of the extended deadline for compliance – imposed by the Federal Energy Regulation Commission (FERC) –  with NERC’s(N. American Electric Reliability Corp.) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) V5 standards.

Why is this important?

Network Access Modeling Improves Security, Performance and Uptime for FEMA

When disaster strikes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) enterprise network is expanded to include “temporary” mobile data centers that can last from months to years. In this kind of situation, change control, network maps and configurations can get wildly out of control. The security engineers in FEMA’s Security Operation Center (SOC) wanted network visibility. What’s more, they needed continuous monitoring to be able to measure risk and make decisions about how to deploy their scarce time and resources.

After learning more about RedSeal’s security analytics platform, FEMA’s cybersecurity lead realized that it could fill a major void in the agency’s solution set. RedSeal could help him understand the network, measure resilience, verify compliance, and accelerate response to security incidents and network vulnerabilities.

The FEMA SOC team deployed RedSeal to help manage their change control process — by modeling the data centers as they popped up in near real time. As data centers come online, they use RedSeal to ensure the right access is available. In the coming months, the team is expanding use of RedSeal to support their incident response program.

FEMA’s network team also uses RedSeal, to visualize access from disaster sites. Initially, they were shocked by the level of network access sprawl. They had no idea how much gear was on the network at a disaster site or how many security consequences resulted from simple configuration changes.

Now, with RedSeal’s continuously-updated network model, the network team is able to identify everything on the network and rapidly address any configuration changes that cause security, performance, and network uptime issues.

Get a PDF of this article. FEMA: Modeling Network Access

Clear ROI for RedSeal Deployment to Support Vulnerability Assessment Program

An anonymous intelligence agency had a problem.

Their vulnerability assessment program was expensive and sub-optimal. The program was run by two internal employees and 16 contractors. Going to data center to data center, each assessment could take anywhere from 2 months to a full year to conduct.

First, they had to inventory each data center and find all the configuration files. Then they had to review each set up to make sure they were updated and had applied best security practices. At that point, they could create a network map.

Using the map, they could then begin to manually analyze the network for vulnerabilities. Given time and resource constraints, the team was forced to triage.  Ignoring medium and low level vulnerabilities, they focused on a short list of the most critical.

Of course, by the time they completed their analysis, the whole network had changed. The network map was merely a snapshot in time. Plus, the vulnerability assessment reports didn’t include leapfrogs to move deeper into the network.

The agency realized that getting one or two reports per year on a network that had already changed — at a cost of $5 million — was not a situation that could continue.

After researching various cybersecurity tools and getting a glowing review from other cyber teams in the government, the agency’s cybersecurity team realized that RedSeal was the solution they needed.  RedSeal’s continuous monitoring of the config files on the network means that the network map is never out of date. Experts at In-Q-Tel were brought to review RedSeal. Approval was quickly given. On a Monday, their engineers told RedSeal, “We want it on Friday!”

Now, after deploying RedSeal agency wide and setting up 14 instances, they conduct continuous assessments year round across all data centers.  After five years, customer feedback has been 100% positive, “We realize now that we can’t leverage the other cybersecurity tools unless we have RedSeal. RedSeal is core to our cybersecurity and vulnerability management operations.”

Do you have a problem with your time consuming manual vulnerability assessment program? Click here to set up a free trial of RedSeal and choose the better way.

RedSeal software is the best way to measure and manage the digital resilience of your network.

Get a PDF of this article. US Intelligence Agency: Clear ROI