Government Technology Insider | January 19, 2019
The cybersecurity industry is not generally known for the quality of its metrics. In a field where the absence of something happening is the best possible result, it’s been hard to find a meaningful way to communicate how prepared an organization is to withstand a cyber attack, or even to tell if a cyber team is getting better at what it does.
Government Technology Insider | January 16, 2019
Cybersecurity experts often like to tell the federal government what it needs to be doing better to deliver on the mission. But how often do they listen to federal government cyber teams to find out what their principal challenges are? And, moreover, how often is that insight collated, analyzed, and shared across civilian and military agencies?
Government Technology Insider | January 2, 2019
With Wayne Lloyd, RedSeal Federal CTO
As anyone who works in any government IT field can tell you one of the greatest frustrations they face is integrating their many products. Regardless of whether an agency has begun its migration to the cloud or is just operating data centers, silos undermine the potential of technology and can even compromise an agency’s ability to meet its mission.
ITSP Magazine | October 25, 2018
By Wayne Lloyd, RedSeal Federal CTO
After both the first and second Gulf wars, nation states such as North Korea, Iran, China and others came to the same conclusion: under no circumstances get into a shooting war with the United States military. The sole superpower in the world had a military so advanced and superior on the battlefield it left little doubt about the outcome.
In early August, at MeriTalk’s Cyber Security Brainstorm, Paul Beckman, chief information security officer (CISO) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said that his biggest new priorities are:
He added that the ability to leverage micro segmentation in cloud or SDNs is an efficient way to provide network data security services.
Which is true to an extent.
Unfortunately, Mr. Beckman puts too much trust in SDN security. If that word “software” does not concern you, then you are not thinking about the problem hard enough. Humans make and deploy software and humans make mistakes, even in something called “software-defined.” They often don’t see what’s exposed as they build out their architecture. They may have intended to have something segmented and not realize it isn’t.
SDNs grow and change quickly. An equally agile modeling solution can ensure that any mistakes are caught and fixed rapidly. There can easily be millions of rules to check as workloads spin up and down too fast for any human to keep up. RedSeal will validate all your security rules over time to ensure that configuration drift doesn’t cause segmentation violations.
Agencies can create risks, too, by making multiple changes over time without comprehending the combined effect those changes have on end-to-end security. This problem is exacerbated by SDNs because of the ease and speed of change they offer. To reduce the risks and realize the true power of SDNs, agile change control should be part of your approval process. This will allow you to model changes at machine speed to see exactly what effect a change will have on end-to-end security.
Added to architecture, updating and workflow issues, is the fact that most SDNs exist in hybrid data center environments, connected to other SDNs, public clouds and physical assets. RedSeal’s model of your network includes all your environments, so you can see access between and within each one. While I agree that SDNs are an improvement on the earlier way of providing security services, they are not a silver bullet.
Mr. Beckman also said, “One of the things that I think we are, as an IT organization, going to be evolving to, is that zero-trust model. Traditionally the perimeter was your primary means of defense, but once you got into the squishy center, you were generally a trusted entity. That needs to go away.”
With zero trust, he said that you need to authenticate everything a user is trying to access inside the perimeter. It’s a great idea for any organization to trust no one on the inside of a network and make them prove they’re authorized to be there. But what happens when credentials are compromised? It is harder to do today, after implementation of two factor authentication procedures and password managers, but not impossible. Hackers still find a way.
Lastly, Mr. Beckman wants to consolidate 16 independent SOCs into four or five centers operating in a “SOC-as-a-service” format. These kinds of consolidation efforts have happened before. The government has put a lot of effort into merging SOCs, only to have them split apart again due to performance issues or mission requirements.
What is new and admirable is a focus on grading the performance of each individual SOC. Identifying poor performers and merging them with high-scoring SOCs seems like a logical way to take advantage of the limited numbers of highly skilled security professionals and improve outcomes. Again, this sounds good in theory. We will see how it works in real life environments.
For more information about how RedSeal meets the DHS’s highest priorities this year, visit our website at: www.redseal.net/government.
Dark Reading | July 12, 2018
By Wayne Lloyd, RedSeal Federal CTO