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20 years of Vulnerability Managment - Why we've failed and continue to do so.

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Cyber Security: Keeping Pace with Change. Getting breached can really ruin your day. Actually it normally happens on a friday evening as you are about chill for the weekend. The cause of must breaches is not rocket science, its more to do with the poor approach we have accepted because we underestimate the threat actor.  - An attacker does not scan your website/network once a quarter with a commercial or open source scanner or perform an annual penetration test against your systems to see if there is any low hanging fruit, so how do we expect to defend against such an advisory using that approach? Systems change now more frequently than ever due to the ease of cloud deployments and the speed of software deployments due to iterative development techniques. The rate of change increase results in exposures quickly manifesting and the organisation not even being aware of the exposure in the first place. Many organisations dont know what they have exposed on the public Internet. We ne...
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Five Ways You Can Make Your Vulnerability Management (VM) Program Smart Now

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  Five Ways You Can Make Your Vulnerability Management (VM) Program Smart Now So you are convinced that your need to adopt a “Smart” Vulnerability Management (VM) approach but you are not quite sure how to get started or even what to shoot for. Here are Five Very Important Steps you need to take to bring on the “Smart”.   Number 1 - Understand Business Goals and Then Automate Ranked Alerts Yes, take a step back and think holistically how your business runs and what business processes are most critical to achieving your enterprise goals. Talk to your business line leaders and operational staff. Hit the whiteboard and talk through “what if” scenarios. Rank all of your business concerns as it pertains to any potential exposures to your attack surface. Then take on a Smart VM Platform that enables you to rank and automate each alert type across each IT layer so you receive automated business-ranked alerts. This is all done in the set-up stage. This is necessary. This is no...
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Edgescan and Huawei - Cybersecurity - Irish Times Article and Panel Discussion

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I recently was interviewed by the Irish times on why is everything getting hacked and how can we change the game.... https://www.irishtimes.com/special-reports/cybersecurity-focus/criminals-have-an-inbuilt-advantage-in-the-great-cyber-arms-race-1.4651078  A recording of the Panel with Andy Purdy, CSO of Huawei North America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQJ1uSQ4IEk&t=33s Both are decent and worth a listen.
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Attack Surface Management - What's old is new again!!

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  Attack Surface Management (ASM), a new sexy approach to cyber security visibility.  "How about we try to see what systems are exposed to the public Internet  so we can make sure they are being secured." ASM is not Vulnerability management (detection of cyber security weaknesses) but rather takes a step back to answer the question, "What do I need to secure?" but is can also help identify the SBoM (Software Bill of Materials) across deployed systems. Attack Surface Management (ASM) which provides you the ability to see all services exposed to the public internet across your global estate. As new systems are deployed, decommissioned or a system changes, ASM can inform you of the event.  This is done in real-time and on a continuous basis in most cases. I wrote a bog in 2018   when we first introduced Edgescan's ASM solution which has evolved since by including both API discovery and multi-region monitoring. API discovery  locates exposed API endpo...
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Edgescan, why we do what we do.....

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  The cyber security industry is full of solutions to make you more secure. Some are unproven and other approaches work if deployed properly. Our industry is very fragmented. for example a recent "Cyber Defense" award I noticed has 195 categories!  I suppose we need to ask ourselves as companies from time to time why we do what we do?  So, the following post is, I guess, the reason we developed Edgescan and why we believe its a decent solution to help organizations improve and be more resilient in relation to cyber security and system protection.... Vulnerability scanning alone did not work. The idea of software testing software for vulnerabilities is a good one but both sides of the equation may have bugs. Bugs in one side (The target) may result in vulnerabilities, whilst bugs on the other side (Scanner) may result in false negatives and false positives.  Accuracy : To that end we built edgescan as a combination of automation to discover vulnerabilities at scale bu...
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HSE Hack - What should we do now......personal opinion

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What I would do to make the HSE a more resilient organization from a cyber standpoint...... This is somewhat an open letter to my government on how to secure *our* data. I do not cover compliance or certification but more practical "Must-have" items. Awareness & Resilience (and budget) Folks who write the cheques need to understand the value and importance of cyber security. Its not a "Tax" or an "Insurance" its a process to which we try to help ensure we are somewhat resilient to breach. Breach is 9 times out of 10 more expensive than multiple years of cyber spend. Embrace cyber security! "Hackers don't give a shit" and if you are weak you will be hit. Cyber-Resilience and awareness may not prevent breach but it may limit the extent of the breach and enable us to act in a timely manner before the genie is out of the bottle.  Investment in cyber security is paramount due to the potential losses due to fraud and breach recovery. Compliance...
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The HSE Data Breach and the State of Irish Cyber Security Many years ago, shortly after I founded the Irish chapter of OWASP ( http://www.owasp.org ) (in 2007??) we were delivering free application and software development classes to anyone who wanted them. It was a local low key affair but every class we delivered was "sold out". We have 60-80 folks mostly developers willing to spend 4-5 hours on learning the fundamentals of secure application development and testing. I suppose we felt cyber security was an important issue because that's what we did. At the time many folks in business felt cyber security was an overhead or a "tax" and did not give it much time. A few years later (late 2010) when the the foundation of the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) was announced, a few of us (local OWASP Ireland leaders) wrote a number of emails to the Irish government offering free cyber security training. As we were working for a non profit (501.3c) charity (OWA...
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