U.S. law has failed to protect Americans from widespread and excessive surveillance, a dire situation that requires immediate attention from citizens, lawmakers, attorneys, privacy experts and the courts.

That was the urgent warning Jennifer S. Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, conveyed to attendees of the Qualys Security Conference 2017 during the event’s closing keynote speech.

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While malicious hackers are the obvious enemies of InfoSec pros, there’s something else that puts IT environments in danger: Perfectionism.

When applied to security, perfectionism becomes detrimental, creating a false certainty that all bases are covered and yielding a fundamentally flawed approach to protecting enterprises from attacks, according to Neil MacDonald, a Gartner Distinguished Analyst and Vice President.

“Perfect security is impossible,” MacDonald said during a keynote speech at the Qualys Security Conference 2017 on Thursday.

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Digital transformation initiatives, if properly implemented, must go way beyond deploying the latest shiny IT systems. Instead, they must aim to fundamentally disrupt and reinvent business processes throughout the entire organization.

That was the message Qualys Chief Product Officer Sumedh Thakar delivered on Wednesday during his morning keynote “Our Journey into the Cloud: The Qualys Cloud Platform & Architecture.”

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It’s not yet Thursday, but attendees at Qualys Security Conference 2017 were treated to a major “throwback” as CEO and Chairman Philippe Courtot journeyed back centuries during QSC17’s opening keynote to illustrate the seismic changes of today’s digital revolution.

Courtot cited some of history’s biggest shifts, such as the development of the printing press, which dramatically accelerated the distribution of knowledge, triggering massive political and economic changes, as well as Copernicus’ heliocentric model, which upended astronomy.

The difference is that changes of that magnitude are happening much more frequently in our time, as the Internet powers developments driven by digital technologies at dizzying speeds.

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Qualys Security Conference 2017 finds Qualys rapidly advancing in its ongoing quest to seamlessly and transparently thread security into the fabric of IT environments, and to make it essential for digital transformation.

At QSC17, happening this week in Las Vegas, Qualys executives will share how the company’s growing catalog of security and compliance apps, powered by the highly scalable Qualys Cloud Platform, can yield substantial benefits and unique advantages to our customers and partners.

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It’s a well-known fact that most successful cyber attacks are easily preventable. That’s because the majority are neither highly sophisticated nor carefully customized.

Instead, they are of the “spray and pray” sort. They try to exploit known vulnerabilities for which patches are available, or to take advantage of weak configuration settings that IT departments could have handily and quickly hardened.

One recent and infamous example was the WannaCry ransomware, which infected 300,000-plus systems and disrupted critical operations globally in May. It spread using the EternalBlue exploit for a Windows vulnerability Microsoft had patched in March.

So why do many businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies — including those with substantial cybersecurity resources and knowledge — continue falling prey to these largely unrefined and easy to deflect strikes?

In most cases, the main reason can be traced back to hygiene — of the cybersecurity type, of course. Just as personal hygiene practices reduce the risk of getting sick, applying cybersecurity hygiene principles goes a long way towards preventing security incidents.

That was the key message Qualys Product Management Director Tim White and SANS Institute Analyst John Pescatore delivered during the recent webcast “Automating CIS Critical Security Controls for Threat Remediation and Enhanced Compliance.”

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End users and their devices are right smack in the center of the battle between enterprise InfoSec teams and malicious hackers, and it’s not hard to see why.

When compromised, connected endpoints — desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets — offer intruders major entry points into corporate networks. However, end users are also their organizations’ best threat detection tools.

That’s a key takeaway from SANS Institute’s “2017 Threat Landscape Survey: Users on the Front Line,” a report published in August and co-sponsored by Qualys.

The study, conducted in May and June, polled 263 IT and InfoSec pros from companies of all sizes and major industries such as finance, government, technology and education.

It found that most of the top intrusion methods reported by respondents sought to directly or indirectly compromise end users or their devices. Hackers’ preferred threat vectors included:

• Email attachment or link (flagged by 74 percent of respondents)
• Web-based drive by or download (48 percent)
• App vulnerabilities on endpoints (30 percent)
• Web server / web app vulnerabilities (26 percent)
• Removable storage devices (26 percent)

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Destruction of service. Get acquainted with this newly-minted term, and with its acronym — DeOS. It’s a particularly disturbing type of cyber attack InfoSec teams may face regularly in the not too distant future.

That’s one of the main findings featured in the Cisco 2017 Midyear Cybersecurity Report, a comprehensive cyber security study the networking giant has been publishing for almost a decade.

Due to several troubling developments, including the expected popularization of DeOS attacks — intended to wreck breached IT systems — and the proliferation of IoT device use in DDoS attacks, this report blares a special alarm.

“We must raise our warning flag even higher,” reads the report, which is based on research and data from Cisco and several of its technology partners, including Qualys. “Our security experts are becoming increasingly concerned about the accelerating pace of change — and yes, sophistication — in the global cyber threat landscape.”
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It’s happening all over the business world. Organizations of all sizes and in all industries are aggressively deploying innovative products to new online consumer channels, digitizing their core services and transitioning core business workloads to public clouds as part of digital transformation efforts aimed at increasing business efficiency and effectiveness.

This trend represents both a challenge and an opportunity for InfoSec teams. The challenge: To ensure the security and compliance of these cloud instances, without interrupting their deployment. The opportunity: To become a partner to business units by facilitating the adoption of public cloud services and other digital transformation technologies.

The digital transformation opportunities ahead are immense, according to Qualys’ CISO. Digital transformation programs are yielding tangible business benefits, but fundamental security challenges remain, he said during the recent webcast “Securing Your Public Cloud Infrastructure.” 

Specifically, InfoSec teams must gain visibility into these cloud workloads, so that they can monitor those assets, identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and promptly remediate problems. Continue reading …

Third-party security assessments drastically reduce your organization’s risk of suffering a data breach. When carried out properly, these assessments identify poor InfoSec and privacy practices among your vendors, partners, contractors, and other third parties with access to your IT systems and data. Unfortunately, many businesses conduct these assessments manually, using email and spreadsheets, which makes them labor-intensive, slow and imprecise. This manual approach strains InfoSec teams and creates a backlog of security evaluations.

In a recent webcast, “Streamlining Third Party Risk Assessments in the Cloud,” a Qualys customer discussed how his organization tackled this challenge in a way that improved productivity, efficiency, visibility, and risk analysis. Below are the answers to the questions asked by participants during the Q&A portion of the presentation, provided by speakers Jonathan Osmolski, Manager of Enterprise Records and Information Governance at Pekin Insurance, and Hariom Singh, Director of Product Management for Qualys Security Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ).

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