Capital One prides itself on staying at the forefront of IT innovations to give its business a competitive edge.

For example, it adopted Agile software-development methodologies years ago, and uses artificial intelligence and machine learning. It was the first bank to implement a mobile wallet with “contactless” NFC payments, and to offer voice-activated financial transactions using Amazon’s Alexa. When 2018 ends, Capital One expects 80% of its IT infrastructure to be cloud based, allowing it to go from seven to two data centers.

Given its tech transformation track record, it’s not surprising that Capital One has embraced DevSecOps, embedding automated security checks into its DevOps pipeline. This effort has dramatically accelerated the process of assessing vulnerabilities and mis-configurations in its virtual machine images and containers.

As a result, the code created in the DevOps pipeline is certified as secure and released to production without unnecessary delays. This allows Capital One — one of the United States’ 10 largest banks, based on deposits — to consistently boost its business across the board by quickly and continuously improving its web properties, mobile apps, online services and digital offerings.

“This has provided a huge benefit to the entire company,” said Emmanuel Enaohwo, Senior Manager for Vulnerability/Configuration Management at Capital One, a Fortune 500 company based in McLean, Virginia that offers a broad spectrum of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses and commercial clients.

Read on to learn how the bank has automated vulnerability and compliance checks in its CI/CD software pipeline, helped by Qualys.

Continue reading …

This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.34.1 includes updates and new features for Cloud Agent & AWS EC2 Connector, AssetView, CloudView, and Security Assessment Questionnaire, highlights as follows.

Continue reading …

This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.34 includes updates and new features for Cloud Agent, EC2 Connector, Continuous Monitoring, Security Assessment Questionnaire, Web Application Scanning, and Web Application Firewall, highlights as follows.

Continue reading …

As organizations increase their use of public cloud platforms, they encounter cloud-specific security and compliance threats, which can be challenging to address without the right tools and processes.

Organizations’ cloud security difficulties lie in two main areas: Lack of visibility into their cloud assets and resources, and a misunderstanding of cloud providers’ shared security responsibility model. As a result, there have been a multitude of easily preventable security mishaps in public cloud deployments due to leaky storage buckets, misconfigured security groups, and erroneous user policies.

These security breakdowns have caused data breaches and other compromises at organizations large and small, including Verizon, Viacom, the Republican National Committee, Tesla and the U.S. Department of Defense. The key to protect public cloud workloads lies in adopting a cloud-native way of supporting and securing your resources in a hybrid IT environment, so as to have full visibility and control.

“Rather than having bifurcated tooling or bifurcated processes or even bifurcated teams, organizations need a unified view of their resources and security posture across on-premises and cloud environments,” Hari Srinivasan, Director of Product Management at Qualys, said during a recent webcast.

Read on to learn about cloud security challenges, best practices, and how Qualys can help you secure any infrastructure, at any scale, on-premises and in cloud, via a unified interface, using uniform standards and processes.

Continue reading …

This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.33 includes the release for CertView, plus updates and new features for AssetView, Cloud Agent, EC2 Connector, Security Assessment Questionnaire, Web Application Scanning, and Web Application Firewall, highlights as follows.  (This posting has been edited to include an update to WAS that is available in a patch release.)

Continue reading …

With organizations aggressively moving workloads to public cloud platforms, such as Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft’s Azure, protecting these environments is critical for compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

These public cloud platforms are being used to power digital transformation initiatives across a wide variety of business functions, including supply chain management, customer support, employee collaboration, sales and marketing.

In all of these business tasks that are being digitally transformed in the cloud, customer personal data regulated by GDPR is likely to be stored, processed and shared.

Continue reading …

Organizations are aggressively moving workloads to public cloud platforms, such as Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft’s Azure, upping the ante for InfoSec teams, which must protect these new environments.

Driving this growth in cloud computing adoption is its essential role in digital transformation initiatives, which help businesses be more efficient, effective, flexible and innovative in areas like e-business, supply chain management, customer support and employee collaboration.

Digital transformation projects are typically delivered using web and mobile apps created in DevOps pipelines, where developers and operations staff work collaboratively at every step of the software lifecycle, releasing apps or app updates frequently.

But security must be integrated throughout the DevOps process — planning, coding, testing, releasing, deploying, monitoring — in an automated way, organically building it into the software lifecycle instead of bolting it on at the end.

That way, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, policy violations, malware and other safety issues can be addressed before code is released, reducing the risk of exposing your organization and your customers to cyber attacks.

In a recent webcast, Hari Srinivasan, Qualys’ Director of Product Management for Cloud and Virtualization Security, explained how Qualys can help you secure your cloud and container deployments across your DevOps pipeline.

Continue reading …

Apple has been all over InfoSec news in the past week or so, along with Spectre / Meltdown developments, a tax season scam alert from the feds, and an apparent solution to the Winter Olympics’ hack whodunit. In addition, researchers warned about a new trend of using Memcached servers to significantly boost DDoS attacks, as GitHub became a victim of this new tactic.

Apple under siege

The second half of February was intense for Apple on the security front. A digital forensics vendor claimed having the ability to unlock all iPhone models, including the X, while a researcher warned about a Trojan targeting MacOs computers that’s not detected by anti-virus products. Oh, and Apple had to squash another one of those pesky bugs that let people crash iPhones via texting.

Unlocking iPhones

Forbes dropped a news bomb on Monday when it reported that Cellebrite recently started telling its customers — which are primarily government, military and corporate investigative teams — that it’s able to unlock and extract data from devices running iOS 11, such the iPhone X, as well as other iPhones, iPads and iPods.

While Cellebrite isn’t publicly trumpeting this capability, anonymous sources told Forbes that in recent months the company “has developed undisclosed techniques to get into iOS 11 and is advertising them to law enforcement and private forensics folk across the globe.”

As Forbes noted, Cellebrite has posted a brochure on its website where it details its ability to unlock these Apple products as well as several Android devices, and extract data from them. The way it works is that customers ship the devices to Cellebrite, where its engineers work their magic. Cellebrite can’t (or won’t) crack devices remotely.

Continue reading …

This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.32 includes updates and new features for AssetView, EC2 Connector, File Integrity Monitoring, Indication of Compromise, Security Assessment Questionnaire, Web Application Scanning, and Web Application Firewall, highlights as follows.  (Post updated 3/23 to include new FIM features for this release.)

Continue reading …

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 …