When vulnerability risk management is proactive, organizations don’t have to hurriedly react to attacks that exploit bugs for which patches are available, as happened with WannaCry. 

“The vast majority of WannaCry remediation took place as an emergency type process,” Jimmy Graham, a Qualys Director of Product Management, said during QSC18 Virtual Edition.

It’s key to have an integrated breach prevention program with asset inventory, vulnerability management, threat prioritization and patch management, he said. 

Graham also outlined how Qualys can help customers comprehensively and proactively manage their vulnerability risk.

Read on to learn more.

Continue reading …

Maintaining an IT asset inventory is essential for a strong security posture, but digital transformation has further complicated this already challenging task.

“The volume and variety of assets, including cloud, virtualization, mobility and IoT, is disrupting IT, and security takes center stage,” Pablo Quiroga, a Qualys Director of Product Management, said during QSC18 Virtual Edition.

Consequently, many security teams can’t definitively answer questions like: What are your IT assets? Where are they located? Who are their owners and users? How are assets related?

Having asset-inventory blind spots heightens security risks, which is why most regulations and standards highlight this practice. For instance, the Center for Internet Security’s Top 20 controls begin with inventory and control of hardware and software, because attackers constantly look to exploit vulnerable assets.

In his presentation, titled “Global IT Asset Discovery, Inventory, and Management,” Quiroga explained the importance of a complete and accurate inventory, and how Qualys can help. Read on to learn more.

Continue reading …

As organizations embrace digital transformation to boost business processes, traditional IT environments get altered, becoming distributed, elastic and hybrid.  “That’s creating a new challenge for security,” Chris Carlson, Qualys’ Product Management VP, said during QSC18 Virtual Edition.

As elements like cloud services, mobility, IoT, and DevOps are incorporated into IT environments, security teams often struggle with asset visibility, credential issues, authentication failures, remote-user scanning, and scheduled scan ineffectiveness.

But these challenges also offer “an opportunity to redefine how security programs and controls are done,” he said during his presentation titled “Securing Hybrid IT Environments from Endpoints to Clouds.” 

Carlson went on to explain how organizations can secure digital transformation efforts with Qualys’ platform, and emphasized the benefits of Cloud Agent sensors. Read on to learn more.

Continue reading …

Digital transformation, driven primarily by the DevOps movement, represents a new opportunity “to redo IT from scratch, but more importantly, to redo security from scratch,” Sumedh Thakar, Qualys’ Chief Product Officer, said during QSC18 Virtual Edition.

Specifically, organizations can organically build security into this new, hybrid IT infrastructure, instead of abruptly bolting it on as has been done traditionally — and ineffectively.  Meshing security in natively requires a unified security and compliance platform for detection, prevention and response.

Today, many organizations have a fragmented, siloed strategy that doesn’t provide the needed visibility because it’s based on accumulating point products that don’t scale, are costly to deploy and maintain, and complex to integrate.

“This is why security is so far behind,” Thakar said during his keynote.

“The effort and resistance that goes into putting together the information that’s required to make decisions is very costly, very time-consuming, and not accurate,” he added.

Continue reading …

Qualys Chairman and CEO Philippe Courtot set the tone for the company’s first virtual conference, the QSC18 Virtual Edition, with a call to the industry to re-invent security to protect digital transformation efforts.

CIOs and CISOs can’t continue accumulating disparate, point solutions that are costly to manage, difficult to integrate, and ultimately ineffective at protecting hybrid IT environments. “The mission is for us together to stop bolting on security and compliance solutions, and start building them in,” he said during the opening keynote.

Digital transformation projects, built by DevOps teams and delivered via cloud services, web apps, and mobile computing, demand a recasting of security’s role. The traditional approach, in which security is an isolated element jammed in at the end of the software pipeline, erases the benefits of digital transformation by slowing it down. 

Qualys is uniquely able to help enterprises address these challenges, he said.

Continue reading …

The IT industry has gone through multiple revolutions – client-server computing, the Internet’s rise, virtualization, mobility – but none rivals the unprecedented impact of today’s digital transformation.

The implications for InfoSec professionals are broad, requiring that they adapt quickly to the profound changes brought about by digital transformation trends.

“Whether you’re ready or not, it’s coming at you, and it’s coming at you very fast,” Scott Crawford, Research Director of Information Security at 451 Research, told Qualys Security Conference 2017 attendees last week in Las Vegas.

Continue reading …

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.

Continue reading …

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.

Continue reading …

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.”

Continue reading …

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.

Continue reading …