Want to Improve your Cybersecurity Posture? Get Beyond the Usual Suspects
From Equifax to Yahoo, WannaCry and Petra, every month seems to bring with it yet another high-profile attack. Vendors roll out patches and fixes, and questions are asked across the political and security communities. These enquiries and discussions almost always end up concluding that the usual cyber suspects are the culprits, writes Rob Waters, a Global Defense Systems Engineer at ForeScout Technologies, a DLT solutions partner. “Truth is, every high-profile breach has a familiar storyline: old, unpatched vulnerabilities, advanced persistent threats and lack of visibility.” But why do governments and organizations continue to struggle with combating these big breaches? Waters offers a couple of reasons: 1. It’s not easy or cheap to secure an enterprise network using traditional methods. 2. The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing exponentially and increasing the attack surface. By 2020, Gartner predicts that IoT technology will be in 95% of new product designs. Plus, government adoption of IoT is booming, the federal market alone is expected to grow to $3 billion this year. Together, these create big opportunities for the enemy with no face. But traditional cyber solutions are struggling to 
keep pace. That’s because you can’t protect what you can’t see. Siloed security solutions don’t provide the visibility needed into risks on “…long-forgotten orphan virtual machines, rogue software installations and connected devices. The days of simple, standardized IT infrastructure are over; we are living in a cloud-consuming, SDN-enabled, IoT era,” says Waters. Key to mitigating against the risks posed by the usual suspects, is understanding who has access to data, where that data resides, and what is running on your network. Something that’s increasingly hard to do in multi-vendor environments. Device visibility and orchestration (i.e. tearing down security silos), however, can help. By shining a light on black holes and closing cybersecurity hygiene gaps, agencies can achieve a unified cybersecurity framework that acts as a central hub of intelligence that corrects poor network visibility and delayed responses to cyber threats. Check out Rob’s blog post for more insights on how ForeScout ingests data from leading security tools and automatically responds to detected threats, and much more.
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This week's roundup of the latest news and insights gathered from IBM's Government Research Institute thought leaders:
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"Zero Trust is a cybersecurity strategy and framework that embeds IT security mechanisms throughout an architecture that generate metadata used to secure, manage, and monitor every device user, application, and network transaction at the perimeter and within every network enclave."
From the Department of Defense (DoD) Zero Trust Reference Architecture v1.0
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New Leadership
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Dawit Blackwell
Analytics & Data Science, Big Data & Analytics, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Market Intelligence
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurned greater demand for health information technology (IT) by demonstrating the importance of having robust medical research, health surveillance and healthcare systems capable of rapidly responding to new and developing situations, something which requires strong IT investment in big data, cybersecurity and cloud. In addition, both the pandemic and emerging technologies have led to numerous changes within the healthcare industry, such as telehealth expansion and increased use of wearables, which necessitate robust health IT solutions.
Gabriel Zighelboim
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Zero Trust is a concept gaining significant attention across the federal landscape. The idea isn’t new, and yet the notion of "never trust, always verify" is appearing more and more in memos, solicitations and other federal government announcements. For example, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released memo M-22-09, "Moving the U.S. Government Toward Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles," in late January 2022.
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Don Maclean
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