Mastering AI Risks: Navigating the NIST AI RMF Core with Coalfire

This article delves into mastering AI risks through the application of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework RMF Core. It emphasizes the importance of understanding and mitigating the multifaceted risks associated with AI, from ethical dilemmas to data security, and introduces Coalfires tailored...

FedRAMP® CSPs face a new challenge meeting FIPS Compliance

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program FedRAMP requires Cloud Service Providers CSPs to meet federal mandates and achieve or maintain a FedRAMP authorization. One of those mandates require the consistent use of FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules everywhere cryptography is...

FedRAMP 101: How to get listed as “In Process”

Are you a cloud service provider working on a federal contract and need a FedRAMP authorization - but dont have a sponsor yet? Acquiring a committed government agency sponsor early in the FedRAMP process is crucial to your success and will ensure a smoother process. A major role for an agency...

Cloud Transformation and the Shared Security Model

For many organizations, the lure of the cloud is very strong. Large enterprises usually have several justifications for adopting cloud-based services including preserving capital, adding scalability to applications, and minimizing IT staffing needs. Small- to medium-sized organizations often look...

So your company has decided to do FedRAMP - What does that mean?

The exponential increase in cloud adoption in recent years has led to a dramatic increase in technology companies evolving from software and application companies to Software as a Service SaaS, Platform as a Service PaaS or Infrastructure as a Service IaaS providers. The 2011 release of the Cloud...

Managing Your Vulnerabilities, FedRAMP Style

As a member of Coalfires Cyber Engineering team, I frequently get questions about vulnerability Deviation Requests DRs from Cloud Service Providers CSPs seeking Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program FedRAMP authorizations. In this post, Ill try to answer questions we frequently...

NIST SP 800-171: What U.S. Government Contractors Need to Know

In December 2016, NIST released Special Publication 800-171, Revision 1: Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems. Since that publication, I have worked with dozens of government contractors to help them understand this publication and determine if and how it applies t...

Meeting FedRAMP and Government Standards – Coalfire Securealities Report

Coalfire released the results of its first annual FedRAMP Marketplace report - Securing Your Cloud Solutions: Research and Analysis on meeting FedRAMP and Government Standards. The findings highlight many positives for cloud service providers and federal agencies, but also opportunities for both ...

New PCI NESA Guidance is Good News for Non-Listed Encryption Solutions

While PCI P2PE is still the most secure approach, solution providers, who are not yet validated, can now offer additional clarity to merchants, QSAs, and acquirers...

Phishing Season: Spam on the rise

Within the past two weeks there have been several reports on the increase in email spam, which can be directly correlated to an increase in phishing schemes and malware attacks. These attacks are frequently being delivered under the guise of legitimate business: they come in the form of shipment...

Guardians of IoT: Addressing IoT security vulnerabilities in electric vehicles and charging stations

The rise of electric vehicles EVs and charging infrastructure necessitates robust security measures, especially in the context of IoT integration. Explore the vulnerabilities in EV systems and potential risks, proposing mitigation strategies like firmware updates, user authentication, intrusion...

The state of cybersecurity compliance in 2023 – part 1

This first blog in the series captures the key takeaways from Coalfires Annual Compliance Report...

White House cyber strategy: leadership is now accountable

The National Cybersecurity Strategy represents one of the most significant market-driving forces in the history of IT. It ushers in a new era of standards, requirements, and best practices that will define how our economy works and how buyers interact with sellers for decades to come...

Top 4 myths about cybersecurity compliance assessors: How to build a successful auditor partnership that enables your business

In this series of blog posts, we will debunk the assumptions of your assessor relationship, navigate independence requirements, and create a space for mutual collaboration and innovation...

Applied ThreadFix: Seeding Your Application Portfolio with OWASP Amass

OWASP Amass is a great tool for asset discovery and enterprise attack surface mapping. It pulls data from a number of different data sources and identifies potential hosts and applications associated with organizations, domains, IP CIDRs and other identifiers. As we have noted, having a solid...

Successful DevSecOps begins with a cultural shift

A successful DevSecOps approach fosters cohesive collaboration between Development, Security, and Operations teams for the cultivation of outcomes that improve security while also maintaining the goals of DevOps. Within DevSecOps, security is an additional foundational component in the process...

The Basics of Exploit Development 3: Egg Hunters

Hello dear reader. If you have read the other articles in this series, welcome back! If not I encourage you to read the previous installments before proceeding with this post. This post covers a surprisingly useful technique in exploit development called Egg Hunters. In order to demonstrate how E...

Part two: Reverse engineering and patching with Ghidra

In the first installment of our three-part blog series we learned how to root the Flashforge Finder 3D printer and acquire its firmware. In this post, we will delve into reverse engineering and patching the software using the new open source NSA tool Ghidra, which rivals its expensive competitors...

So your company has decided to do FedRAMP - What does that mean?

The exponential increase in cloud adoption in recent years has led to a dramatic increase in technology companies evolving from software and application companies to Software as a Service SaaS, Platform as a Service PaaS or Infrastructure as a Service IaaS providers. The 2011 release of the Cloud...

Will ISO 27701 Be the New GDPR Certification?

On August 6, ISO published the ISO/IEC 27701:2019 "ISO 27701" standard, which lays out the requirements for implementing an organizational program to govern the handling of personally identifiable information PII, known as a Privacy Information Management System PIMS. In many ways, the new standa...

Continuous Monitoring in the Cloud

I recently spoke at the Cloud Security Alliances Federal Summit on the topic "Continuous Monitoring / Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation CDM Concepts in the Cloud." As government has moved and will continue to move to the cloud, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure continuous...

Background Checks on AIs and Other Challenges in the PCI World

Coalfire has noted a number of leading-edge technological challenges for enterprises managing the rapid pace of innovation while also aiming for PCI compliance. Wed like to review our recent experience and offer suggestions for these comparatively novel situations...

Highlights from the HITRUST Third-Party Assurance Summit

The HITRUST TPA Summit brought together experts representing customers, vendors, and assessor firms in various aspects of risk management to share best practices, lessons learned and effective third-party risk management strategies leveraging the HITRUST CSF Assurance Program and HITRUST Assessme...

The Archimedes Medical Device Security 101 Conference - A Secure Forum for Security Issues

The University of Michigans Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security hosted its second annual MDS 101 conference in Orlando this month. The conference provides a secure forum for attendees to speak freely about cybersecurity issues with respected professionals who can help establish best...

Deploying and Troubleshooting Compliance Baselines

If you are in the IT space, youve most likely encountered or are bound by some form of regulation/framework such as PCI, HIPAA, FISMA, and/or CGIS. Most of these compliance programs require a hardened baseline to be implemented within your information systems to reduce the risk and impact of an...

How I discovered CVE-2017-13707

New Vulnerability Found Using Techniques Taught at Black Hat USA One of the topics I teach in Coalfires Adaptive Penetration Testing course, given most recently at Black Hat 2017, is manual privilege escalation on Linux- and Unix-based systems. I also talk about how common it is to gain an initia...

AWS releases PCI DSS Quick Start for Deploying PCI DSS In-Scope Workloads

In the next step to help customers adopt their platform for PCI, Amazon Web Services AWS has released their PCI DSS Quick Start program. The PCI DSS Quick Start program is the next evolution of cloud providers developing tools for rapid deployment of standardized configurations to drive adoption ...

The Clock is ticking for EU and US to Negotiate New Safe Harbor Deal: What You Can Do to Stay Out of Legal Limbo

European authorities have given the European Union and US officials three months to come up with an alternative to the Safe Harbor agreement after the European Court of Justice ECJ declared Safe Harbor laws invalid earlier this month. The new agreement must protect the personal data of European...

In Memory of Our Friend, Rick Dakin

We are deeply saddened to announce that our founder and CEO Rick Dakin passed away suddenly over the weekend...

The PCI Enforcement Hammer is Ready to Drop

The time for nervous anticipation for PCI breach response is over …. VISA has issued dramatic PCI Data Security Standard Compliance enforcement guidance for Level 1 and 2 merchants and all Service Providers. Effective January 1st, 2015, noncompliance costs will be applied sooner and will escalate...

Apple Pay: A New Way to Pay

Every September, Apple announces exciting new products that promise to change how we interact with not only our devices, but with the world around us. 2014 has been no exception; in San Francisco this morning, Apple announced the iPhone 6, Apple Watch and Apple Pay. Even though Im excited about t...

2013 PCI SSC European Community Meeting Wrap-Up

Matt Getzleman - PCI Practice Director, Dan Fritsche - Director, Solution Validation, Andrew Barratt - Managing Director UK, and Brian Pennington - Regional Sales Director, discuss the recent PCI SSC Community Meeting in Nice, France...

BYOD Survey Results: Employees are not playing it safe with company data

Employers are seeing a drastic increase in the number of employees using personal smartphones and tablets in the office. This "Bring Your Own Device" BYOD trend is causing headaches for the IT department and there is no stopping this trend. Due to the sensitive nature of company information often...

Guardians of IoT: Fortifying the financial sector in the age of IoT

The Internet of Things IoT has revolutionized the financial industry, but its associated security vulnerabilities and risks must be addressed to protect sensitive data...

What to look for in an audit partner

How are successful auditor partnerships formed? It starts with selecting the right auditor and taking them with you on your organizations compliance journey...

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month

Coalfire employees share what Asian American and Pacific Islander AAPI Heritage Month means to them...

Six steps to prepare your application security team for a penetration test

This blog post will show step-by-step how an application security team should prepare for a penetration test...

FedRAMP just got better – and is here to stay

Today, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act NDAA, taking a giant step forward in securing the federal governments cloud-first mission. The FedRAMP® Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program Authorization Act, outlined in section 5921 of the NDAA, formalizes the...

Highlights from FedRAMP®’s new Penetration Test Guidance

In an effort to stay on top of the evolving threats being faced by the cloud community, the FedRAMP PMO released Version 3.0 of their Penetration Test Guidance, dated June 30, 2022. 3PAOs and CSPs should begin using the updated pen test guide for pen tests beginning shortly after June 5, 2022,...

Penetration testing and red teaming: The differences and reasons why both are important to your business

Penetration testing, also known as ethical hacking, white-hat hacking, or pen testing, is one important form of security assessment that tests people, process, and technology to find security vulnerabilities that a potential attacker could exploit. Red teaming is a more targeted approach that...

The right ASM tools include understanding where the real risk lies

While companies are just scratching the surface of understanding their Internet-facing architecture, hackers have been monitoring growing attack surfaces to find vulnerabilities where companies arent looking or maybe not prioritizing and reaping the reward through bug bounty programs...

Please Stop Managing Vulnerabilities in Excel Spreadsheets

Do your best Excel users work in application security? Are you trying to manage thousands of vulnerabilities across hundreds of applications in an increasingly elaborate series of Excel spreadsheets? Most companies are using multiple scanning technologies as well as a variety of manual testing...

So your company has decided to do FedRAMP - What does that mean?

The exponential increase in cloud adoption in recent years has led to a dramatic increase in technology companies evolving from software and application companies to Software as a Service SaaS, Platform as a Service PaaS or Infrastructure as a Service IaaS providers. The 2011 release of the Cloud...

Should cloud service providers be concerned with FIPS 140-3?

If youve dealt with FedRAMP, you may already know that FIPS 140-2 is the standard for cryptographic modules published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST. All cloud service providers CSPs who wish to be FedRAMP compliant must use only crypto modules that have been validated...

Deserialized Double Dirty

Recently I was able to fully root a NetApp OnCommand Performance Manager appliance using a Java Deserialization vulnerability and Dirty COW...

The Unhealthy Security of Healthcare

I have been involved in a number of healthcare penetration tests here at Coalfire and in my previous roles. I have hacked electronic medical records, medical devices, and most importantly, humans. From my time as a systems engineer at a medical device and systems vendor to my current role at...

IoT Discussion at the Leidos Supplier Innovation & Technology Symposium

Coalfire was asked to participate on a technical panel about the Internet of Things IoT at the Leidos Supplier Innovation & Technology Symposium on June 6. This event is a dynamic day enabling Leidos largest suppliers as well as targeted start-ups to showcase their offerings and capabilities to a...

Microsoft Word Document Upload to Stored XSS: A Case Study

Anytime I see a file upload form during an application test, my attention is piqued. In a best-case scenario, I can upload a reverse shell in a scripting language available on the webserver. If the application is running in PHP or ASP for example, it becomes quite easy. If I cant get a backdoor...

Icebreaker: Chip Away at Active Directory Passwords, Automatically

To break the ice with Active Directory and shorten the cycles penetration testers spend on cracking passwords, I developed Icebreaker, a tool that automates network attacks against Active Directory and provides plaintext credentials. Icebreaker performs five network attacks in order...

Coalfire’s Adaptive Penetration Testing at Black Hat Helped Prepare Tomorrow’s Security Talent

What makes a penetration tester highly successful? Most obviously, the technical skills to hack into a network, application, or location comes to mind first, and without those capabilities and the ability to continuously learn, an aspiring pen tester has a tough road ahead of them...