Azure Policies

Welcome back to Part Two of our four-part Blueprint Series. Today's post covers the use of Azure Policies within a Blueprint deployment along with ARM templates and permissions management. Azure Policies are the critical component of Azure Blueprints. Policies, like ARM Templates, are JSON...

So Long, Privacy Shield

In whats rapidly becoming the splashiest news to hit the privacy space in years, the Court of Justice of the EU CJEU, the highest court in the European Union, invalidated the U.S. Privacy Shield, a legal instrument that made it possible for organizations operating in the United States to transfer...

A new way to manage supply chain risk – Introducing the AICPA SOC for Supply Chain report

With the continuation of its System and Organization Controls SOC suite of services SOC 2®, SOC for Cybersecurity, etc., the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants AICPA has released a new report format that focuses on manufacturing and distribution supply chains. The AICPAs SOC for...

Establishing risk appetite is key to effective risk management

The mission of an enterprise risk management program is to respond to and monitor risks to the enterprises operations and objectives. In order to properly respond to and monitor risks, the enterprise must establish risk appetite thresholds. Well-established and well-communicated risk appetite...

Remote Workforce is NOT the New Norm, but “Secure Work Anywhere” Should Be

Secure Work Anywhere SWA is a new term for an old idea that is quickly becoming an industry standard. The overall principles of SWA are not new, but the risks associated with increased rates of workers connecting from potentially unsecure networks highlight the importance of those principles now...

FedRAMP – 8 years in and 100 assessments achieved

Back in 2011, if you had asked me what cloud computing was, I would have looked at you with a blank look on my face. At the time, I was supporting a Federal client when my boss asked me to assist in applying to become a 3PAO. I had no clue what 3PAO even stood for it stands for Third-Party...

Applied ThreadFix: Security teams collaborating with development teams

Modern enterprises are distributed. Most ThreadFix deployments have stakeholders spanning development and security teams and those team members are spread around the globe. To support these distributed organizations, ThreadFix has a number of collaboration features that make teams more efficient...

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...

With IoT, common devices pose new threats

For Instance… Hackers Setting Your 3D Printer on Fire The world is careening toward the reality that almost all electronics in your home and business are connected to the internet. Many of these devices contain things like heating elements, batteries, and motors that are entirely...

NIST SP 800-171A Assessment: Finalized Assessment Objectives Foster a Roadmap to Compliance

On June 13, 2018, NIST formally released their Special Publication SP 800-171A, Assessing Security Requirements Controlled Unclassified Information CUI.This publication provides organizations with an assessment methodology to evaluate their compliance with the CUI security requirements defined in...

Incident Response: Do Your Vendor Contracts Have Claws (for Liability)?

In previous blogs, weve discussed some of the struggles organizations have when responding to cyber incidents. For many, it is the recovery aspect, and specifically vendor liability for the data or privacy breach, that poses many questions. In trying to assign liability, the obvious place to star...

Black Hat 2017: training, cybersecurity trends and end-point protection

Every year, Black Hat is a highly anticipated event in the cybersecurity community--and Black Hat 2017 certainly did not disappoint! It was yet another year of record traffic, bustling with visitors from the security community that want to strengthen their security skills and postures...

Ransomware Response: To Pay or Not to pay

Recently, I was speaking with a CISO friend of mine and he mentioned that his company suffered a breach. I asked if it was a ransomware attack, and sadly, that was the case. Malware had infected nearly every connected computer. Clearly there was a breakdown in protective controls, but Ill get to...

What is Defcon

The first year I attended, I was lucky enough to identify interesting wireless signals with a distinct sound - that of the POCSAG and FLEX protocols. Decoding these signals revealed party invites to the Telephreak party where I listened to raw, uncensored lightning talks covering topics from car...

Coalfire goes to Washington!

Our CEO Larry Jones visited The White House Thursday morning to join with First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Biden in the celebration of the Joining Forces initiatives fifth-year anniversary and announce Coalfires pledge to hire and train veterans and military spouses...

The 100 Million Dollar Getaway - Horror Stories 2015

In todays security landscape, companies face daily threats to their reputation and intellectual property. The typical response to these threats is to purchase a tool or a service claiming to be a magical silver bullet that can respond to all "cyber" threats. In reality, the quest for a security...

Banking with digital currency - A futuristic application

Digital Currency is a thing? $3 Billion dollars USD of money is out there in a digital format, not printed or managed by a government. It has many different product names and each one operates separately. One example of a digital currency is Bitcoin. It is only one of the many digital currencies...

Law Firm - Forensics Services

As cyber threats and attacks have increased year over year, Coalfire has seen a drastic increased need for support to law firms in cybersecurity cases. Attacks and threats vary so often, many law firms lack the skills required to properly evaluate cyber-attacks involving their clients. As such la...

How do cyber insurer's assess cyber risk?

Last week I presented on risk transfer as a viable risk management option to compliance and security professionals at the Financial Crime Compliance Professionals Conference in London. As mentioned in one of Ricks earlier blog entries analyzing the Target kill chain, the communication between...

Whether you are a large or small business, beware of these 5 common security problems

Every January, the trade press if full of new years resolution-like advice… things to do in the coming year, even Coalfire made a few predictions for 2013. I work at Coalfire Labs, and since our business is IT security and testing, we want to share some advice on how to avoid your systems and...

P2PE Hybrid, the next best thing since the Prius

P2PE promises many things, the most coveted being scope reduction for the merchant and a shifting of the compliance burden from the merchant to the service provider. A properly implemented P2PE solution can indeed reduce the risk of compromise for a merchant as well as reduce the scope of what mu...

IT Security Horror Stories: Tale of the Fake IT Rep

Some IT security monsters arent as obvious as a Mummy. At Coalfire Labs, we discover--and help our clients address--some pretty scary security and compliance problems. There are lots of deceptive monsters looking to exploit the weaknesses of their victims. This is one of those terrifying but true...

Coalfire Client FireHost Achieves HITRUST CSF Certification

Yesterday, we were delighted to see our long-time client Firehost announce that they achieved Common Security Framework CSF "Certified" status from the HITRUST Alliance. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, FireHost has made compliance a top priority, and weve enjoyed working with them to achieve...

FISMA vs FedRAMP: Compliance requirement differences

Organizations that work with, or want to work with, government agencies must manage to government compliance regulations. Almost everyone is familiar with the FISMA compliance standards, but with the announcement of FedRAMP, which provides a structure to manage compliance requirements for "a clou...

The hackerproof password? Tips and advice on password management

Having some security expert tell you that you should be creating strong passwords that are unique per account and change frequently is like your dentist telling you that you should floss morning, night and after consuming any dentally dangerous foods. The majority of us say, "yeah right". The tru...

What We Learned at HIMSS12

A few weeks ago, more than 35,000 healthcare IT professionals and 1,100 exhibitors converged on Las Vegas. Some were there to go shopping for "HIT" or health information technology; others were there to sell it. The IT professionals from across the healthcare spectrum were there to meet with each...

Coalfire Expands Dallas Office and Names Kurt Hagerman Managing Director

I am pleased to announce that our Dallas office is growing by leaps and bounds. Leading the charge is Kurt Hagerman, the newly appointed managing director. Kurt will serve more than 60 clients in the Southwest region and oversee Coalfires strategic vision while building new client relationships f...

IT Compliance Matures into Risk Management

Over the past ten years rapid change and an evolving threat landscape has better prepared Coalfire to defend our clients against known risks. Not surprisingly, much of the progress is due to compliance-related investments. As we look towards the next ten years, we see a proactive risk management...

Celebrating Black History Month: Reflections as the Chair of Coalfire's Black Employee Resource Group

As we embark on another February, I am honored to reflect on the significance of Black History Month from the perspective of serving as the chair of Black Employees in Cybersecurity Obtaining Mentorship, Influence, Networking, and Growth B.E.C.O.M.I.N.G., Coalfire's Black Employee Resource Group...

Four key questions for privacy programs in the U.S.

With new state privacy laws passed each year, organizations are tasked with developing privacy programs that are compliant with applicable laws. To help organizations identify their current privacy program maturity, privacy professionals can ask four questions to determine where they stand...

Threat and vulnerability management - No time for complacency

There was some very good news in Coalfires 4th Annual Penetration Risk Report. Most notable was that high-risk vulnerabilities have been cut almost in half since 2018 when we first began reporting our pen testing research derived from thousands of direct client engagements. Also of note, the larg...

Baselining PassGAN: Adventures in the rhubarb

Cracking is a complex topic full of misunderstandings, confusing terminology and weird people. This blog post is front-loaded with some terminology, some explanations, and maybe some apologies. Password cracking: This is fundamentally one thing: guessing. Were not reversing, or talking to spirits...

Using DAST to Expand DevOps Security Coverage

The state of application security is constantly evolving with changing web architectures and approaches. These changes are making security teams employ a wider range of techniques and toolsets to find vulnerabilities within their applications. Web and mobile applications each present their own...

Establishing risk appetite is key to effective risk management

The mission of an enterprise risk management program is to respond to and monitor risks to the enterprises operations and objectives. In order to properly respond to and monitor risks, the enterprise must establish risk appetite thresholds. Well-established and well-communicated risk appetite...

What are the benefits of SAST testing in CI/CD pipelines?

Static application security testing SAST is traditionally used in software development lifecycles both early on in the process and often to "white box" test all files containing source code. Integrating SAST into modern CI/CD pipelines allows developers to continuously monitor their code, providi...

A Cyber Engineering Primer: Vulnerability Management Lifecycle

According to the SANS Institute, "Vulnerability management is the process in which vulnerabilities in IT are identified and the risks of these vulnerabilities are evaluated. This evaluation leads to correcting the vulnerabilities and removing the risk or a formal risk acceptance by the management...

PCI Compliance: Early-TLS and Cloud Service Providers

Organizations tracking their PCI compliance are likely aware of the impending June 30, 2018 deadline to disable SSLv3 and early-TLS. This blog post examines the special case of Cloud Service Providers CSPs and how their customers should proceed to achieve compliance...

Cyber Engineering for 2018 and Beyond

2017 could be considered one of the most exciting or horrifying years in the technology industry. End-of-year statistics showed that the number of reported breaches in the business sector saw a 21% increase over the previous year, and headlines from all major news outlets were riddled with report...

The Spectre of Chips on Meltdown

The news is rife with emerging details of Intel and other chip vulnerabilities and the hardware bugs that can potentially exploit them. While details are still developing and will likely continue to be uncovered in the days, weeks, and even months ahead, we will explore what is known to date...

The Value of Governance in Minimizing Cybersecurity Incidents

Part Two of a Three Part Series Since Equifaxs September 15th statement about their well-publicized, broadly discussed major security incident, Coalfire has fielded multiple inquiries from clients who are wondering if such an incident could happen to them, and if there is anything that they can d...

Just a Few Seats Left at the Coalfire Adaptive Pen Testing Training at Black Hat!

Black Hat is just around the corner, and Coalfire is gearing up for the best Adaptive Penetration Testing Training yet! Weve adapted the Adaptive Penetration Test Training course with new instructors, enriched content, and new labs to provide the richest training to date. The revised training now...

AWS Public Sector Summit 2017: Cloud Super Powers and Security

Coalfire recently returned from the Amazon Web Services AWS Public Sector Summit, held in Washington, D.C., which addresses some of the most pressing issues todays leaders face around security, governance and compliance, and more. While Coalfire has attended the show in the past, we were especial...

Cloud Burst?

The cloud can burst!? This weeks AWS service disruption showed us the importance of architecting a system to account for failure, and how to be successful when deploying your solution in the cloud...

2017 RSA Conference Highlights

Over five days, 45,000 consumers and thought leaders convened at the 2017 RSA Conference, sharing insights on how to stay ahead of todays - and tomorrows - cyber threats. Coalfire was in the thick of it, and here weve compiled some of the most important takeaways...

FedRAMP Readiness Assessment Report (RAR) template launched

As part of the FedRAMP Accelerated process, cloud service providers CSPs can now complete a Readiness Assessment Report RAR to demonstrate their readiness for the FedRAMP process. The RAR is required for CSPs pursuing the FedRAMP JAB approval route. CSPs should also consider having a Readiness...

New PCI DSS Scoping Guidance Corroborates Coalfire’s Approach

On Friday, December 6th 2016, the PCI Security Standards Council released their formal information supplement titled, Guidance for PCI DSS Scoping and Network Segmentation. This particular information supplement has been eagerly anticipated in the PCI DSS industry for several years. The document...

FedRAMP in Bloomberg

Recently Bloomberg Government published an article that describes the increasing awareness of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program FedRAMP as a major factor affecting the federal marketspace. The article indirectly indicates a major first-mover advantage, as there are "only 77...

Breaching a bank in 20 minutes - Horror Stories 2015

I arrived onsite to suite 102 the banks corporate headquarters around 9:40 a.m. I was impersonating a local utility worker - with all the garments like a hardhat, clipboard, obnoxious yellow vest, and some old Timberland work boots. I played the part well...

What the PCI Council’s Point-to-Point-Encryption (P2PE) Update Means for You

Last week, the PCI Security Standards Council PCI SSC published the updated P2PE v2.0 standard. The Summary of Changes from v1.1 to v2.0, the updated P2PE Glossary and the PIM template are available in the PCI SSC documents library. According to the announcement, the highlights of the new version...

PCI Community Meeting - EMV Chip Update

Randy Vanderhoof, Executive Director, EMV Migration Forum EMF, presented the EMV Chip Update today at Day Two of the PCI Community Meeting. The session provided attendees with insights into the EMV chip migration process in the U.S. and how this impacts PCI security efforts...