Commvault Unveils Clumio Backtrack - Near Instant Dataset Recovery in S3
Security news in four minutes is back this week! Last week was busy and thought-provoking. These days, every week gets me more excited for the future of the industry.
I grew up with the hacker mindset: Figure out how everything works and how to repurpose technology for new uses, with an ethos of technology for people and protecting digital rights.
With this hacker mindset as a lens, I’m optimistic about the new cyber security strategy from the U.S. federal government. This strategy illustrates that the ideas of protecting internet connected infrastructure and privacy are being taken more seriously. Although it took 25 years to go from hacker discussions on BBSs and in ’zines, to policy in the White House, privacy rights and security are reaching all levels.
Execution on the new strategy will bring further industry growth, healthy debate on how we should handle and regulate data, and, if the current administration is successful, it will shape the future of cyber security. Anything at a national level takes time, and that’s a good thing. It will take time to listen and consider the full impact of proposed changes. While this memo only sets a strategic direction, it’s the beginning of a more serious stance than we have previously seen.
Here are my takeaways:
Switching gears to commentary on recent attacks, the LastPass breach has been well covered but I want to note the parallels between the attack TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) in that breach and the attack in the news last week, “SCARLETEEL.”
In both of these attacks we see threat actors gaining access to credentials to steal data from the cloud. Initial access in each attack was very different; nonetheless, the result was the same: data theft from cloud resources (MITRE ATT&CK TA0009,T1530,T1213).
While organizations are getting better at cloud security, it shows we have a long way to go as an industry. We still need to find better answers to security that works with humans. Access controls are the most common failure point for initial access, we miss malicious use due to fatiguing monitoring programs, and our disaster recovery programs and backups are architected for legacy technology challenges, not modern cloud challenges.
To wrap up, here are a few articles worth your time: