NIST Ushers In a New Era of IT Risk Management
August – Dr. Paulo Shakarian
Topic: Artificial Intelligence Research for Forecasting Exploit Usage
Vulnerability disclosure rates are at an all-time high – averaging over 1,000 per month in 2019 – more than twice as much as in 2016. But while disclosure rates have remained at this high level, hackers still only exploit a small fraction ranging from 2%-3% by most studies. Ironically, the fact that exploited vulnerabilities make up such a small portion mean that this a particularly challenging machine learning problem. In this talk will review a series of peer-reviewed research papers that were produced under U.S. government grant funding that have investigated this problem. Through a combination of machine learning, graph theory, and data mining (from sources including social media, deepweb, open web, and Tor sites), these approaches provided promising results. These techniques leveraged an understanding of not only the content of hacker discussions, but also the underlying social structure of these communities as well as technical information about the vulnerabilities themselves. This, in-turn, enabled successful forecasting of exploits before they become available – providing a 20-fold improvement in terms of precision. This talk not only reviews the peer reviewed research, but also gives insight into how machine learning can be used to address cybersecurity problems and provides examples of exploit usage successfully predicted ahead of time.
July – Gary Asplund
Topic: My CEO Told Me We Have To Move Our Datacenter to the Public Cloud…So, What’s the Big Deal?
Abstract:
Consider the following:
– You don’t own any of it but, it is your responsibility to control and secure everything in it
– You don’t own any of it, but you critically depend on what’s in it
– You don’t maintain any of it, but you trust all of it is properly maintained at all times
– You can’t touch any of it, but it’s up to you to completely orchestrate, control and secure what’s in it
– You can’t physically walk in anywhere but you (and anyone else on the planet with the right access) can virtually access from everywhere
At first blush, a seasoned and experienced network / security director may not fully appreciate the significant differences and challenges his/her staff will experience in trying to fulfill their job duties when their datacenter is in the public cloud. The old strategy of ‘lift and shift’ – creating VM’s of all of your current/existing hardware and ‘shifting’ it to the cloud – will fail. Further evidence of the urgent need for purpose-built tools to secure public cloud infrastructures can be seen in the multiple and repeated data leaks and misconfiguration compromises we have seen in the last year – According to Gartner, “Through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.”
And in a world which is rapidly becoming completely ‘software defined’ new skills and tools are required.
In this session, we will discuss why today’s IT organizations require mature and complete native tools – built in the cloud for the cloud – which provide:
– Complete visibility
– Configuration management – Identity protection
– Secure DevOps
– Compliance Automation
– Governance Enforcement
– Environment Lockdown
We will discuss the subtle yet profound differences in operating your datacenter in the public cloud vs operating your own datacenter. We will discuss the ’Shared Responsibility Model’ and what it really means to you and your IT department as you expand the number of workloads you move to the public cloud. And, as your sophistication increases, and you expand your use of PaaS and IaaS, the complexities follow in tandem. We will show how today’s IT organizations require new, purpose-built tools designed and capable of ’speaking the same language’ as the public cloud infrastructures and built to leverage the extensive API’s they provide.
June – Kevin Albano
Topic: Effective Threat Intelligence Sharing
Many organizations struggle with creating threat intelligence for a variety of reasons – availability of data, trust of the data, and effective integration with other sources, among others. Further compounding the challenge is the need to convert the information into meaningful and actionable actions. With the possibility of mounting cyber threats to several densely populated areas, many municipalities across the world face a growing need for insightful information to act and react to real-time dangers.
In this presentation, we will present approaches to effective sharing of threat intelligence and how we create new threat intelligence every day using commercial data sources for malware, surface web, dark web and open data sources.
Speaker: Kevin Albano
Kevin Albano, Global Lead, Threat Intelligence, IBM X-Force IRIS
Kevin Albano has more than 17 years of experience working in information technology, law enforcement, and security consulting. Throughout his career, he has focused on investigating computer network intrusions, notifying impacted organizations, and disrupting some of the largest cyber espionage campaigns.
At IBM, Kevin is responsible for threat intelligence collections, managing advanced threat research and directing information analysis – all focused on helping customers understand their cyber threat risk and make decisions to protect their organization.
Prior to IBM, Kevin held prominent roles at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Mandiant. As a Special Agent at the Los Angeles FBI Field Office, Kevin developed the investigative process for examining computer network attack operations. He identified large-scale organized data theft operations and created the field guide for how cyber espionage investigators notify data breach victims.
Kevin joined Mandiant from the FBI to help defend commercial and government entities against cyber espionage. While at Mandiant, Kevin developed programs to analyze criminal attack infrastructures, notify victim commercial entities, and define threats. He also supported incident responders by categorizing and organizing threat information to identify sophisticated threat groups.
Kevin has also made significant contributions to the Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (ISAO) Standards Organization ISAO 300-1