Neil MacDonald

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Entries Tagged as 'Adaptive Security Infrastucture'


Intrusion Prevention Systems? We Need Intrusion Resilient Systems

by Neil MacDonald  |  February 3, 2012  |  1 Comment

I’ve blogged before about advanced threats that easily bypass our traditional protection mechanisms and reside undetected for extended periods of time on our systems. On one of the panels I moderated on APTs, Dave Merkel from Mandiant put it best. “You are compromised, get over it”. Others in the US Government have come to the [...]

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Category: Application Security Beyond Anti-Virus Cloud Cloud Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Security Intelligence     Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Interactive Application Security Testing

by Neil MacDonald  |  January 30, 2012  |  8 Comments

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) solutions test applications from the “outside in” to detect security vulnerabilities. In contrast, Static Application Security Testing (SAST) solutions test applications from the “inside out” by looking a source code, byte code or binaries. Both approaches have their pros and cons and, until recently, the market for these tools has [...]

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Category: Application Security Security Intelligence     Tags: , ,

DevOps Needs to Become DevOpsSec

by Neil MacDonald  |  January 17, 2012  |  Comments Off

DevOps seeks to bridge the development and operations divide through the establishment of a culture of trust and shared interest among individuals in these previously siloed organizations. However, this vision is incomplete without the incorporation of information security, which represents yet another silo in IT. Breakdowns in communications and processes across development, operations and security [...]

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Category: Application Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure     Tags: , , , , , ,

US Symposium Summary from a Security Perspective

by Neil MacDonald  |  October 24, 2011  |  1 Comment

Last week I attended Gartner’s US Symposium conference in Orlando. With 8,000+ attendees (25% of which were CIOs) and at least 1,000 more analysts, vendors and support staff, you can imagine it was quite a scene. In addition to three presentations, I had more than 30 fantastic one on ones with attendees over the four [...]

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Category: Application Security Beyond Anti-Virus Cloud Cloud Security Information Security Microsoft Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Next-gen Context Aware Intrusion Prevention

by Neil MacDonald  |  October 13, 2011  |  Comments Off

Context-aware security is the use of supplemental information to improve security decisions at the time the decision is made. The goal? More-accurate security decisions capable of supporting more-dynamic business and IT environments as well as providing better protection against advanced threats. In this 2010 research note that provided a definition and framework for understanding context-aware [...]

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Category: Next-generation Security Infrastructure Security Intelligence     Tags: , , , ,

Does Protecting Desktops Require a Different Vendor/Product than Protecting Servers?

by Neil MacDonald  |  September 29, 2011  |  2 Comments

I’ve made it a point over the past 6 months to ask clients if they are combining their endpoint protection platform contracts across desktops, laptops and servers. In most cases (about 75%), the answer is yes – contracts are being combined in order to reduce complexity and costs. Is protecting a desktop different than a [...]

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Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Endpoint Protection Platform Next-generation Security Infrastructure     Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Building Context-Aware Security: VMware Acquires PacketMotion

by Neil MacDonald  |  August 27, 2011  |  Comments Off

VMware quietly disclosed it has acquired PacketMotion in this recent blog post by Dean Coza of VMware. We identified PacketMotion as a cool vendor in Gartner in this 2009 research for clients. Essentially, PacketMotion uses standard Intel-based hardware appliances  (as well as a virtualized probe implementation that runs inside of virtualized environments) to deliver full [...]

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Category: Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , ,

It’s Time for Security to Ascend

by Neil MacDonald  |  August 24, 2011  |  1 Comment

As I research into the future of adaptive security infrastructure, I am convinced that the future of information security lies in software, not hardware. If you think about it for a bit, most of information security policy enforcement is in the form of software already – it’s just embodied (entombed?) in physical hardware. Unfortunately, the [...]

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Category: Cloud Cloud Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , ,

Real-world Systematic Workload Reprovisioning

by Neil MacDonald  |  June 23, 2011  |  Comments Off

I’m here at the Gartner Information Security summit on the fourth and final day. We had a record number of attendees – at least 1700 by my estimate. Attendees have the ability to book one on one conversations with the analysts and my schedule was completely full. One of the conversations with a client was [...]

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Category: Information Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization     Tags: , , , , , , ,

Don’t Trust Your Servers

by Neil MacDonald  |  June 17, 2011  |  3 Comments

One of the toughest problems in information security is addressing advanced intrusions that have bypassed traditional security controls and now reside undetected on enterprise systems. With financially motivated attacks and state-sponsored “advanced persistent threats” both on the rise, intrusions can remain undetectable for extended periods of time. We have reached a point where our systems [...]

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Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , , , ,