NIST SP 800-137

From: MeriTalk

By: Jessie Bur

The Department of Homeland security (DHS) has expanded its Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Tools Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) with the inclusion of Imperva’s Web application and database firewalls.

“This selection is a testament to the depth of our experience spanning thousands of installations across civilian and defense agencies, and global enterprises,” said Mike Mooney, chief revenue officer at Imperva. “We will use the CDM program to make it even easier to apply our proven solutions and expertise to protect the mission-specific critical data and applications of Federal agencies.”

Read Complete Article

From: InsideSources

by Giuseppe Macri

***

Carriers must also detail their “anticipated approach to assessing and mitigating cyber risk induced by the presence of multiple participants in the band” and “cybersecurity standards and practices to be employed, whether industry-recognized or related to some other identifiable approach.”

Competing 5G providers will have to demonstrate they can coordinate their cybersecurity efforts by safeguarding the communications of mobile devices not even under their control. The agency also wants to see providers work with the cybersecurity industry at large, incorporate automated threat-detection systems and share data about threats with each other, saying plans “should include comment on machine-to-machine threat information sharing.”

From: silicon beat

By Ethan Baron

A key NASA computer network managed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise has so many security holes that the space agency’s head of IT refused to sign off on a standard authority to operate, a new report said.

***

Earlier this year, Federal News Radio reported that network security analysis firm SecurityScorecard had detected thousands of signals emanating from malware – including some of the world’s nastiest computer viruses – that had apparently infected NASA systems. NASA responded to the station, saying its “continuous monitoring tools and scans, a set of monitoring and scans performed by Department of Homeland Security, and various independent third-party audits of NASA’s computing environment do not support this claim of a broad malware infection in NASA’s IT infrastructure.”

From: Veris Group

***

Every security leader has a duty to provide a comprehensive vulnerability management program. It’s a comparatively small amount of work yielding a large return on investment for the organization. This requires a depth of understanding of the existence of security weaknesses and implementing a formal patch management program performed on a regular basis. Patch every system you can find. Scour your network for shadow IT systems and IP enabled devices which fall outside of your typical scan/patch program. Study after study shows that without regular patching, organizations can continue to be exposed to these threats. “We found that 99.9% of the exploited vulnerabilities had been compromised more than a year after the associated CVE was published.” (2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report).

From: Federal News Radio | Sponsored Content

By Jason Miller

***

That is where the Homeland Security Department’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program comes in. Experts say CDM tools will help agencies know where their vulnerabilities are more quickly and automatically address the problem and let the chief information security officer know what’s going on.

Agencies are making progress toward this continuous monitoring and risk based approach, but it’s taking time and hackers are exploiting gaps in the system.

Read Complete Article

From: Nextgov

By Mohana Ravindranath

The Interior Department’s use of out-of-date logical access control protocols makes the agency vulnerable to insider threats, a new cyber audit showed.

Interior’s Office of the Inspector General found the department’s cyber protections are also lagging in two other areas: It needs to do more protect the information on employees’ mobile devices, and it doesn’t currently have a way to monitor encrypted traffic for malware, the report said.

Read Complete Article

From: CSO (Australia)

by Dick Bussiere, Principal Architect APAC , Tenable Network Security

Network Monitoring has been and will continue to be a very important part of an overall defense in depth security program.

***

Like any other technology, monitoring and defenses have evolved and continue to evolve as new technologies emerge and as the threat environment changes. In this two part series, I will review where monitoring has been, and identify some important trends that you need to be aware of.

Measures and Countermeasures

Read Complete Article

From: TechRepublic

By Alison DeNisco

***

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

1. Accenture and Endgame Inc. announced Monday a threat hunting as-a-service created to identify and remove latent threats in an organization’s system.
2. Threat hunting is becoming a more common service for companies looking to avoid increasingly numerous and sophisticated cyber attacks.
3. Services like this may be one part of a layered security approach, but are not a silver bullet, experts said.