Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Toil — endless, exhausting work that yields little value in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — is the scourge of security engineers everywhere. You end up with mountains of toil if you rely on manual effort to maintain cloud security. Your engineers spend a lot of time doing mundane jobs that don’t actually move the needle. Toil is detrimental to team morale because most technicians will become bored if they spend their days repeatedly solving the same problems.

Organizations must update their ransomware protection at the same pace that as the attackers changes their tactics. The ransomware scourge continues, with incidents hitting a U.S. record in the second quarter of 2021, as attackers expand into vertical industries and target critical infrastructure. Ransom demands have also been growing. According to IT Governance, the average decryption key rate from attackers is $140,000 yet many organizations end up paying much more than that.

Who would have thought software could rattle the White House? But a vulnerability in Log4J, a popular open source software project, exposed critical digital infrastructure to remote code execution attacks. This prompted the US Government to engage big tech, infosec professionals, and open source organizations to come together to help secure open source software.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... Is there anything more frightening than the unknown? Anything the mind can conjure up is frequently scarier than something realized. The shark in Jaws is terrifying because you don’t see it until it’s too late. It’s a silent, relentless death machine, hiding in the water. A software vulnerability is the unknown, hidden deep within an ocean of code, packages and container dependencies.

An unpatched vulnerability in a popular C standard library found in a wide range of IoT products and routers could put millions of devices at risk of attack. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-05-02 and discovered by Nozomi Networks, is present in the domain name system (DNS) component of the library uClibc and its uClibc-ng fork from the OpenWRT team.

In the alphabet soup of IT buzzwords, DevSecOps is one of the more confusing abbreviations. More than just a trendy buzzword, DevSecOps is the mature organization’s next evolution in comprehensive development processes.

System Monitor, better known as Sysmon, is one of my favorite security datasets. The data is crazy detailed and offers a great way to power security detection and response since it gives cyber security teams a roadmap to understand exactly what systems or people are doing while they use any Windows operating systems. The avalanche of the data is the downside and why observability engineers need tools like Cribl Stream to manage and enrich Sysmon data to make it more useful and more cost-effective.