The company's vision for the future of cloud security is based on simplified, horizontal coverage across multiple cloud platforms.

Networking giant Cisco has unveiled a plan to simplify security operations, including the debut of an open security platform called Security Cloud, conceived as a unified platform for end-to-end security across hybrid multicloud environments.

The platform offers threat prevention, detection, response, and remediation capabilities, as well as less-intrusive methods for risk-based authentication, including a Wi-Fi fingerprint.

Cisco is also emphasizing intelligent user and device identity verification checks that run continuously and in the background.

**Horizontal Coverage**

TK Keanini, CTO of Cisco Secure, explains that in an age where organizations are protecting assets across multiple clouds — be they Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud Platform — security teams are struggling to provide uniform, horizontal coverage across this infrastructure.

"We're trying to abstract away networking and security to a layer that is completely horizontal across that which you protect — your compute and storage," Keanini says. "Where before, networking and security were sometimes living in those silos, we're now logically above it. We want to provide a function that's consistent and has the economics of cloud."

Featuring Cisco Meraki SD-WAN technology, the secure access service edge (SASE) subscription service Cisco+ Secure Connect Now streamlines deployment and management of SASE through a cloud-managed platform with a unified dashboard.

A unified Secure Client is designed to help simplify the streaming of Cisco Secure agents, including AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint, and Umbrella.

"With Secure Connect, we tried to basically abstract away the complexity and hand you an application experience," Keanini says. "We're going after a person who doesn't ever want to be a networking expert, or they just want the network to work, and they want to control it via an app."

Cisco is also leveraging the OpenID Foundation's Shared Signals and Events standards, including CAEP and RISC, to build session trust analysis by sharing information between vendors.

The company also has enhanced its Secure Cloud Analytics, which automatically promotes alerts into SecureX and maps those alerts to MITRE ATT&CK.

It also debuted the Secure Firewall 3100 Series, which features an AI-powered encrypted visibility engine, uses machine learning (ML) technology to uncover threats, and offers a custom security research service, called Talos Intelligence On-Demand.

Keanini says that the through line with all of these services, as well as with Cisco's Security Cloud vision, is simplicity — specifically, providing services that remove complexity for organizations and individuals.

"You're good if you provide security, but you're even better if you provide security and usability," he says. "If you're going to reach the common person that just never wants to be a security expert, you got to deliver an application experience. That's really simple."

Cisco Revamps Cloud Security Strategy With New Secure Access, SASE Portfolio

AI works best when security professionals and AI are complementing each other.

Artificial intelligence has advanced greatly in the past decade. On my phone, I'm reading Apple and Google news that is well-tailored to me, thanks to AI recommendation models. Self-driving cars are already picking up passengers for rides in downtown San Francisco.

The same transformation is happening in the cybersecurity world too. However, questions remain: Will AI replace security professionals? Or will AI still be as useful in the zero-trust era given that access is tightened to the minimum already?

AI was introduced to the center stage of the cybersecurity industry a few years ago, originally to tackle malware detection and anomaly detection use cases. We have come a long way to better understand both the usefulness and the limitations of applying AI to cybersecurity, especially in the zero-trust era.

**AI Is Still Needed**

First, a zero-trust architecture doesn't remove the need for AI. Though zero trust eliminates the attack surface and reduces the chance for the anomaly to happen, zero trust demands AI more.

Today, an enterprise user's security policy is typically that person's department security policy. Whether users are in a big or a small department, they all follow very similar, if not the same, security policy, including access control policy.

In the zero-trust era, we need a personalized, contextual, dynamic, and granular security policy — which is exactly what zero trust is about. Access control, for instance, is no longer based on simple rules but a set of complex policies based on your identity, your device, your posture, your intention, your risks, your content, and a lot of rich data points.

However, generating such complex, granular, and personalized policy _at scale_ can be very time-consuming if relying on human rules and heuristics. Different employees will use different applications and such application usage may need to evolve fast in a short period of time. AI is a critical technology to make such an intelligent and personalized security policy recommendation at scale.

At the same time, it is impossible for AI to capture or comprehend all the nuances and contexts of any complex environment, so AI may make recommendations that are suboptimal from experts' eyes. With ongoing human feedback, we can improve the AI model and its effectiveness.

**Threat Detection**

Second, zero trust gives the enterprise much tighter protection than it has had in the past, but no matter how tightened things are, there is always a weak link somewhere. Therefore, we want AI to assist with evasive and unknown threat detection and prevention.

Some evasive threats are undetected in time by conventional signature-based or sandbox technology. The SolarWinds supply chain attack is a good example. This global attack turned the SolarWinds Orion software into a weapon, subsequently gaining access to several government systems and thousands of private systems around the world. There was no involvement from any malware by the traditional definition, and it was hard to rely on any single layer of the conventional technology to detect such an attack ahead of time.

AI has a good potential to be the technology to do a better job with unknown threat detection because it can "predict" threats that have never been seen before.

Practically, we will want to layer multiple security technologies along with AI. For instance, in the case of malware, the tried-and-true approach of signature matching and sandbox will continue to play a key role. AI will complement greatly, but not displace, the conventional technology.

**Easily Understood**

Third, enterprise customers want to utilize AI in a way that is easily understood and digestible by security professionals. The "explainable AI" may not improve the AI model efficacy on the surface, but it will increase the adoption of AI significantly.

For instance, AI may be able to detect an unknown threat, but SecOps teams may want to see which family the threat belongs to before taking an action. For another example, AI may be able to generate intelligent and relevant security policy recommendations, but SecOps teams may still want to know the context of why certain recommendations are made before accepting them.

**Conclusion**

The cybersecurity industry needs AI to help reduce unknown attacks at scale and come up with granular and contextual security policies at scale to reduce the attack surface. We want the result to be explainable too.

AI-powered security tools and products are an amazing digital assistant to SecOps professionals. And professionals are assisting AI technology to advance, too, as we will need humans to verify many of the outputs and/or provide feedback for the AI model to improve.

AI is useful to scale the enterprise security functions, like more-intelligent policies and more-intelligent threat detection as discussed above. AI works best when security professionals and AI are complementing each other. In the end, AI is an assistant to security professionals and will not be a replacement for human effort for a long time to come.

How AI Is Useful — and Not Useful — for Cybersecurity

John Leyden 09 June 2022 at 15:18 UTC

APTs hammering unpatched vulnerabilities

Chinese state-sponsored attackers are placing a heavy reliance on known but commonly unpatched vulnerabilities to “establish a broad network of compromised infrastructure”, a US federal security agency warns.

While previously unknown (zero-day) vulnerabilities and novel exploits usually grab the most headlines, a joint advisory from the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI warns that attacking “publicly known” flaws has become a mainstay of Chinese cyber-espionage.

**Hit list**

The advisory offers a list of network device CVEs most frequently exploited by PRC state-sponsored cyber actors since 2020.

Flaws in small business-focused routers, SSL VPNs, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices from the likes of Cisco, Fortinet, Netgear and QNAP feature heavily on the list.

Some of the main attacks in play can achieve remote code execution (RCE) against unpatched systems while others achieve their aims by achieving authentication bypass or privilege elevation.

Catch up on the latest cyber-attack news and analysis

Chinese state-backed attackers are using publicly available exploit codes against virtual private network (VPN) services or public facing applications to hack into major telecommunications companies and network service providers, creating a platform for follow-up attacks.

Hacked systems “serve as additional access points to route command and control (C2) traffic and act as midpoints to conduct network intrusions on other entities”, according to the CISA’s advisory, which builds on previous US intel agency reporting.

By building a network of compromised systems that act as a platform for follow-up assaults, Chinese APTs are hiding or obfuscating the source of attacks, making detection and response more challenging.

Industry experts said that CISA’s latest advisory is designed to hammer home the importance of prompt patching.

**Slow patching peril**

Andrew Kahl, CEO of BackBox, commented: “Last month CISA released a joint advisory (PDF) that recommended prioritizing the patching of software containing known vulnerabilities.

“These two advisories within a month of each other indicates threat actors are increasingly targeting known vulnerabilities, because they understand many organizations are slow to implement patches.”

Kahl added: “One of the most common vectors for attackers is through known vulnerabilities that otherwise could have been patched. In fact, 87% of organizations have experienced an attempted exploit of an already-known, existing vulnerability.”

**Hiding in plain sight**

Terry Olaes, director of sales engineering at Skybox, said that CISA’s alert pointed towards a need to adapt enterprise vulnerability remediation strategies to provide better coverage for less severe but actively exploited vulnerabilities.

Prompt triage would help organizations to protect themselves against attacks from a wide range of potential adversaries.

“Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting known vulnerabilities hiding in plain sight and turning them into backdoors to deploy complex attacks that are increasing at record rates,” Olaes said.

“If organizations only rely on conventional approaches to vulnerability management, they may only move to patch the highest severity vulnerabilities first based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).”

Olaes concluded: “Cybercriminals know this is how many companies handle their cybersecurity, so they’ve learned to take advantage of vulnerabilities seen as less critical to carry out their attacks.”

RELATED Behind the Great Firewall: Chinese cyber-espionage adapts to post-Covid world with stealthier attacks

Chinese cyber threat actors are widely abusing well-known attacks to infiltrate networks, CISA warns

SAN FRANCISCO – Today, in partnership with the Coalition to Reduce Cyber Risk (CR2), 37 companies and organizations have pledged to enhance cyber resiliency and counter evolving cross-border cyber threats such as the growth of ransomware. Signers to this groundbreaking pledge from eight countries have promised to:

·         encourage the development, evolution and implementation of risk-based approaches that rely on consensus-based standards and risk management best practices, such as ISO/IEC 27110 and 27103, or the NIST Cybersecurity Framework;

·         support efforts of our vendors and supply chain contributors to adopt risk-based cybersecurity approaches in order to help small businesses flourish while improving the resiliency of the cyber ecosystem;

·         incorporate ISO/IEC (or other widely accepted international) cybersecurity standards as a foundation of our cybersecurity policies and controls wherever applicable and feasible; and

·         periodically reassess our cybersecurity policies and controls against revisions to ISO/IEC cybersecurity standards and actively participate in industry-driven initiatives to improve those standards.

_“CR2 is committed to driving a globally-aligned approach for managing cyber risk. Thirty-Seven organizations from eight countries have signed the Cyber Risk Management Pledge, demonstrating the breadth of usage of international standards such as ISO/IEC 27110 and 27103, as well as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and associated sector profiles.”_ said Benjamin Flatgard, President of CR2 and Executive Director of Technology and Cybersecurity Policy and Partnerships at J.P. Morgan Chase.  He added

_“Governments should embed widely used international standards at the core of their national cyber policies to facilitate a seamless approach to shared cyber risk.”_

For more information on the CR2 and the pledge, or if your company or organization is interested in joining the pledge, please visit https://www.crx2.org/

##

**Cyber Risk Management Pledge**

The signatories to this pledge understand that in order to enhance cyber resiliency and counter evolving cross-border cyber threats such as the growth of ransomware, we must enable the seamless implementation of risk-based approaches to cybersecurity around the world. 

Internationally recognized cybersecurity frameworks and standards that are based upon the principles of risk management and relevant across sectors support such implementation by strengthening consistency and continuity among interconnected sectors and throughout global supply chains. 

Increased and ongoing adoption of these frameworks and international standards by companies and governments around the world will mitigate cyber risks and facilitate economic growth. To further advance adoption of international approaches to cybersecurity risk management, we commit to:

·         Encourage the development, evolution and implementation of risk-based approaches based on consensus-based frameworks, standards and risk management best practices, such as ISO/IEC 27110 and 27103, or the NIST Cybersecurity Framework;

·         Support efforts of our vendors and supply chain contributors to adopt risk-based cybersecurity approaches in order to help small businesses flourish while improving the resiliency of the cyber ecosystem;

·         Incorporate ISO/IEC 27110 and 27103, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, or other widely accepted international cybersecurity standards as a foundation of our cybersecurity policies and controls wherever applicable and feasible; and

·         Periodically reassess our cybersecurity policies and controls against revisions to such cybersecurity standards and actively participate in industry-driven initiatives to improve those standards.

A commitment to internationally recognized cyber risk management approaches and frameworks that are relevant across sectors can bring widespread economic benefits, help governments achieve their policy goals, bolster collective security, and enhance cyber resiliency across the ecosystem. 

AT&T

AWS

Cisco

Citrix

Cybastion Institute of Technology

Cybereason

Exiger

IBM

JP Morgan Chase

Lumen

Mastercard

Microsoft

NetScout

NTT

Palo Alto Networks

Rakuten Symphony

Redhat

Schneider Electric

Tenable 

Trellix

Verizon

Asia Internet Coalition (AIC)

BSA | The Software Alliance

Coalition of Service Industries (CSI)

Coalition to Reduce Cyber Risk (CR2) 

Cyber Risk Institute

CyberPeace Institute

Cybersecurity Coalition

The DCRO Institute

Health-ISAC

Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC)

Information Technology Industry (ITI)

Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA)

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

United States Council for International Business (USCIB)

US-India Strategic Policy Forum (USISPF)

37 Major Companies and Organizations Pledge to Enhance Cyber Resiliency and Counter Evolving Global Threats

The latest edition of the Talos EMEA Monthly Update is available now on Cisco.com and Cisco's YouTube page. You can also view the episode in its entirety above.
For June, Hazel and Martin got together to discuss business email compromise. BEC has quickly become the most lucrative attack vector for...


[[ This is only the beginning! Please visit the blog for the complete entry ]]

The latest edition of the Talos EMEA Monthly Update is available now on Cisco.com and Cisco's YouTube page. You can also view the episode in its entirety above.

For June, Hazel and Martin got together to discuss business email compromise. BEC has quickly become the most lucrative attack vector for threat actors, even surpassing ransomware. This episode provides a quick explainer of what BEC is and how organizations can be prepared for when, not if, this type of spam campaign comes for them.

Talos EMEA monthly update: Business email compromise

Compromised routers, VPNs, and NAS devices from Cisco, Citrix, Pulse, Zyxel, and others are all being used as part of an extensive cyber espionage campaign.

State-sponsored cyberattackers affiliated with China are actively building out a large network of attack infrastructure by compromising targets in the public and private spheres.

According to a joint alert from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI, the attackers are targeting major telecom companies and network service providers with a set of exploits for known vulnerabilities in a variety of routers, VPNs, and other networking gear, as well as network-attached storage (NAS) devices.

The network devices are then being used as additional access points to route command-and-control (C2) traffic and act as midpoints to carry out network intrusions on other entities, according to the alert — all bent on stealing sensitive information.

The cyberattackers "typically conduct their intrusions by accessing compromised servers called hop points from numerous China-based IP addresses resolving to different Chinese ISPs," the Feds noted. "The cyber-actors typically obtain the use of servers by leasing remote access directly or indirectly from hosting providers. They use these servers to register and access operational email accounts, host C2 domains, and interact with victim networks. Cyber-actors \[also\] use these hop points as an obfuscation technique when interacting with victim networks."

On the obfuscation front, CISA said it has observed the groups monitoring network defenders' accounts and actions, modifying their ongoing campaign as needed to remain undetected.

The groups also "often mix their customized toolset with publicly available tools, especially by leveraging tools that are native to the network environment, to obscure their activity by blending into the noise or normal activity of a network."

    

Commonly exploited bugs used by China-linked threat actors. (Source: NSA/CISA/FBI)

To avoid compromise, users should apply available patches, disable unnecessary ports and protocols, and replace end-of-life infrastructure, the agencies noted.

Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly-discovered vulnerabilities, data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to your email inbox.

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China-Sponsored Cyberattackers Target Networking Gear to Build Widespread Attack Infrastructure

Using a custom encryption scheme within music notation, Merryl Goldberg and three other US musicians slipped information to Soviet performers and activists known as the Phantom Orchestra.

In 1985, saxophonist Merryl Goldberg found herself on a plane to Moscow with three fellow musicians from the Boston Klezmer Conservatory Band. She had carefully packed sheet music, reeds, and other woodwind supplies, along with a soprano saxophone, to bring into the USSR. But one of her spiral-bound notebooks, lined with staves for hand-notating music, contained hidden information.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Using a code she had developed herself, Goldberg had obscured names, addresses, and other details the group would need for their trip in handwritten compositions that looked, to an untrained eye, like the real melodies she’d written on other pages of the book. Goldberg and her colleagues didn’t want to give Soviet officials details of who they planned to see and what they planned to do on their trip. They were going to meet the Phantom Orchestra.

The group was a dissident ensemble that Goldberg describes as an amalgamation of Jewish refuseniks (Jews who were barred from emigrating out of the USSR), Christian activists, and Helsinki monitors—watchdogs who tracked Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The Americans’ trip was funded and coordinated by the nonprofit Action for Soviet Jewry (now Action for Post-Soviet Jewry), which works on humanitarian relief in the former Soviet Union and was focused on helping Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel and the United States. 

The trip was a rare and special opportunity for American and Soviet players to meet in the USSR and make music together. It was also an opportunity for the American musicians to smuggle information about aid efforts and plans to the Phantom Orchestra, and for the ensemble to send updates out, including details about individuals looking to escape the Soviet Union.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Goldberg and her colleagues, all of whom are Jewish, traveled to Moscow separately in two pairs to make it less likely that they would arouse suspicion as a group. They had received training on how to react to questioning and been told to expect surveillance, even run-ins with Soviet officials, throughout their trip. But first Goldberg needed to get her notebook past border control. 

“When we arrived, we were immediately pulled aside, and they went through everything in our luggage, to the point of unwrapping Tampax. It was crazy,” says Goldberg, who is presenting about the experience and her musical code at the RSA security conference in San Francisco today. “With my music, they opened it up and there were some real tunes in there. If you’re not a musician, you wouldn’t know what’s what. They went page by page through everything—and then they handed it back.”

Goldberg says that while the code worked and Soviet officials didn’t confiscate their music, they did interrogate all four travelers about what they planned to do while in the USSR. “We were brought into a room with a big burly guy who banged on the table and yelled at us,” remembers Goldberg, now a music education professor at California State University, San Marcos.

Musical note names span the letters A to G, so they don’t provide a full alphabet of options on their own. To create the code, Goldberg assigned letters of the alphabet to notes in the chromatic scale, a 12-tone scale that includes semi-tones (sharps and flats) to expand the possibilities. In some examples, Goldberg wrote only in one musical range, known as treble clef. In others, she expanded the register to be able to encode more letters and added a bass clef to extend the range of the musical scale. These details and variations also added verisimilitude to her encoded music. 

For numbers, Goldberg would simply write them between the staves, where sometimes you might see chord symbols. She also added other characteristics of composition, like rhythms (half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, whole notes), key signatures, tempo markings, and articulation indicators like slurs and ties. Most of these were there to make the music look more legitimate, but some doubled as coded supplements to the letters hidden in the music notes. She even occasionally drew tiny diagrams that could be mistaken for charts to remind herself of where a meeting place was located or how to deliver something. 

While someone could technically have played the code as music, it would have sounded less like a tune and more like a cat walking across piano keys.

“I picked a note to start, and then I created the alphabet from there. Once you know it, it ends up being pretty easy to write things. I taught my friends on the trip the code, too,” Goldberg says. “We used it in order to take in people’s addresses and other information we would need to find them. And we coded things while we were there so we would be able to take out some information about people and their efforts to emigrate, as well as details we hoped could help other people ask to leave.”

The US musicians got their bearings in Moscow before heading to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. There and on their next stop in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, they successfully met members of the Phantom Orchestra, many of whom spoke some English, and spent time getting to know each other, playing music together, and even staging small, impromptu concerts.

During eight days of travel, the musicians were tailed constantly by Soviet agents and were repeatedly stopped for questioning. Goldberg says that members of the Phantom Orchestra, all of whom faced similar treatment in their daily lives, gave her and her colleagues advice and encouragement. When the Americans would express concerns that their presence was endangering the activists, Goldberg says the Phantom Orchestra members were resolute about the importance of spending time together. She adds, though, that some of the activists were later arrested and even beaten, because of the interactions.

“On the second night, we were playing together and the KGB came in and everything got shut down. The electricity was turned off; it was a scary situation,” Goldberg says. “And yet, when we’re playing music no one can take away that sense of freedom and empowerment. Playing together and communicating with people through music is like nothing else. I was amazed by the strength it brought the people there. Music can be very comforting, but it also conveys a sense of feeling powerful.”

After their time in Yerevan, the American musicians had planned to go to Riga, the capital of Latvia, and then to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg in Russia. Finally, they were set to stop in Paris before returning to the United States. Instead, they were stopped and questioned again. The musicians were supposed to be placed under house arrest in Yerevan, but Goldberg says that Armenian officials bristled at the KGB intrusion and let them continue their trip. Eventually, though, the musicians were picked up and escorted back to Moscow, where Soviet agents confiscated their passports. Goldberg says the group was driven around Moscow for several hours, perhaps as a scare tactic, before finally being allowed to stay together in a dormitory room guarded by young Soviet men with machine guns.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

“At that point, you’re thinking they’re going to take us to Siberia or something,” she says. “We were super freaked out. So we kept playing music for each other that night. And we played a beloved Russian folk tune, but out of tune, to annoy the young soldier outside our door. It gave us a sense of humor and empowerment.”

Finally, officials said the group would be deported to Sweden. They were heavily guarded and brought to a plane that had come from Sweden and was going to return without passengers. While officials searched their possessions again before letting them on the plane, no one ever flagged the sheet music. Goldberg points out that she even got the film from her camera back, perhaps thanks to a sympathizer.

“They were given no reason for their expulsion, and US officials are still waiting for information from the Soviet Foreign Ministry,” Reuters reported in a wire about the situation on May 31, 1985. “The spokesman said the expulsion appeared to be linked to their meeting with … Georgian dissidents.”

Goldberg says that while she later learned that some of the Soviet activists faced consequences for the visit, some of the people the musicians met on the trip were eventually able to permanently leave the USSR. She notes that while her musical code wouldn’t have been very difficult to crack if someone were focused on it, the obfuscation served its purpose, making it both an elegant and harmonious encryption scheme.

How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music

Spirits were high at the return of the in-person contest, which kicked off by bringing last year's virtual event winner on stage.

RSA CONFERENCE 2022 – San Francisco – At the Moscone Center on Monday, RSA Conference program committee chair Hugh Thompson's happiness was palpable. He told a cute story about his kids learning to hack during the COVID-19 lockdown and exulted in holding the Innovation Sandbox competition in person.

"You will not be able to walk out of this place today without being so excited about the kinds of innovation that are happening in security today," Thompson said.

At the in-person 2022 Innovation Sandbox, representatives from 10 cybersecurity startups made their case for having the most innovative technology in the sector. Each finalist had three minutes to pitch their tech to a panel of experienced judges. The judges were Dorit Dor, chief product officer of Check Point Software; Paul Kocher, independent researcher and founder of Cryptography Research (who Thompson called the "Simon Cowell of the judging panel"); Niloo Razi Howe, senior operating partner at Energy Impact Partners; Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks; and Christopher Young, executive VP of business development, strategy, and ventures at Microsoft.

Thompson brought Dor and Howe to the stage to discuss the judges' deliberations and announce the winner. He tried to gin up some good-natured drama by asking about altercations and pointing out the judges' lack of obvious injuries.

"There was a big dispute," Dor acknowledged, but Howe assured him, "We're not bloodied or bruised."

Both Howe and Dor had high praise for all 10 companies. "There are many good technologies out there, and it was not an easy selection," Dor said.

Added Howe: "There was conversation about every single company. The top 10 are really fantastic, solving really important problems."

First Thompson announced the top two: Talon Cyber Security and BastionZero. Ofer Ben Noon, co-founder and CEO of Talon, and Shannon Goldberg, CEO of BastionZero, shook hands with everyone. Goldberg even hugged Noon.

Dor called Talon's custom browser portal a "legit alternative that brings simplicity and manageability" for organizations with distributed workforces. Howe praised BastionZero for tackling the "really important problem of management of sessions connecting into the infrastructure."

But in the end, there could be only one winner — and it was Talon.

Here's how the presentations went down.

**The 10 Contestants**

The first contestant was Leonid Belkind, CTO of Torq, which Thompson described as "no-code automation for security teams." Belkind ran through his spiel in exactly three minutes "to the second," Thompson marveled.

The first judge question was from Kocher, who asked, "If someone isn't technical enough to write code, how are they going to understand what they're going to screw up with their automation?" Kramer asked about departments that don't want to collaborate with security teams, while Howe pointed out that in the crowded no-code sector, Torq would need to displace an existing contender.

Next up was Ben Noon, whose company's tagline is "solving security for hybrid work and unmanaged devices." He made a compelling case, saying, "Your browser is your front door," and it's been left open. The company built a secure corporate portal in Chromium with a user experience like Google Chrome and a backend that provides visibility and malware protection.

Then Sevco Security co-founder and CEO J.J. Guy presented for his company, "the starting point for all of your security activities." The company's tech aims to make a complete inventory of all devices connected to an organization to improve asset management.

The fourth contestant was Giora Engel, CEO and founder of Neosec, which is "reinventing API security by bringing XDR techniques and true behavioral analytics." His company addresses what he calls "the API blindspot" — B2B APIs, which are overlooked while people address B2C concerns.

Vladi Sandler represented Lightspin, which sells "graph-based cloud security built by and for cloud engineers." Refreshingly, the CEO mentioned 50% female representation on staff as a differentiating factor. Kocher tried to earn his Simon Cowell rep by saying, "So on Amazon's website I had to turn off One-Click ordering because I kept getting the wrong stuff. You claim on your website that in one click, you can remediate problems. Should I be scared by that?" Sandler rejoined that he trusts his team's skills, and Thompson gently ribbed Kocher about his Amazon problem afterward.

David McCaw co-founded Dasera, which is "helping cloud-first organizations operationalize data governance," according to its tagline. "We think DataGovOps is going to be the next revolution and finally solve the data challenges we've been facing for a long time," he asserted.

Cycode, which provides "complete software supply chain security," was represented by CEO and co-founder Lior Levy. Dor dropped a judge's question that brought laughs to the room: "How do you convince developers to fix their code?" Levy responded that his company helps developers implement bug fixes within their existing workflows and adds in automation "so they don't get frustrated."

"Bringing incident response into the cloud era" is Cado Security. CEO and co-founder James Campbell compared the manual process of investigating and responding to cloud incidents to the tedious procedure for creating a mix tape (Gen X represent).

"Is data collection happening before an attack or after an attack?" Kramer asked. "Is it part of the investigation, or is it part of the ongoing process?" The answer was that it depends on which services a customer uses.

Goldberg showed up to talk about her company BastionZero, which says it is "redefining zero trust for access to cloud infrastructure." Thompson asked Kocher, who co-created the SSL protocol, to ask a question. He obliged by asking whether organizations should use BastionZero or the strong encryption of a YubiKey to replace passwords.

Goldberg answered, "You should use us, for sure, absolutely," which again brought laughs, but she continued by saying that the separate authentication path could include things like YubiKeys.

Araali Networks, whose tagline was "surviving intrusions in cloud-native environments," closed out the contest with co-founder and CEO Abhishek Singh. The judges asked several technical questions about how the system handles various situations and configurations, which Singh handled ably.

"It works out of the box for Google, Amazon, and Azure," he assured Microsoft's Young. "Any system that works with Linux ... is ready to work with us."

**In-Person Do-Over for Apiiro**

    

Source: Screen-grab from RSA Conference

One of the most poignant moments came at the beginning of the show: Thompson brought up the winner of the 2021 Innovation Sandbox, which was held virtually, so that he could have his in-person moment of glory. Idan Plotnik, co-founder of Apiiro, shook Thompson's hand and told him his company had increased its revenue by 398% in the past year.

"Everything changed," Plotnik said.  

The 10 finalists, in alphabetical order, were:

1.  Araali Networks
2.  BastionZero
3.  Cado Security
4.  Cycode
5.  Dasera
6.  Lightspin
7.  Neosec
8.  Sevco Security
9.  Talon Cyber Security
10.  Torq

For more about each of these companies, read our contest preview.

Talon Grasps Victory at a Jubilant RSAC Innovation Sandbox

Panelists from an RSA Conference keynote agreed that organizations need to begin work on PQC migration, if they haven't already.

RSA CONFERENCE 2022 — Even the most future-facing panels at the 2022 RSA Conference in San Francisco are grounded in the lessons of the past. At the post-quantum cryptography keynote "Wells Fargo PQC Program: The Five Ws," the moderator evoked the upheaval from RSAC 1999 when a team from Electronic Frontier Foundation and Distributed.net broke the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in less than a day.

"We're trying to avoid the scramble" when classical cryptography techniques like elliptic curve and the RSA algorithm inevitably fall to quantum decrypting, said moderator Sam Phillips, chief architect for information security architecture at Wells Fargo. And he set up the high stakes encryption battles often have: "Where were all the DES implemented? Hint: ATM machines."

"We had to set up teams to see where-all we were using \[DES\], and then establish the migration plan based upon using a risk-based approach," Phillips said. "We're trying to avoid that by really trying to get ahead of the game and do some planning in this case."

Phillips was joined on stage by Dale Miller, chief architect of information security architecture at Wells Fargo, and Richard Toohey, technology analyst at Wells Fargo.

**A Brief Explanation of Quantum Computing**

Toohey, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, handled most of the technical aspects of quantum computing during the panel. He explained, "For most problems, if you have a quantum calculator and a regular calculator, they can add numbers just as well. There's a very small subset of problems that are classically very hard, but for a quantum computer, they can solve very efficiently."

These problems that quantum computers handle better than conventional computers are called np-hard problems. "A lot of cryptography, specifically in asymmetric cryptography, relies on these np-hard type problems — things like elliptic curve cryptography; the RSA algorithm, famously — and when quantum computers are developed enough, they'll be able to brute-force their way through these," Toohey explained. "So that breaks a lot of our modern classical cryptography."

The reason why we don't have crypto-breaking quantum computers today, despite headline-making offerings from IBM and others, is because the technology to reach that level of power has not been accomplished yet. Toohey said, "To become a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, a quantum computer needs to have about 1-10 million logical qubits, and those logical qubits all need to be made up of about 1,000 physical qubits. Today, right now, the largest quantum computers are somewhere around 120 physical qubits." He estimated that to even muster the first logical qubit will take three years, and from there, it's got to scale up to "a million or so logical qubits. So it's still quite a few years away."

Another of the technical challenges that needs solving before we get these powerful quantum computers is the cooling systems they require. As Toohey said, "Qubits are incredibly sensitive; most of them have to be held at very low, cryogenic temperatures. So because of that, quantum computing architecture is incredibly expensive right now." Other problems include decoherence and error correction. The panel agreed that the combination of these issues means crypto-cracking quantum computers are 8-10 years away. But that doesn't mean we have a decade to address PQC.

**Now Is the Time**

The panel was named for the journalistic model of five questions that start with w, but that didn't come up until late in the audience Q&A portion. Miller said, "Sam was asking the what, the who, the why, the where, and the when. So I think we've covered that in our conversations here."

Most of the titular questions were somewhat vague and a matter of judgment. However, on the concept of when you should start planning for the post-quantum future, there was complete agreement: now. Miller said, "You've gotta start the process now, and you have to move yourself forward so that you are ready when a quantum computer comes along."

Phillips concurred, saying "There is not right now a quantum computer that is commercially viable, but the amount of money and effort going into the work there to move it forward because people recognize the benefits that are there, and we are recognizing the risk. We feel that it's an eventuality, that we don't know the exact time, and we don't know when it'll happen."

Toohey suggested beginning your preparations with a crypto inventory — again, _now_. "Discover where you have instances of certain algorithms or certain types of cryptography, because how many people were using Log4j and had no idea because it was buried so deep?" he said. "That's a big ask, to know every type of cryptography used throughout your business with all your third parties — that's not trivial. That's a lot of work, and that's going to need to be started now."

"What we're trying to do right now is drive ourselves toward a goal: five years" until Wells Fargo is ready to run post-quantum cryptography, Miller said. "The key is: large company, five years, is a very aggressive goal. So, the time to start is now, and that's one of the most important takeaways from this get-together."

**Crypto Agility Gets You to Quantum Resilience**

Pivoting is a key marker of agility for the panel, and agility is vital for being able to react to not just quantum threats, but whatever comes next. "The goal here should be crypto agility, where you're able to modify your algorithms fairly quickly across your enterprise and be able to counter a quantum-based attack," Miller said. "And I'm really not thinking on a day-to-day basis about when is the quantum computer going to get here. For us, it's more about laying a path and a track for quantum resiliency for the organization."

Toomey agreed on the importance of agility. He said, "Whether it's a quantum computer or new developments in classical computing, we don't want to be put in a position where it takes us 10 years to do any kind of cryptographic transition. We want to be able to pivot and adapt to the market as new threats come out."

Because there will be computers that can break current cryptography techniques, organizations do need to develop new encryption methods that stand up to quantum brute-force attacks. But that's only the half of it. Phillips said, "Don't just focus on the algorithms. Start looking at your data. What data are you transiting back and forth? And look at devaluing that data. Where do you need to have that confidential information, and what can you do to remove that from the exposure? It will help a lot not only in the crypto efforts, but in terms of who has access to the data and why they have to have access."

**You've Got to Have Standards**

One open question loomed over the discussion: When would NIST announce its picks for the new standards to develop for post-quantum cryptography? The answer is: not yet.

The lack of certainty is no cause for inaction, Miller said. "So NIST will continue to work with other vendors and other companies and research groups to look at algorithms that are further out there. Our job is to be able to allow those algorithms to come into place quickly, in a very orderly manner without disrupting business or breaking your business processes and be able to keep things moving along."

Phillips agreed. "That's one of the reasons for pushing on plug and play. Because we know that the first set of algorithms that come out may not satisfy the long-term need, and we don't want to keep jumping through these hoops every time somebody goes through it."

Toohey tied the standards question back into the concept of preparing _now_: "That way, when NIST finally finish publishing their recommendations, and standards get developed in the coming years, we're ready as an industry to be able to take that and tackle it."

He added, "That's going back to crypto agility, and this mindset that we need to be able to plug and play, we need to be able to pivot as an industry very quickly to new and developing threats."

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