It was a privilege to attend this year’s RSA cybersecurity event in San Francisco, and one of our top highlights was certainly the opportunity to speak to Cisco’s ThreatWise TV host Jason Wright. Watch the video on Cisco’s ThreatWise TV (or below) as Jason interviews our very own Michael Morris to learn more about how Cisco and Endace integrate to accelerate and improve cyber incident investigations.
In this short 4 minute video, Michael demonstrates how Cisco Firepower and Stealthwatch can be used together to investigate intrusion events, using Cisco dashboards and EndaceVision to drill down into events by priority and classification to show where threats come from, who has been affected and whether any lateral movement occurred, as well as conversation history and traffic profiles. Michael also explains how Cisco and Endace work together to ‘find a needle in a haystack’ across petabytes of network traffic.
A big thanks to Cisco and to Jason for giving us this spotlight opportunity. If you have any questions about how Cisco and Endace integrations can accelerate and improve cyber incident investigation, visit our Cisco partner page.
We are really excited to announce the release of OSm 6.5
This significant new release incorporates some major architectural changes and introduces a truly revolutionary feature – ultra-fast, network-wide search and data-mining – with the brand-new InvestigationManager™ application.
Customers are always telling us how important it is to accelerate the investigation of security threats and performance issues so they can respond to them more quickly and more accurately.
InvestigationManager is a game-changer for analysts involved in the investigation process, allowing them to search across petabytes of globally-distributed Network History for specific “packets-of-interest” at lightning-speed, putting definitive evidence at their fingertips when they need it.
New Groundbreaking EndaceFabric Architecture
Watch this short video for an overview of the architectural changes that OSm 6.5 introduces and how this new architecture underpins the amazing new, ultra-fast search capability that InvestigationManager brings to all EndaceProbe models.
InvestigationManager’s Ultra-Fast Search in Action
Watch this demo to see just how fast InvestigationManager can find specific “needle-in-the-haystack” packet from within more than a petabyte of Network History distributed across multiple EndaceProbes deployed around the world.
(Tip: prepare to be impressed!).
Want to Find Out More?
OSm 6.5 includes a number of other updates including:
• Real-time visualizations in both InvestigationManager and EndaceProbes (“Play Mode”)
• The ability to trigger, collect and export system and RAID dumps from one or more EndaceProbes at a time.
You can read more about the new features of OSm and the new InvestigationManager application on endace.com.
Or watch the video below for a deep-dive into the new features of OSm 6.5.2 and InvestigationManager and what the new ultra-fast search capability of InvestigationManager means for Threat Hunting.
How do I get hold of OSM 6.5?
OSm 6.5 is supported by all current EndaceProbe models.
The downloadable image and documentation for OSm will be available on the Endace Support Portal from early February, 2019.
If you wish to install this new release earlier, please contact your Endace account team.
The Computing Security Awards started in 2010 to recognize security champions and solutions throughout the UK IT industry. The winners of the awards will be announced on the 11th October at an awards ceremony dinner at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotel, London.
Endace has also been announced as a finalist in the 2018 UK IT Industry Awards in the ‘Security Innovation of the Year’ category.
The UK IT Industry Awards celebrates IT excellence and focuses on the contribution of individuals, projects, organizations and technologies that have excelled in the use, development and deployment of IT in the past 12 months. The award ceremony for the UK IT Industry Awards will take place on the 14th November in Battersea, London.
The EndaceProbe is the industry’s only, truly, open packet capture platform, allowing both hosting of and integration with commercial, open-source and custom analytics applications.
You can learn more about Endace’s network monitoring products, analytics platform, and network packet history recording solutions here.
“One of my worst nightmares [as an attacker] is that out-of-band network tap that really is capturing all the data, understanding anomalous behaviour going on. And someone’s paying attention to it.” Rob Joyce, NSA: “Disrupting Nation State Attackers, Jan 2016” (22:10)
It’s great to see the efficacy of packet capture and network recording acknowledged by such an eminent cybersecurity Tsar as Rob Joyce.
If you haven’t already seen his video presentation on Disrupting Nation State Attackers, it’s well worth a watch. Before being shoulder-tapped to take up his new role as a cybersecurity advisor to Trump’s National Security Council, Joyce headed up the Tailored Access Operations division of the NSA.
The NSA’s TAO division is responsible for “providing tools and expertise in computer network exploitation to deliver foreign intelligence.” In other words, it is responsible for finding, and taking advantage of, the very network vulnerabilities that we’re all trying to protect against.
In his presentation at the Usenix Enigma conference last year, Joyce outlined key steps organizations can take to protect themselves against the sort of sophisticated techniques employed by Nation State attackers and criminal elements looking to attack your network.
Much of his advice is practical common sense. Know everything on your network, understand it, and update and patch everything. We all know this is critical, but all too often it doesn’t happen. Take patching for example. Joyce says that, in his experience, many organizations undertake security audits to identify known vulnerabilities, but frequently have still not fixed those vulnerabilities by the time the next audit rolls around months later.
Joyce also explodes a common myth – that sophisticated intruders rely on zero day threats. In fact, he says, zero day threats are far from being biggest danger to corporate networks. For any large network, he says:
“Persistence and focus will get you in and achieve that exploitation without the zero days. There’s so many vectors that are easier, less risky and quite often more productive.”
The cause of most intrusions, says Joyce, come down to one of things (the “Big Three”):
Email: “a user clicked on something they shouldn’t have”
Malicious websites – “they’ve gotten to a malicious website … and it’s either executed or they’ve run content from that website.”
Removable media – “where a user inserted contaminated media“. [As an aside, someone once told me the easiest way to get malware into an organization is to load it on a USB stick labelled “Payroll”, drop it in the carpark and leave the rest to curiosity!].
Joyce outlines the importance of making sure that sources of information about activity on the network – such as log files or network packet captures – are actually being monitored. “You’d be amazed at incident response teams that go in and there’s been some tremendous breach .. Yep, there it is right there in the logs.”
But perhaps the best piece of strategic advice he offers is this:
“Consider that you’re already penetrated. Do you have the means and methods to understand if somebody’s inside your network?”
That change in focus is important. Statistics show intrusions are becoming increasingly commonplace. Once organizations move from “we need to make sure we’re not penetrated” to “maybe we already are penetrated” they start to understand what tools, skills and processes they need to put in place to identify intrusions and stop an initial penetration from going on to become a more serious data breach. Or, if they have already been breached, what do they need to make sure they can identify how it happened and what was compromised?
Joyce’s presentation is a salient reminder that ensuring the basics of network security hygiene is critical. And that the battle to defend against attackers is an ongoing one. As fast as you tighten up your security, new vulnerabilities emerge that put you at risk.
Take a look at the video. You’ll find it’s 30 minutes of your time very well spent!
Cybersecurity Resources
Some of the useful resources that Joyce discusses and recommends are listed below
NOTE: The two links to the IAD site above require installing the DoD Root CA Certificates to avoid getting an “untrusted website” notification. More information here.
Endace was an exhibiting partner at Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas this month. Perform is the annual conference for Dynatrace users and attracts attendees from all over the world.
Attendees at Dynatrace Perform 2017 in Las Vegas
The conference sessions were packed, and our booth in the partner area was swamped during the partner sessions!
In fact it was so busy we didn’t have time to take photos of our booth! So here’s one of Dynatrace’s photos instead. And if you want more, there’s a big gallery of photos on this page.
In the Partner Lounge, Blaine Deutsch and Tom Leahy demonstrated how EndaceProbes integrate with Dynatrace DC RUM to provide instant access to network packet history as definitive evidence for troubleshooting application performance issues. They also showed how using EndaceProbes to Playback recorded history to an instance of the virtual AMD agent hosted in Application Dock offers new options for deep investigation of historical events.
If you weren’t able to make the event, here are the presentations:
We thoroughly enjoyed being at Perform 2017. And being in Las Vegas on Superbowl Sunday prior to the conference was certainly an experience too.
Thanks to all the attendees who came to our stand. We had some really interesting conversations which we look forward to picking up with you again very soon.
And thanks to Nathan, Mike, Paula and the team from Dynatrace for making us welcome and ensuring we had everything we needed too. A great event guys!
Launching at Black Hat this week, the EndaceProbe 114 is purpose-built for deployment in remote locations or branch offices. It offers the same 100% accurate recording, centralized management data mining and retrieval and application hosting as the rest of the EndaceProbe family but comes in a compact, short-depth format that makes it ideal for deployment in branch offices.
The EndaceProbe 114 allows organizations to cost-effectively extend their network visibility right out to the network edge and eradicate the blind spots that can make branch office locations an attractive target for attackers.
Last month we announced a partnership with Plixer to provide integration between EndaceProbe™️ Network Recorders and Plixer’s Scrutinizer™️ NetFlow Analytics suite. This leverages Endace Fusion’s API to enable SOC and NOC teams to pivot directly from Scrutinizer alerts to packet-level detail in traffic recorded on EndaceProbes across the network, delivering the detailed data that enables analysts to quickly investigate and establish the root cause of an alert.
We have also joined the Cisco Solution Partner program. This partnership provides customers using Cisco’s Firepower™ Management Console with single-click access to EndaceVision for powerful visualization of network traffic and rapid drill down to recorded network packets using Endace Fusion’sPivot to Vision and Pivot to Packets API functions.
Are you a Cisco Firepower or Plixer Scrutinizer user?
Contact sales@endace.com to organize a demo so you can see how this integration can dramatically speed up your investigations.
It seems everyone is in Las Vegas for Black Hat this week. We’re excited. Yes, we’re here too and we’d love to see you.
So drop in and see us at Booth #1572 where you’ll be able to check out our new EndaceProbe 114 Branch Office Network Recorder, see demos of our Cisco® FireSIGHT™ Management Center and Splunk™ integrations and we’ll also be showing off the new features of EndaceVision 2.0.
Plus we have some handsome battery packs and notebooks to give away. So swing by and say Hi.
With up to 192TB of storage per appliance, the new EndaceProbe™ 9000-XS series network recorders provide a highly scalable network recording solution, offering Petabytes of clustered and/or distributed storage capable of storing weeks, or months, of network history.
The massive storage of the 9000-XS EndaceProbes makes them an ideal choice as always-on recorders capturing a detailed history of network activity for forensic analysis of data breaches and speeding up the investigation and resolution of network security or performance issues.
See our press release about the new XS series and check out the complete range of EndaceProbe 100% accurate, high-speed network recorders.
Or download the EndaceProbe 9000 series datasheet.
Network monitoring tends to focus heavily on bandwidth, addressing the question, “Do I have the capacity to carry the traffic that my business requires?” Capacity, however, must include session count and lifecycle, which are often overlooked until they become a problem. That’s why EndaceVisionTM 6.0 Network Visibility Software has added two new tools to deal with sessions: TCP Flags view and client/server breakdown.
