Why everyone should care about FIPS 140, NIAP NDcPP, and DoDIN APL.

Original Entry by : Cary Wright

By Cary Wright, VP Product Management, Endace


Cary Wright, VP Product Management, Endace

Weak security plagues far too many of the IT products we use today. The problem is, there is no unified mandate to compel vendors to invest in security hardening their products. Vendors are free to choose how heavily to invest in security. So it’s no surprise that many vendors don’t invest heavily enough in thoroughly security hardening their products.
 
However, in many industries – such as Government, defense or critical infrastructure – the potential impact of a security vulnerability in a product is just too serious for organizations to leave it to vendors to decide how to secure their products. For this reason, organizations in many of these industries mandate that vendors must submit their products to rigorous testing and certification processes to ensure the security of their products is iron clad.
 
At Endace we found out first-hand how difficult and rigorous these standards are to comply with. The effort took us the better part of a year and significant investment in software development, testing and validation, and certification. Armor plated security is a good way to describe what these standards require. Our recent OSm 7.2.1 release includes everything we had to do to comply with these standards.
 
The good news for customers – regardless of the industry you are in – is that this rigorous testing and validation process doesn’t just benefit Government, Defense and critical infrastructure organizations. Any organization that adopts products that have passed these certification processes can be confident those products have been independently evaluated to minimize the risk of security vulnerabilities and are fit-for-purpose for deployment in high-security environments.
 
By selecting a product with DoD level security compliance you reap the benefit of millions of dollars of investment in security testing and hardening that goes way beyond standard penetration tests and security scans. The testing process for each of these certifications involves delving deep into the product – comprehensive testing, source code reviews, and independent validation that the security controls of the product are robust and well designed.
 
 

What are these standards, and what do they test?

Complying with FIPS 140-3 is the fundamental first step in certification. FIPS mandates that products must use robust and secure encryption. This is not a bolt-on. Products must implement a validated cryptography module as a central software pillar to ensure all encrypted communications meet the NIST standard for strong cryptography, including HTTPS, SSL, and SSH.
 
Just including encrypted HDDs in a system – as some vendors do to claim compliance with FIPS – is not sufficient. Every communication to and from the system must be secured with FIPS validated cryptography before the system can be FIPS certified. Independent testing confirms that products comply with the FIPS standards.
 
NIAP NDcPP 2.2e, also known as Common Criteria, is an international standard agreed by 18 nations. It builds on FIPS to define security requirements that are expected to be implemented by all network devices. It goes extremely deep to validate a product has robust security. By deep, I mean months of extensive testing, inspection, and independent code reviews, conducted and signed off by government signatories who are usually security experts in defense departments.
 
DoDIN APL stands for the US Department of Defense Information Network Approved Products List. With FIPS and NIAP certification in hand and a US DoD sponsor, a vendor’s final step is undergo product testing by a US DoD lab against DoD cybersecurity requirements. Being listed on the APL is the last big stage of a long and intensive project but it’s not the end of the story. Ongoing maintenance and revalidation ensures that a product remains secure throughout its life.

OSm 7.2.1 is released and available for download.

I am very proud of the team at Endace for having delivered a huge release with OSm 7.2.1 . This release has focused on meeting all the requirements for these intensive – but extremely valuable – security standards. And I am glad to say that every Endace customer will benefit from this huge investment in product security hardening.

Combining Endace and Elastic delivers detailed visibility into real-time and historical network activity

Original Entry by : Cary Wright

By Cary Wright, VP Product Management, Endace


Cary Wright, VP Product Management, Endace

We’re pleased to announce our newest technical partnership with leading SIEM and observability platform provider, Elastic. By combining together EndaceProbe™ always-on Hybrid Cloud packet capture, Elastic™ Stack and Elastic™ Security, we’re providing the packet-level network visibility and detailed network metadata that Security and IT teams need when responding to security threats and network or application performance issues.

How Do We Work Together?

By combining Endace and Elastic Stack, organizations gain accurate, highly detailed visibility into both real-time and historical network activity. Security and IT analysts can search network metadata in Elastic, and quickly pivot to full packet data for forensic investigations when they need to. The result is faster, more accurate incident investigation and resolution. The combination of Elastic Stack and EndaceProbe gives cybersecurity and IT teams the ability to see exactly what’s happening on their network in real-time. EndaceProbes can record weeks or months of full packet capture across hybrid cloud networks to provide a complete and accurate record of all network activity. The detailed full packet capture data recorded by EndaceProbes is a perfect complement to the rich logs and metadata collected by Elastic Stack. When analysts need to go back-in-time to investigate any incident they have a complete record of that activity at their fingertips. Beyond this, the ability to pivot from anomalies or security alerts directly to forensic examination of packet-level data lets analysts see exactly what’s happening. They can quickly respond to incidents and dramatically mitigate threat risk to their organizations.

EndaceFlow and Elastic Stack

In addition, EndaceProbe appliances can host EndaceFlow™, which generates extremely high-fidelity NetFlow data at full line rate. This NetFlow data can be ingested by Elastic Stack to provide detailed metadata for monitoring the security and performance of the network and interrogating network activity. Pre-built integration between EndaceProbes and Elastic Stack enables streamlined investigation workflows. Analysts can click on alerts in the Elastic UI to go directly to the related full packet data recorded by EndaceProbe. Analysts can quickly view traffic right down to individual packet level to see precisely what occurred before, during and after any event, with absolute certainty.

For more information about our Fusion Partner integrations, please visit www.endace.com/fusion-partners.

To see a demonstration of this Elastic Security integration in action please visit the Elastic partner page at https://www.endace.com/elastic-security.


Introducing EndaceProbe Cloud

Original Entry by : Cary Wright

Scalable Packet Capture for Hybrid Cloud

By Cary Wright, VP Product Management, Endace


Cary Wright, VP Product Management, Endace

The rapid growth of cloud vulnerabilities, hijacked cloud credentials, APTs targeting cloud, and lack of network layer visibility in cloud has made one thing clear: recorded network packet data is just as essential in the cloud as it is in physical networks. 

Enterprises know the value of our packet capture solutions, and they have told us they need the power of packets in the cloud as well. In many cases, they have moved – or plan to move – workloads to the cloud but have been hampered by an inability to gain the same visibility into activity in their public cloud infrastructure as they are used to relying on in on-premise environments.

Leveraging our 20-plus years of experience in delivering accurate, reliable packet capture for some of the world’s largest organizations, Endace developed EndaceProbe Cloud as the first truly scalable, enterprise-class solution for providing always-on packet capture in public cloud environments.

Unlike many solutions on the market, we’ve done it in a way that scales easily and delivers truly unified visibility that lets security, network and IT teams analyze packet data from across hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments quickly and easily from a central console. 

EndaceProbe Cloud delivers packet-level visibility for public cloud that is critical for threat hunting, incident response and performance management in those environments. It operates seamlessly with EndaceProbe hardware appliances to deliver always-on packet capture across on-premise, private and public cloud infrastructure, to provide unified visibility across the entire network.

See it in Action

The demo below shows how easy it is to quickly search for packet data across a multi-cloud – AWS and Azure – environment, recreate files from packet data and drill-in to analyze the full packets. All from a single console.

EndaceProbe Cloud is a full-featured EndaceProbe, purpose-built for deployment in AWS and Microsoft Azure environments that provides the following benefits to customers in cloud and hybrid cloud environments:  

    • Continuous, zero-loss, packet capture in public and hybrid cloud environments that provides weeks or months of visibility 
    • A unified console for fast global search and analysis across on-premise, private and public cloud environments.  
    • Full visibility into North-South and East-West traffic 
    • Secure packet storage within the customers’ own virtual network or virtual private cloud (VPC). 
    • Powerful traffic analysis and investigation tools including file extraction, log generation, and hosted Wireshark™ 
    • Seamless workflow integration with an open API and strong ecosystem of third-party network and security tools (https://www.endace.com/fusion-partners) 
    • Subscription-based pricing that offers flexibility and scalability  

EndaceProbe Cloud complements Endace’s hardware appliances to provide unified and seamless visibility across the entire network.

 

 

Multi-Tenancy introduced with OSm 7.1

Original Entry by : Cary Wright

Securely sharing packet capture infrastructure across multiple entities

By Cary Wright, VP Product Management, Endace


Cary Wright, VP Product Management, EndaceWe are proud to announce that EndaceProbe now supports Multi-Tenancy, “Woo-hoo” I hear you say! If you are an MSPP, MDR, Service Provider, or organisation with multiple departments, your SoC teams can now reap the benefits of having access to weeks or months of continuously recorded network traffic whilst sharing costs with many other likeminded SoC teams. Let’s dig into what Multi-Tenancy is and why it’s important.

At the most basic level, Multi-Tenancy is the ability to host multiple “entities” (e.g. multiple customers or multiple organizational divisions) on a single architecture at the same time. To put it another way, Multi-Tenancy offers a way to share the costs of a system or service across more than one entity. Multi-tenancy can mean different things depending on your domain of expertise:

  • Cloud providers are inherently multi-tenanted, serving millions of clients with shared compute
  • Operating systems often host multiple tenants on a single machine
  • Networks can supply connectivity to multiple teams or organizations via a single infrastructure.

All these scenarios have these necessary requirements in common:

  1. Each tenant’s data must remain private and accessible to only that authorized tenant, and
  2. Each tenant needs access to reliable, predictable, or contracted resources – such as bandwidth, compute, storage, security services, expertise, etc.

Multi-tenancy can help organizations to scale critical security services in a cost-efficient manner. A capable security architecture/service requires a significant capability investment and the expertise to operate it. By enabling this investment to be shared, it enables services to be made available to organizations that might otherwise not have been able to afford them.

A good example of where Multi-Tenancy can be extremely useful is the Security Operations Center (SoC). Typically, only large, well-funded organisations have the resources to build their own dedicated SoC. Multi-tenancy can enable multiple organizations to share a SoC, each benefiting from a strengthened security posture without carrying the full burden of the costs and effort involved.

This is the model underpinning outsourced MSSP services, for example. But it can also be an ideal model for larger organizations with multiple divisions that each need to maintain separation from each other. Or where multiple individual companies are owned by a common parent. It can also be a useful way to safely isolate a newly acquired company until its systems can be safely migrated or transferred over to the new owner’s infrastructure.

We see lots of areas where organizations are benefiting from this ability to  share infrastructure and services. So we are very pleased to announce that with the new OSm 7.1 software release, EndaceProbe Analytics Platform now also supports Multi-Tenancy for network recording.

This is especially useful where multiple tenants share the same network. A single EndaceProbe, or a fabric of EndaceProbes, can now be securely shared across multiple different organisations or tenants, while keeping the data for each tenant secure and private. EndaceProbes continuously record all network data on the shared network, but only provide each tenant with access to their own data.

In this case the tenancies are defined by VLANs, where each tenant has a VLAN, or set of VLANs, that carries only their traffic. When a user needs to investigate a security threat in their tenancy, they simply log into InvestigationManager to search, inspect, and analyse only the traffic that belongs to that tenancy. It’s as if each tenant has its own, wholly separate, EndaceFabric, dedicated just to its own tenancy.

This new capability is important for large organisations that service multiple departments, agencies, or divisions. Service providers, MSPPs, and MDRs which service multiple clients will also benefit from Multi-Tenancy to give each of its clients ready access to its own recorded network traffic for fast, secure, and private, security incident response.

We are very excited that this new Multi-Tenancy feature can help make Network Recording accessible for many more organizations, helping them to resolve incidents faster and with greater confidence.

For more information on this great new feature, or to arrange a demonstration to show how Endace could help you, contact us.


Watch Endace on Cisco ThreatWise TV from RSA 2019

Original Entry by : Endace

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.


New OSm 6.5 brings ultra-fast, network-wide search to all EndaceProbe models

Original Entry by : Sebastian Mackay

OSm - Operating System for Monitoring

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.


Dynatrace Perform 2017

Original Entry by : Mark Evans

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!


Inaugural Sharkfest Europe a great success

Original Entry by : Endace

endace-sharkfest-standEurope got its own Sharkfest in October and the inaugural Wireshark Developer and User Conference was a great success with strong attendance from the user and developer community across Europe. Congratulations to Sharkfest Europe for a great launch to what is sure to be a fantastic annual event.

There was a great program of speakers over the three days. Kicking things off with the pre-conference course was Wireshark University’s Laura Chappell. Her Troubleshooting with Wireshark tutorial was well attended and included invaluable tips for working with Wireshark using workflows which make optimal use of Wireshark to quickly highlight potential issues.

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