Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Blog

"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle," were words spoken at the end of every G.I. Joe cartoon during the mid-1980s and served as a conclusion to public service announcements. For some reason this statement has always stayed with me and I often use the saying, typically in a sarcastic manner. But late last week and again this morning this 80s era disclaimer resonated once again after the U.S. House of Representatives passed bill 4061, "To advance cybersecurity research, development, and technical standards, and for other purposes".

On the show floor at RSA Conference there is a lot happening and overall the show seems much more well attended than last year. I talked with Crossbeam about how they verify the performance of their network equipment using real-world simulation.

BreakingPoint Resiliency Score™ Replaces Vendor Assurances With the Measurable Answers Needed to Harden Cyber InfrastructureBreakingPoint Systems today unveiled a new approach to objectively measure the resiliency of network and security equipment, putting an end to data sheet speculation. The BreakingPoint Resiliency Score™ provides an objective, repeatable and scientifically measured certification of the performance, security and stability of any network or network device. The Resiliency Score methodology was unveiled today on the show floor at RSA Conference (Booth 1356), with vendors receiving an opportunity to calculate their score.

While catching up on security news and blogs the other day, I came across a blog post from ICSA Labs entitled "Why a Test Lab Needs to be Wary of Commercial Exploit Packet Captures" and thought that it would be a good conversation starter to inform our readers about how BreakingPoint approaches developing test cases for security device testing, our methodology behind why we develop our test cases the way we do, and the thought processes and conclusions behind those decisions.

Media headlines tell us we should be concerned about IPv6. After all, cyber criminals are already "taking advantage of IPv6 vulnerabilities" and we are running out of IPv4 addresses "at an alarming rate". But there are so many unanswered questions around IPv6 and shifting through what is truth and what is hype can be a challenge. We figured we would take on the IPv6 conversation in our next webcast and answer the questions you have been asking:

Next week is my favorite week of the year. It's the Sales Operations meeting held at our headquarters in Austin. Each year we bring the sales people and sales engineers together to review the previous year and preview the year moving forward. More importantly I get to show off.

If you ask your IT team if your network is secure, hopefully they'll say 'yes'. If you ask a hacker, I'm pretty confident they will say 'no'. Technically, it is the hacker that is right, but a more informative answer is 'somewhere in between'. It's a black and white question with a gray answer.

Tomorrow begins a mad rush of cyber security events throughout the country. BreakingPoint will have people at nearly a dozen shows over the next month, and in most cases we will be providing on site demonstrations. In case you are attending one of these shows or simply live in the area and want to meet up give us a shout here or on Twitter.