Cloud Security – MEC Networks Corporation

Fortinet Named As A Leader In The 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant For Network Firewalls

MEC Digital — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 08:03:51 +0000

Fortinet has been recognized as one of the Leaders among the 18 vendors included within the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls report for 2019. We believe this recognition showcases our clear understanding of market needs, both as an innovator and a thought leader. We feel, it conjointly highlights our current commitment to providing the IT community, and our over 415,000 customers around the world, with the best possible protection for today’s refined and highly distributed networks.

A Commitment to Innovation and Thought Leadership

With nearly 630 patents—more than any other vendor— we feel/we are confident/we believe, Fortinet is number one in proven cybersecurity innovation. And as networks continue to undergo a fast and ongoing transformation, the underlying security design must be able to position to adapt and scale in an approach that enables organizations to understand their business objectives. This clear vision of the needs of each today’s and tomorrow’s networks has enabled us to continually be at the forefront of thought leadership and product development.

A Powerful Security-Driven Networking Approach

A crucial component of our current success is our distinctive security-driven networking approach, which integrates security into each component of the network to assist customers to increase efficiencies across their infrastructure, correlates threat intelligence, and respond to detected threats in an exceedingly unified fashion. It conjointly prevents the types of security gaps in policy, functionality, and enforcement that are typically the results of a more traditional, ad hoc approach to security.

With a security-driven networking strategy in place, FortiGate Network Firewalls guarantee consistent, end-to-end protection across all crucial network edges—from campuses and data centers to branch offices and multi-cloud deployments.

Securing the Extended Network

Secure SD-WAN: Fortinet is one of the primary vendors to deliver an enterprise-class SD-WAN solution using custom-built ASIC technology combined with totally integrated advanced security to support and protect distributed WAN locations. As a part of a security-driven networking strategy, Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution allows organizations to increase crucial business applications to remote locations, improve user experience, and lower WAN costs while not compromising their security posture.

Cloud security: FortiGate network firewalls offer advanced security for even the most complicated multi-cloud environments with broad support for all of the highest IaaS providers, as well as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba. This enables customers to leverage consistent multi-layer security protection, automation, and deep integrations no matter how many clouds they adopt using cloud-native solutions within every cloud, and seamless policy and enforcement translations between totally different cloud environments.

Accelerate On-Ramp to the Cloud: Fortinet’s high-performance data center and SD-WAN solutions accelerate cloud on-ramp by providing high-speed connectivity and deep SSL inspection to the multi-cloud. With FortiGate network firewalls, organizations can deliver an excellent user experience while achieving clear visibility and inspection of all SSL and TLS traffic, whether or not on-premises or within the cloud.

High-speed inspection of SSL and TLS encrypted traffic: With encrypted traffic currently comprising over 70th of total network traffic and 60 minutes of attacks using SSL or TLS to infiltrate networks and exfiltration data, organizations place themselves at serious risk once SSL/TLS inspection isn’t turned on. For many network firewalls, however, inspecting encrypted traffic results in huge performance hits, leading to the type of performance bottlenecks that today’s digital businesses cannot afford. Using advanced physical and virtual security processors (SPUs), FortiGate solutions offer the very best price/performance rates within the industry. And Fortinet is that the sole vendor to currently support TLS v1.3.

Single pane of glass management: Fortinet is additionally the only vendor to supply comprehensive management of a full suite of advanced security solutions, regardless of where they’re deployed through a single pane of glass management system. FortiManager simplifies management with a single console, or it can be extended across a tiered management strategy or integrated into a strong NOC/SOC solution for consistent configuration, orchestration, and compliance across even the foremost broadly distributed network.

More Gartner Peer Insights Reviews Than any other vendor for Enterprise Network Firewall

Of course, we believe leadership is about much more than industry accolades, that is why we are therefore happy with the fact that a majority of the Fortune 500 corporations trust Fortinet to secure their most important assets. However each business, large or small, deserves a similar level of protection, that is why our solutions are universally adopted by such a big amount of organizations both large and small – more than 415,000 and growing! Gartner Peer Insights portal for the Enterprise Network Firewalls market lists Fortinet’s FortiGate Enterprise Firewall with the highest overall customer reviews than all other solutions (based on 1,438 reviews as of 13 Sept 2019).

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Fortinet: 5 Advantages of SD-WAN To Your Business

MEC Digital — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 08:12:35 +0000

Organizations are progressively embracing digital transformation to keep pace with rising market trends, fluctuating customer demands, and enlarged competition. However traditional network architectures weren’t designed to handle the workloads and complexities of most digital transformation initiatives. More distressing is that business-critical services are typically distributed across multiple clouds, which might compromise network performance more, particularly at branch locations.

No wonder then that savvy network operations groups are turning to software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) as a way to scale back overhead and support new applications and services resulting from digital transformation. This innovative technology not solely simplifies the management and operation of a WAN but additionally delivers a variety of real-world business advantages.

5 ways in which SD-WAN will boost the bottom line – without the IT headaches:

Improves performance

Not all network traffic is made equal. Luckily, SD-WAN can be organized to prioritize business-critical traffic and real-time services like voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) then steer it over the foremost efficient route. By facilitating vital applications through reliable, high-performance connections, IT groups will help cut back packet loss and latency problems, thereby increasing worker productivity and boosting employees’ morale.

Boosts security

Digital transformation is a double-edged weapon. While it will improve customer satisfaction and extend market reach, it may expose a company to vital security risks. That’s a concern, given that 41st of respondents reported a rise in the frequency of cybersecurity events in 2017, per the U.S. State of Cybercrime survey. The great news is several SD-WAN solutions provide built-in security. However, the fundamental firewall and VPN functions provided by most SD-WAN solutions are typically not enough, forcing IT groups to do and overlay security across elastic and dynamic SD-WAN connections after the fact. A far better choice is to look for SD-WAN solutions that give a wide range of integrated security features, like NGFW, IPS, encryption, AV, and sandboxing capabilities which will help stop data loss, downtime, regulatory violations, and legal liabilities.

Lowers complexity

Digital transformation initiatives will add layers of complexity to a network. The result’s not only a risk of poor network performance but over-taxed IT groups and the need for locating onsite personnel at remote sites to manage the local IT infrastructure. Luckily, SD-WAN will ease the IT burden by simplifying WAN infrastructure, using broadband to off-load non-critical business apps, automating monitoring tasks, and managing traffic through a centralized controller. Take into account searching for an SD-WAN solution which will conjointly be integrated into the local branch infrastructure to drive security and management deep into the local LAN.

Enables cloud usage

Organizations are progressively adopting cloud services. The great news is that SD-WAN allows direct cloud access at the remote branch, thereby eliminating backhauling traffic – routing all cloud and branch workplace traffic through the data center – which means that employees will directly access cloud applications despite location without burdening the core network with further traffic to manage and secure. What’s more, SD-WAN improves cloud application performance by prioritizing business vital applications and sanctioning branches to directly communicate to the internet.

Reduces costs

As organizations deploy an ever-increasing array of cloud-based applications, the amount of data moving over a WAN will increase exponentially, increasing operational costs. luckily, SD-WAN will cut back this price tag by leveraging low price local internet access, providing direct cloud access, and reducing the quantity of traffic over the backbone WAN. According to an IDC survey (forecast), nearly 1 / 4 of survey respondents expect SD-WAN cost savings of upwards of 39th, with two-thirds expecting more modest savings in the 5-19% range.

Additionally, once properly elect and deployed, SD-WAN practicality can be extended deep into the local branch LAN to make sure that security and network functionality will defend locally deployed devices and secure direct connections to SaaS applications and other online resources. Eliminating network sprawl, security risks, and inconsistent performance are among the benefits of migrating to SD-WAN. But for organizations that dive deeper, this innovative technology offers huge business advantages that translate to lower total cost of ownership and support their larger SD-Branch initiatives.

Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in an exceedingly unified offering.

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SonicWall: A Quick Look At The Modern Phishing Campaigns of 2019

MEC Digital — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 07:07:29 +0000

The world of cybersecurity is dominated by headlines of malware, ransomware, data breaches, app vulnerabilities, IoT threats, and botnet attacks. However, phishing has been a heavy threat since the early 2000s and is widely considered the foremost common attack vector for cybercriminals.

Today, phishing isn’t about volume. These email threats are currently tuned to successfully trick a high-value target into taking the desired action: clicking on a malicious link, opening a malware-laden file, providing a password, or authorizing monetary transactions.

In the current cyber race, threat actors are perpetually attempting to get around security systems. Within the context of email as a threat vector, phishing has evolved into spear-phishing, impersonation, and Business Email Compromise (BEC) varieties of attacks. These messages are extremely targeted with in-depth social engineering efforts to rigorously choose and study the victim.

Global phishing volume down attacks more targeted

Published within the 2019 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, our Capture Labs threat researchers recorded 26 million phishing attacks worldwide, a 4.1 % drop from 2017. During that point, the typical SonicWall client faced 5,488 phishing attacks.

2018 Global Phishing Volume

As businesses get better at blocking email attacks and guaranteeing workers can spot and delete suspicious emails, attackers are shifting techniques. New information suggests they’re reducing overall attack volume and launching a lot of extremely targeted phishing attacks.

Explore the 5 common techniques phishers are using

1.) Malicious URLs and fake or spoofed websites

With enhancements in secure email solutions that mitigate phishing, cybercriminals are resorting to innovative ways to execute targeted attacks, like using weaponized URLs in an email to deliver malicious payloads or making phishing websites with fake login pages to reap user login credentials. In late 2017, it was reported that nearly 1.5 million phishing sites are created monthly. And also the detection of phishing sites has become tougher because phishers are obfuscating phishing URLs with multiple redirections and URL shorteners.

In addition, about half of these phishing sites are using HTTPS and SSL certificates, which makes it easier for cybercriminals to deceive their victims.

Source: “PhishPoint: New SharePoint Phishing Attack Affects an estimated 100 pc of office 365 Users,” Avanan, August 2018.

According to Microsoft’s counterintelligence report, “attackers increasingly use popular document sharing and collaboration sites and services to distribute malicious payloads and fake login forms that are used to steal user credentials.”

2.) Phishing targeting office 365 applications, users

SaaS and webmail services are progressively targeted by phishing campaigns. according to the Anti-Phishing working group (APWG), phishing that targeted SaaS and webmail services doubled within the fourth quarter of 2018. As office 365 gains adoption as the preferred choice of cloud email platform across organizations of all sizes and verticals, it comes as no surprise that Microsoft is the most impersonated brand.

“As Microsoft’s SEG market share increases, smart attackers can specifically target Microsoft’s defenses,” reports Gartner.

This is not inconceivable because an office 365 subscription is accessible to anyone with a credit card, creating its security features very accessible to cybercriminals. This, in theory, allows criminal groups to design phishing campaigns that will evade Microsoft’s native defenses. In fact, in another report, researchers found 25th of phishing emails bypass office 365 security.

3.) Compromised credentials

In January 2019, security researcher Troy Hunt discovered “Collection 1,” a trove of 773 million email addresses and 21 million passwords available for sale on Hacker Forum. These compromised user IDs and password combos are used to perform attacks from the inside. a typical attack includes an account takeover that involves threat actors compromising worker corporate credentials by either launching a credential phishing campaign against an organization or buying credentials on the Darkweb because of third-party information leaks. The threat actor will then use the taken credentials to gain further access or increase privileges. Compromised credentials might stay undiscovered for months or years.

4.) Impersonation, CEO fraud, and Business Email Compromise (BEC)

According to the FBI, Business Email Compromise, or BEC, is a scam targeting businesses operating with foreign suppliers and/or businesses frequently performing wire transfer payments. These subtle scams are administered by fraudsters compromising email accounts through social engineering or computer intrusion techniques to conduct the unauthorized transfer of funds. These sorts of attacks are hard to prevent because they do not contain malicious links or attachments, however, a message to the victim is seemingly from a trustworthy sender requesting a transfer of funds.

The FBI internet complaint Center (IC3) reported last summer that from October 2013 to May 2018, total losses worldwide for known BEC scams hit $12.5 billion.

5.) Malicious PDF files and office doc attachments

Email attachments are a popular delivery mechanism for malicious payloads, like ransomware and never-before-seen malware. SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers recently found a considerable increase of malicious or fraudulent PDF files. These fraud campaigns take advantage of recipients’ trust in PDF files as a “safe” file format that’s widely used and relied upon for business operations.

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Fortinet: Cyber Attack Patterns Uncover Defensive Strategies

MEC Digital — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 07:52:47 +0000

In Fortinet’s Q1 2019 Threat Landscape Report, threat analysts at FortiGuard Labs selected to poke into data from the company’s web filtering service. Here is what they found.

Weekdays vs. Weekends

When researchers checked out the web-filtering volume from two Cyber Kill Chain phases, comparing weekdays and weekends, they found that pre-compromise activity is roughly 3 times more likely to occur throughout the workweek.

This is primarily because of the very fact that almost all phishing attacks require somebody to click on an email link or perform another action, whereas post-compromise activities that use command-control services will occur anytime.

Every bit of insight that can be gained on how attackers work is often converted into enhancements in security practices. During this case, it may make sense to think about differentiating weekday and weekend filtering practices.

Shared Infrastructure

Another fascinating insight is the degree to which different threats share infrastructure (namely, URLs). Nearly hour of all analyzed threats shared public infrastructure. For example, IcedID, the ninth-ranked threat by volume, shared nearly two-thirds of the domains it contacted with different threats.

Even more intriguing: once threats share infrastructure, they additionally tend to do so within an equivalent stage in the Kill Chain. Similarly, while many alternative threats might share an equivalent domain during, say, the exploitation part of an attack, it’d be uncommon for that threat to also leverage that domain for its C2 traffic.

Security tactics

It’s clear that cybercriminals share more than source code and sell technology on Dark web commerce sites. They conjointly share methods and techniques. Once that data is known and incorporated into a security strategy, pattern and behavior marching will improve the power to notice live threats. Attack vectors, like those, simply mentioned, underscore the need for organizations to rethink their strategy to better future-proof and manage cyber risks.

This should start with organizations taking a stratified approach to security across individuals, processes, and technology:

People – The overwhelming majority of attacks still happen because somebody clicks on a malicious link. Workers ought to be frequently educated on making robust passwords, how to determine malicious URLs and email sources, and to not open or click on unknown or unexpected email messages, links, or attachments. this could then be augmented with access management policies, as well as a zero-trust policy, and intent-based segmentation thus, within the event of an incident, an attack is restricted to a particular segment of the network.

Processes – Incident response plans need to embrace regular backups that are stored off-network, regular testing of these backups, and system restoration drills to make sure everybody is aware of their role thus systems can be restored as quickly as possible.

IT groups must always know what assets are online, where those assets are, then be able to prioritize their access to and consumption of resources based on which are most business-critical.

Technology – Security tools need to be chosen based on their ability to be integrated along and cross-automated so that they will gather, share, correlate, and consume threat intelligence across the entire distributed network in real-time.

“Deception technology is another tactic IT groups should make use of. Effective deception strategies make it more durable for an adversary to determine what assets are fake and that are real, while tripwires embedded in these false signals increase the power to detect an intruder. Finally, segmenting company networks limits the exposure of critical information if there’s a breach.”

Derek Manky, ThreatPost, June 14, 2019 Tweet

Adapt Your Security Ways

Last quarter’s threat research from FortiGuard Labs offered necessary insights into how attackers are evolving and the way you’ll be able to leverage behavior patterns to ascertain and circumvent threats. As an example, initial attacks stages tend to occur throughout work hours, and those attacks also tend to share infrastructure. In response, IT security groups should be on the lookout for these and similar activity identifiers by adjusting their detection and filtering practices accordingly.

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Fortinet: Reasons Why Email Security Should Be Top of Mind for Everyone

MEC Digital — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 06:20:09 +0000

I have the chance every week to talk with organizations that come back through our executive briefing center. They share info concerning their strategic business and security initiatives whereas learning concerning our company vision and ways that we are serving customers with similar challenges to those they face.

Many times their stated interest is SD-WAN and cloud, typically segmentation, and different times security operations. without a question, these are necessary (and hot) topics, however, I perpetually try to carve out a bit little bit of time to speak concerning email security, and here’s why.

Industry data Shows Email may be a prime Attack Vector

If you read the recent 2019 data Breach Investigation Report from Verizon, you’ll notice that ninety-four of malware was delivered via email which the highest cybercriminal action resulting in a breach was phishing.

FortiGuard Labs habitually finds new phishing campaigns rising to the fore, like this new version of Hawkeye that recently hit our weekly threat intelligence newsletter and blog.

But it’s not simply malicious files or URLs in an email that represent a risk. according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over 2 years of Business, Email Compromise exposed victims to a calculable loss of $3.3bn. And the U.S. Department of Justice recently filed suit against a cybercriminal purported to have taken $100m using that sort of fraud.

Email is Moving to the Cloud

Whether your organization uses Microsoft office 365, Google G-Suite, or another cloud-based email provider, email infrastructure is moving off-premises and into the cloud to be managed by some other person. This makes excellent sense given the maturity of email systems and increasing IT specializes in different high-value aspects of digital transformation.

However, outsourcing email infrastructure doesn’t essentially mean you must outsource email security. Given the industry data on top of this, this is often a really necessary question for every organization to answer concerning their distinctive appetite for risk.

Leading industry Analysts Assert you want to Re-Assess Email Security architecture

Recently, Gartner published their Market Guide for Email Security and declared that “Security and risk management (SRM) leaders should come back their organizations’ email security architecture within the light of current email threats, like refined malware, links to exploit kits, credentials phishing, and BEC.”

This Market Guide states “the following capabilities are often used as primary differentiators and choice criteria for email security products:

To Protect Against Attachment-Based Advanced Threats: Network Sandbox and Content Disarm and Reconstruction
To Protect Against URL-Based Advanced Threats: URL rewriting and Time-of-Click Analysis and web Isolation Services
To Protect Against Impersonation and Social Engineering techniques utilized in URL-Based, Attachment-Based and Payloadless Advanced Threats: show Name Spoof Detection, Domain-Based Message Authentication, reporting and conformance on arriving Email, Lookalike Domain Detection, and Anomaly Detection.”

(Side note: we are proud to possess been listed among the Representative Vendors for international SEGs in Gartner’s 2019 Market Guide for Email Security.)

Conclusion

To recap, sources have known email-based malware, phishing, and BEC as pricey – and infrequently, the highest – cybercriminal actions. For those organizations rapidly moving to cloud-based email systems, this issue remains, and even as with their traditional email solutions, they’ll still ascertain whether or not the native email security is sufficient. additionally, leading analysts assert that each organization should re-assess their email security architecture.

Given this information, it looks pretty clear to me what we tend to all ought to embrace among our 2019 security projects.

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Fortinet: Expanding Revenue Opportunities with SD-WAN

MEC Digital — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 02:27:48 +0000

Today’s organizations need business-critical SaaS applications, unified communications, and rich media services to be made available to each user, as well as those located at branch offices, while not escalating connectivity overhead, overburdening connections by backhauling unneeded traffic or introducing IT complexity in locations while not local IT employees on-site. And given the advanced nature of today’s digital networks, traditional WAN connections will not keep up.

However, moving these solutions to the branch over the general public internet needs a good range of refined functionalities, like load equalization, remediating noisy or unreliable WAN connections, and maintaining high-integrity connections to support latency-sensitive applications. To realize this, SD-WAN has become the WAN connection replacement solution of choice.

“SD-WAN is currently the quickest growing networking technology segment, projected to grow at a 40.4% CAGR through 2022. additionally, according to one survey, over 85th of corporations report that they’re actively considering adopting SD-WAN to extend security and cut back sprawl.”

— Jon Bove, Channel Partners Online, 17 May 2019

Because of its rise, however, a growing variety of vendors are currently marketing a brand new SD-WAN device or service — not all of them are created equal.

“And to complicate matters further, there is little guidance available to help organizations wade through the marketing hype. While third-party testing labs like NSS Labs have begun to establish some baseline parameters around SD-WAN solutions, there are still a number of issues that organizations face in selecting, deploying, and managing a solution that meets their current and evolving needs.”

— Jon Bove, Channel Partners Online, 17 May 2019

Providing essential SD-WAN guidance

As a result of this vendor sprawl, customers considering a move to SD-WAN are inundated with the choices available to them. As trusty advisors, partners have a singular opportunity to guide them through this transition, from choosing solutions to deploying, managing, and optimizing a solution rollout. Here are many areas to specialize in, that may well be useful in aiding customers to pick the most effective answer for his or her business while serving to you grow your business:

Efficiency. Automated Multi-Path Intelligence selects the foremost economical route for business-critical traffic, and WAN Path rectification is able to beat poor or noisy links, enhance data dependability, and deliver a much better user experience.
Performance. Tunnel bandwidth Aggregation permits per-packet load equalization to maximize network capacity and performance, whereas advanced Application Awareness will determine applications on the very initial packet then rate routing across available network bandwidth primarily based to accelerate delivery.
Interconnectivity. Public networks raise eyebrows once it involves security. specialized VPN functions, like meshed overlay VPNs, firmly interconnect branch devices, applications, and resources, therefore, data and applications will quickly across the extended network while not overwhelming VPN management systems.
Security. SD-WAN solutions got to give a full variety of advanced security features while operating at SD-WAN connectivity speeds. this needs that security gives native integration into the SD-WAN answer for quicker performance and simplified management; deep examination of encrypted VPN traffic at digital speeds; a full vary of security protection, together with NGFW, IPS, web filtering, anti-virus, and sandboxing, and seamless integration with enterprise security to make sure consistent security enforcement.
Management. Managing WAN optimization and security functions through 2 totally different interfaces will produce visibility and management gaps. single-pane-of-glass management permits remote administrators to manage network topologies and security devices and policies. This simplified approach ought to be extended across the complete distributed network, therefore, branch deployments aren’t treated as a separate and isolated network.

Selecting a complete Secure SD-WAN solution

Most IT groups aren’t only stretched thin, however, they’re conjointly unfamiliar with the complexities concerned in selecting and deploying the proper SD-WAN solution for his or her organization. To overcome this challenge, they need help from a trustworthy advisor that understands the requirements of deploying a good, scalable, and secure SD-WAN solution. As a result, partners are in a very distinctive position to produce the assistance and guidance they have — simply at a time once SD-WAN isn’t solely a top of mind issue for organizations, however, once cybercriminals have conjointly increased they specialize in targeting the WAN edge.

Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in a very unified giving.

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Fortinet: Four Essential Cloud Security Concepts

MEC Digital — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 06:11:03 +0000

Possibly the foremost vital attribute of the cloud is that crucial business applications can be deployed, managed, and distributed quicker and easier than by any other method, giving employees and customers real-time access to essential information—wherever they’re located and on whatever device they’re using. That requires nimble resources that will scale and move, and applications that are straightforward and intuitive to use, have access to real-time data, and might be quickly updated to satisfy perpetually evolving trends. Likewise, internal workflows across devices—and completely different clouds—need to be extremely available, flexible, and responsive so as to support essential functions and complete transactions.

Security is simply as crucial a component of any cloud environment—especially as cybercriminals look to take advantage of the rapidly increasing attack surface. However, to be effective, it has to be as agile and dynamic because the cloud infrastructure is protected. And, it’s even as not possible to safeguard a cloud environment using legacy security solutions as it is to create a cloud using legacy network components and traditional application development methods.

Effective security not solely must protect connections between data and users, however, it also secures virtually every connection to each physical or virtual device across the distributed infrastructure. Even those who are perpetually moving across—and even between—multi-cloud installations.

In such a setting, complexities arise from the employment of various security solutions, as deploying security solutions that are solely available on a single cloud platform might not be available on others and will have functional limitations. Such deployments have truly imposed limits on the true potential of the cloud. Too many organizations have failed to address this security challenge holistically, often swamped by the scope and scale of the challenge.

Four Essential Cloud Security Concepts

To address these challenges, organizations need to incorporate the following four security concepts into their cloud development strategies:

Security-led cloud development: Security breaches tend to be the results of a determined cybercriminal exploiting the weakest link in an organization’s attack surface. And for several organizations, the adoption of the cloud has expanded its attack surface exponentially. Eliminating those weak links requires security to be implemented systematically all over, even once the infrastructure is in a state of constant flux. Because infrastructures are increasing and changing so quickly, it’s essential that overall security setup becomes the foundational requirement for any network changes. Mandating that correct security tools, policies, and procedures are in place before any new resources are spun up permits security to adapt in sync with infrastructure and application changes. this needs to choose security tools that perceive the infrastructure within which they have been placed, which can even operate systematically across all environments—including multi-cloud—to enforce policies and guarantee visibility that permits secure applications and connectivity from the data center to the cloud. Even minor variations in adaptability and enforcement will produce security gaps that cybercriminals are all too willing and able to exploit.

Cloud-native security: Since data and workflows can move throughout the infrastructure and to the cloud, security must perform systematically. choosing a cloud firewall from an equivalent vendor that’s protecting the organization’s physical assets won’t necessarily solve that problem. there’s a need for these solutions to interact seamlessly with cloud services and subscribe themselves to those services as well as determine cloud-based resources within the same logical manner that they identify alternative resources. That said, the underlying technology used for protecting networks is incredibly completely different from the tech used for protecting cloud-based resources, however, the practice of managing security must stay similar. that’s why native integration into the cloud infrastructure is crucial.

Multiple form factors: Consistent security enforcement depends on equivalent security solutions being deployed across several platforms and in as many different form factors as possible. Applications, as an example, should be able to create calls to a cloud-based security solution to spot and protect specific data and transactions. Container-based applications should have access to containerized security tools so as to simply integrate security functionality into the application chain. And ideally, these tools ought to be operated within the very same way as solutions deployed everywhere across your distributed infrastructure, together with at branch offices and edge devices.

Central management: one of the largest complaints from network administrators is that they can’t see and manage their entire network through one console that extends visibility across physical and virtual networks. A management solution that may see and shut the gates against an attack in one area of the network but not in another is probably going cause a compromised infrastructure. To eliminate gaps in security enforcement, organizations would like one pane of glass to gain visibility and define consistent security policies throughout the whole infrastructure to effectively manage risk. Security solutions got to share and correlate threat intelligence, receive and implement centrally orchestrated policy and configuration changes, and coordinate all resources to reply to detected threats.

Rethink your Security

Traditional security models where devices are placed at a network gateway to observe foreseeable traffic and devices are obsolete. Today, security must span your distributed infrastructure, dynamically scale once application resources grow, and automatically adapt because the infrastructure unendingly adjusts to ever-changing demands. And even as necessary, it additionally must guarantee consistent functionality and policy enforcement no matter its form factor or wherever it’s deployed. Achieving that will require you to rethink your current security infrastructure.

If the cloud goes to play a major role within the future of your organization, you’ll be better off finding a single vendor that supports your overall application lifecycle and infrastructure roadmaps and expansion plans—especially a solution that gives consistent protection and functionality across multiple public and private cloud domains, even if meaning replacing the standard security hardware you’ve got deployed on-premise.

By leverage native integration capabilities of a broad protection toolset – which may all be automated and centrally managed are the security foundations necessary to enable uniform policy enforcement, collaborative threat sharing, centralized management and orchestration, and a single view across your entire distributed infrastructure and powers your organization with the confidence to deploy any application on any cloud infrastructure. while nota strong, integrated, and automated security framework designed to span, grow, and adapt to your entire network, you’re flying blind, and today’s aggressive cybercriminals are only too willing and able to exploit that weakness.

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Fortinet: Securing the future of ICT

MEC Digital — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 09:20:15 +0000

When thinking about digital transformation, most people consider things just like the cloud, smartphones, and new applications. Some might also consider IoT. However one of the most disruptive results of digital transformation has been the fast emergence of the edge.

Edge-based networking is replacing the standard perimeter, enabling organizations to dynamically expand their networks, build dynamic WAN connections, adopt mobility and IoT methods, and enable the distributed process. it’s additionally introducing a large range of the latest security challenges that can’t be addressed with our current security solutions or methods.

Any time an endpoint or IoT device, a cloud container, a branch office, or any other configuration connects back to your core environment to deliver or collect data, process information, or run an application or workload, you’ve created an edge. The edge consists of various key elements:

Edge Computing: one of the most consistent elements of any network modification is to maneuver data as near to the place it needs to be processed in order to respond to events in near real-time. Today, flexibility and mobility are a demand for several industries, including health care, telecommunications, manufacturing, and finance. Supporting this needs moving data closer to the edge.

Edge Devices: And any device with a determinable IP address is an edge device. they’ll be smart consumer devices like phones and watches and cars, devices deployed at a branch office—such as specialized routers, integrated access devices (IADs), multiplexers, SD-WAN solutions, or perhaps containers within the cloud.

Multi-Edge: Combining these components together creates multi-edge environments, like using an SD-WAN connection to enable interconnectivity with different branch offices, back to the core data center, out to mobile users, along with separate connections to the general public internet and to cloud applications.

Securing The Edge

There are currently several times more IP-enabled devices on earth than humans, and lots of those will support multiple connections. which suggests there are billions upon billions of edges in use at any given moment, with billions of additional potential edge devices simply around the corner. And each of those requires protection.

While the security of an organization is merely as good as its weakest link, a personal device at a branch network connecting to the general public internet might not need a similar degree of scrutiny as a video conference discussing intellectual property development. putting a balance between securing essential data and managing restricted resources like bandwidth as technical overhead needs building a tiered security strategy.

Set Trust Level

How does one make sure that every new edge connection receives the security it requires? Here are five basic requirements:

Secure connections: encryption is crucial for devices connecting over publicly available networks. complex communications and collaboration necessities will need to develop and maintain a meshed VPN overlay. keep in mind that some transactions could need encryption beyond what’s provided by IPSec and SSL.

Control access: All devices got to be identified at the instant of connection, and applicable policies got to be applied. Those policies then got to follow the connection, therefore, security and network devices on the data path, whilst it moves across and between cloud and edge environments, will participate in imposing those policies.

Segment networks: authorized devices got to be allotted to a specific network segment wherever it may be closely monitored, access to unauthorized resources may be prevented, and devices or applications that begin behaving badly may be in real-time quarantined.

Enable inspection: Applications and data got to be inspected. Security tools should examine encrypted data at network speeds and detect security events got to trigger an identical response across the complete distributed network.

Centralize management: Devices got to be able to share and correlate threat intelligence, distribute policy systematically, identify anomalous behaviors, and orchestrate a uniform response through a central management system.

Conclusion

The growth of the edge is completely transforming today’s networks, and therefore the delivery of 5G can solely drive that transformation quicker. to address the new security challenges that the edge is introducing, we want to grasp two things:

The legacy security solutions that brought us to the current point cannot take us any longer. The security that focuses on a connection through a gateway on a perimeter, or maybe on inspecting the content flowing through that connection, has very little usefulness in a very world whenever networks, data, workflows, and devices area unit in a very constant state of flux. A one-size-fits-all approach to edge security is definite to fail. Security not solely must span the complete distributed network, however additionally dynamically change while not human intervention to continuous network changes. Instead, sanctioning the networks of tomorrow needs organizations to radically reimagine the security solutions they need in place these days, beginning with the recommendations outlined higher than.

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Fortinet Raises the Bar for Cloud Security Again

MEC Networks Corporation — Sat, 11 May 2019 04:10:42 +0000

Four Noteworthy Advances in Cloud Security

In keeping with our Fortinet’s long history of security innovation on-premise, Fortinet offers this expertise for the cloud as well. We are proud to announce Four new advances that further demonstrate our commitment to the variety of cloud adoption initiatives organizations are undertaking—enabling them with the confidence needed due to consistent security across their entire infrastructure even as their cloud and networking initiatives continue to evolve.

1. Accelerated Performance—Virtual Security Processor (vSPU) for FortiGate VM

As organizations migrate existing applications into the cloud, they too often find that many of these applications—especially those with high-performance requirements—can not benefit from the flexibility and potential that these new cloud architectures have to offer. Quite often, this is due to the performance constraints inherent in the virtual security solutions they have deployed to protect themselves and their resources, and not in the cloud environment itself. To truly unleash the potential of the cloud’s scale, customers need a new class of high-performance virtual security appliances designed for cloud environments.

Fortinet’s new Virtual Security Processing Unit (vSPU) for the FortiGate-VM solution, modeled after the award-winning security ASICs in place in Fortinet’s physical devices, extends accelerated security performance into private and public clouds. Our new vSPU technology enables customers to migrate their high-performance applications to the cloud without compromising on speed or security. It also supports a variety of other use cases, including highly available, large-scale VPN in the cloud.

Fortinet’s revolutionary vSPU architecture provides a whole new level of performance for virtual security. We also made the process of integrating with new acceleration technologies much easier, which, in turn, provides customers with the benefit of early access to high-performance security in the public and private cloud.

Fortinet has achieved this by applying our 15+ years of proven hardware design leadership to cloud software by optimizing code, eliminating unnecessary processing, and addressing many of the processing challenges and complexities faced by other security solutions. As a result, Fortinet is now the first to market with high-performance support for AWS C5n and Intel QAT, on top of their existing support for DPDK and SR-IOV running in a variety of environments.

2. Cloud Security Analytics—FortiCASB-Cloud 4.1

Gartner predicts that through 2023, at least 99% of cloud security failures will be the result of misconfiguration. So whether an organization is migrating to the cloud or building cloud-native applications, the cloud’s management interface is one of the new threat vectors that organizations need to address. In fact, while many organizations are still trying to use their traditional security tools to deal with cloud security issues, it is important to realize that none of these tools address the threats associated with the misconfiguration of cloud infrastructures—let alone the potential risks associated with such misconfigurations being distributed across multiple disperse and distinct cloud infrastructures.

The cloud security management capabilities provided by FortiCASB-Cloud 4.1 provide organizations with the visibility and controls they need to mitigate the growing risks associated with the configuration of their public cloud infrastructures, as well as with the applications they have built in the cloud.

FortiCASB-Cloud powers security teams with insights and information that help them communicate cloud security information and findings more effectively with cloud DevOps teams. This information helps them better address potential risks, such as those that can be addressed through modifications to infrastructure code in the CI/CD pipeline. Among its capabilities. FortiCASB-Cloud offers organizations the ability to investigate security events, optimize security configurations, and assess an overall security posture against internal or external policies and regulatory requirements.

FortiCASB-Cloud leverages the public cloud management API to monitor activity and configure multiple public cloud resources on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
FortiCASB-Cloud continuously evaluates configurations across regions and public cloud types to:
– Provide guidance on security best practices
– Offer threat and risk management tools to help mitigate cloud risk
– Trace misconfigurations to their source
– Enable regulatory compliance violation reporting

3. Container Security

As organizations build native cloud applications. they often leverage emerging technologies such as containers and serverless workloads. The use of these technologies to accelerate the application development process is accelerating digital transformation. However, traditional security tools—even those designed for the cloud—cannot address all of the security needs of these workloads.

FortiGate (FortiOS 6.2) Fabric Connectors and New Technology Partners

Fortinet offers a comprehensive Container and emerging technology solution for our customers through a mix of organic products and tools, and integrations with 3^rd parties.

FortiOS 6.2 addresses these cloud container challenges with the following advances:

FortiGate running FortiOS 6.2 Fabric Connectors delivers container-aware security by helping customers secure any traffic entering or leaving (north-south) their container clusters using logical policies based on labels and meta-data information attached to container resources. Since containers cannot be defined using static IP address information, these capabilities are essential when securing container-based workloads for publicly facing cloud applications.
FortiCASB-Cloud 4.1 delivers container-aware security by providing full visibility into container service configuration risk profiles and vulnerabilities, as well as detailed traffic analysis to and from container hosts.
Fortinet Cloud Technology Alliance Partnerships deliver container-integrated security with the partnership with companies like (1) Tufin, through their cloud-native Iris platform that manages native cloud security, as well as their Orca platform that manages Kubernetes security without agents, and (2) Alcide, which offers deep integration into serverless and container-based workloads, leveraging emerging standards such as Istio, and supporting agents for containers.

4. FortiMail 6.2 O365 Connector

For those organizations that consume O365 applications, many find it hard to implement a network-heavy security product that requires potentially challenging changes to network configuration. Fortinet addresses this challenge by offering organizations the ability to easily attach industry-leading mail security to their O365 Exchange online instances that have been optimized for cloud performance and that functions as a cloud-native solution.

Conclusion

Fortinet continues to be committed to solving the wide range of cloud adoption initiatives organizations are considering or implementing, whether migrating applications and infrastructure to the cloud, building cloud-native applications, or consuming SaaS applications. Fortinet’s comprehensive strategy of the native integration of our portfolio of products and services into the cloud platforms, offering the broadest set of protections available and enabling single pane of glass management and security operations offer customers the confidence they need to expand cloud operations while deploying any application on any cloud without concerns of risk, availability, or performance.

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Fortinet Cloud Security Q3 Workshop

MEC Networks Corporation — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 08:39:23 +0000

Defining security in today’s cloud environments

A global leader and innovator in network security, Fortinet conducted its Q3 workshop last September 19, 2017, at the Discovery Suites Manila in Ortigas, Philippines. Participants were from existing and active partners of MEC-Fortinet. While the workshop discussion revolved around the Fortinet Cloud Security solutions.

Opening the workshop with her remarks, Ms. Jenny Carreon, MEC Product Manager for Fortinet
Mr. Brian Perry Ortanez, Systems Engineer, discusses the overview of Fortinet Cloud Security solutions
Workshop participants enjoy their mid-session meal break
Ms. Rachelle Alcantara, Channels Account Manager, talked about the activities conducted by Fortinet Philippines
Discussing the FortiMail Cloud, Office365 Mail, and On-Premise FortiSandBox is Systems Engineer Mr. Eunice Quilantang
Giving his short talk, Fortinet Senior Presales Consultant, Mr. Nap Castillo
Ms. MJ Laquihon, Channels Account Manager, ended the workshop with her remarks
Sales and Technical team of MEC Networks Corporation and Fortinet Philippines

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