Cisco

Two new global studies from network specialist Cisco reveal an increase in consumer concern about data sharing during the pandemic and the security challenges organizations face supporting employees and customers in our remote-first world.

The reports also highlight the opportunities presented by the accelerated transition to a cloud-first, remote world that demands us to be secure, connected and productive from anywhere.

Finnish cybersecurity company F-Secure has published a report detailing its investigation into a pair of counterfeit Cisco network switches.

The investigation concludes that the counterfeits had been designed to bypass processes that authenticate system components. Two different counterfeit versions of Cisco Catalyst 2960-X series switches were discovered by an IT company after a software update stopped them from working.

It’s a generally held view that smaller businesses are more vulnerable to cyber threats than larger ones but a new report from Cisco Security suggests this may not actually be the case.

In its 2020 SMB Cybersecurity Report the company reveals that SMBs are maturing and mirroring larger organizations' approaches to a variety of security issues, including data breach disclosure, customer data inquiries, threat hunting and more.

As businesses move into the cloud and expand their use of IoT devices, protecting their systems becomes much more complex.

To address this problem Cisco is launching a new integrated cloud-native security platform, Cisco SecureX, aimed at improving visibility, identifying unknown threats, and automating workflows to strengthen customers’ security across network, endpoint, cloud, and applications.

Increasingly the boundaries between operational technology and business networks are breaking down as businesses seek access to the real time data that industrial IoT devices hold.

But that leads to increased risk to critical infrastructure as devices become more exposed. To combat these threats, Cisco is introducing an IoT security architecture that provides enhanced visibility across both IT and OT environments, and helps protect industrial processes.

Data privacy is very much in people's minds at the moment with the introduction of CCPA and other legislation around the world.

Businesses can sometimes see privacy regulations as a necessary evil that they have to comply with, but new data from Cisco reveals growing, tangible benefits for businesses that adopt strong privacy practices.

The concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that is able to carry out tasks and understand the world in the way that humans do has been around since 2005 when it was first mooted by Dr Ben Goertzel and Cassio Pennachin in their book Artificial General Intelligence.

A new collaboration between network specialist Cisco and AI company SingularityNET brings practical AGI a step closer, with a commitment to developing applied technologies and customer solutions.

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a claim that it sold video surveillance software to the American government even though it was aware it contained security vulnerabilities.

A total of fifteen US states filed a case under the False Claims Act after Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force and the Federal Emergency Management Agency all purchased flawed software from Cisco. Rather than improving security as desired, the complainants said that Cisco's software actually made systems less secure.

The roll out of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has changed the face of privacy and data protection for millions of people across Europe. The regulation not only grants people access to the personal data companies hold about them, but also controls how this data can be used and transferred.

Apple's Tim Cook has already voiced his support for GDPR and said that the rest of the world should implement similar regulation. Now he has been joined by Cisco in calling for data laws to be embraced by the US as they have been in Europe.

By 2022 more IP traffic will be created on global networks than in the entire 32 year life of the internet to date.

This rather startling prediction comes from network infrastructure specialist Cisco which reckons that by 2022, 60 percent of the global population will be internet users. More than 28 billion devices and connections will be online, and video will make up 82 percent of all IP traffic.

The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities really focused people's attention on the security of processors, and Intel has been at pains to convince users that it takes security seriously. With this in mind, the company has now announced a new Threat Detection Technology which introduces two new malware-fighting techniques.

Accelerated Memory Scanning offloads malware scanning to GPUs, taking the strain off CPUs and helping to improve performance. There's already interest, with Microsoft planning to add support to Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection. Intel has also revealed Advanced Platform Telemetry which is supposed to cut down on false positives.

Cisco's Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP) software has a hardcoded password that could be used by an attacker to gain full control of a system. The company even says that "extenuating circumstances" exist that could enable an attacker to elevate privileges to root.

The vulnerability (CVE-2018-0141) affects version 11.6 of the software. A patch has been made available, and users are encouraged to install it as soon as possible as there are no other workarounds.

According to Networking specialist Cisco, almost half of SMBs and enterprises in the US are outsourcing at least some of their security to managed security service providers (MSSPs) in order to counter the latest advanced threats.

The company is targeting this market by launching a set of new endpoint security solutions aimed specifically at MSSPs. These include three powerful cloud-based tools.

As businesses increasingly turn to cloud solutions they rely more on encryption to protect their data. Gartner predicts by 2019, 80 percent of web traffic will be encrypted, but that leads to a problem as it can allow malware to travel undetected.

Detecting malicious content in encrypted traffic is difficult without decrypting it, forcing network operators to choose between privacy and security. A new solution from network specialist Cisco solves this conundrum by allowing traffic to be scanned without decrypting it.

Cisco has just announced a new set of services that aims to predict potential troubles in a company’s IT department.

Powered by artificial intelligence, the Business Critical Services and High-value Services offerings will anticipate IT failures, mitigate risks, reduce maintenance costs and assist organizations in keeping necessary skills to keep digital transformation going.