Security

For years now, we’ve been hearing about “smart cities.” Cities with the ability to leverage innovative technology, and automation to optimize resources and improve services for their citizens, with the ultimate goal of making our lives better. These smart cities are no longer a distant dream of the future – they are happening now. Unfortunately, without sufficient cybersecurity, their ultra-connected nature can make these dream cities a nightmare, as the recent hack of San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency…

The role of the chief information officer (CIO) has undergone substantial changes in less than two decades, progressing from a rare position within an organization to the heart of the executive boardroom. The pace at which technology has evolved has driven much of this growth, and today’s financial organizations now lean on their CIO to keep data safe while also keeping pace with industry advances. Let’s take a look back at the evolution of security within the financial services CIO’s role and some of changes that have brought…

One of the distinct advantages of working in the IT industry for over 35 years is all of the direct and indirect experience that brings, as well as the hindsight that comes with that. One of the more personally interesting experiences for me has been watching the growth and ultimate success of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement from a fringe effort (what business would ever run on OSS?) to what has now become a significant component behind the overall success of the Internet. I was initially reminded of the significance of the Open Source…

Unfortunately, many IoT devices are headless, meaning that they literally cannot be patched, so other security measures will have to be developed. Until then, the Internet will face the havoc resulting from IoT-based shadownets for hire, and major DDoS attacks and Cybersecurity wars will be launched by exploiting IoT vulnerabilities.

Enterprises have rapidly incorporated cloud computing over the last decade, and that trend only seems to be accelerating. Private cloud infrastructure, including virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN), is in the process of transforming on-premise data centers, which host the majority of enterprise server workloads around the world. Enterprises are also embracing public clouds at an unprecedented rate, with most connecting back to on-premise environments to create a true hybrid cloud environment. For all their advantages, these accelerated…

PHP is an open source, general-purpose scripting language used for web development that can also be embedded into HTML. It has over 9 million users, and is used by many popular tools, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, and so on. This week, a high-level security update was released to fix a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2016-10033) in PHPMailer, which is an open source PHP library for sending emails from PHP websites. This critical vulnerability is caused by class.phpmailer.php incorrectly processing user requests. As a result, remote…

The cloud has seen immense growth over the last couple of years. But the security risks that arise from such a profound change are not to be taken lightly.

Happy New Year! And for those of you heading to Las Vegas, welcome to Accelerate 2017! Every year Fortinet brings together thought leaders, technical experts, and IT professionals to share and learn the latest in network security technology. We’re looking forward to welcoming over 1500 partners, users, Fortinet experts, and executives to the Accelerate conference. And for the first time, Fortinet end users have been invited to participate in this annual event. Accelerate always provides a unique opportunity to gain hands-on technical…