Cybersecurity At RSA

You could tell by the din that the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week is the largest enterprise IT security confab in the world. The fact that several prominent breaches over the last year have shaken the C-suite out of its ostrichlike complacency clearly turned the volume up on this show all the way to eleven. So now money seems to be flowing into IT security like never before, adding to the commotion.

The big question: with all this security gear from the many hundreds of vendors exhibiting at the conference, each trying to get their message heard above the clamor, why do the hackers appear to be winning? Clearly, tools aren’t enough – even when they’re arguably better than ever.

Regardless, the RSA Conference is largely about the tools and technologies – where each tool addresses some corner of the security sphere. Here are my picks for some of the most interesting (in alphabetical order, so as not to play favorites). Are they sufficient? You be the judge.

CA Technologies / As the largest vendor on this list, CA Technologies was predictably showing off a number of security products. The one tool that caught my eye is their secure API management tool, which joined the CA family through the 2013 Layer 7 Technologies acquisition. Today, this product has moved well beyond its XML appliance roots to a user-friendly tool for handing all the security around APIs, so that developers don’t have to worry about the nuts and bolts when publishing their software interfaces.

Certes Networks / Once hackers penetrate a corporate network, they typically sneak around from place to place, seeking further vulnerabilities until they happen upon their goal, which is typically data they’d like to steal. Certes Networks aims to slow down this behavior by leveraging sophisticated encryption to compartmentalize the network. Different segments of the LAN or WAN have separate keys, preventing hackers from moving around easily.

Contrast Security – Contrast Security takes a page out of the agent-oriented playbook of Application Intelligence vendors like AppDynamics and New Relic, leveraging agents scattered about the network to identify vulnerability patterns in code. Customers primarily use contrast security for development and test environments that leverage Java, .Net, and Adobe Systems Cold Fusion languages, but the technology also works in the production environment. The Contrast Security plugin for Eclipse will alert developers when they introduce vulnerabilities that might allow common attacks like SQL injection, thus preventing those vulnerabilities from reaching the production environment in the first place.

CrowdStrike – CrowdStrike is one of a handful of vendors who seek to detect adversaries once they’re already on your network by uncovering indicators of attack (IOA) and indicators of compromise (IOC). These indicators are essentially breadcrumbs that hackers leave behind as they probe for vulnerabilities. The trick to detecting them is that individually they may not raise red flags, so tools like CrowdStrike must look for suspicious patterns – at least until the hackers figure out how to avoid leaving breadcrumbs.