Tag Archive for: collaboration

#mWISE: FBI Director Urges Greater Private-Public Collaboration

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“I’m here to recruit you.” Was Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, really joking when he said that hiring people for the FBI was the reason for his presence at the Mandiant mWISE conference?

During his opening keynote speech on September 18, Wray explained how collaborating with the private sector has changed the FBI’s approach to combating cybercrime.

He said that the 9/11 terrorist attacks led the Bureau to open itself more to other parties, first in its counter-terrorism missions and then in other areas, including cyberspace.

“Today, our strategy is informed by where we sit, at the center of a cyber ecosystem that stretches from the defensive side, with the private sector but also agencies like the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), all the way over to, on the offensive side, the CIA, the NSA and our foreign partners,” Wray added.

Over the past few years, the FBI has conducted several joint investigations and law enforcement operations in cyberspace, which encompass an increasing number of partners, including foreign cybersecurity agencies from ally countries and private organizations.

“The bottom line is: it doesn’t matter who gets the credit as long as the job gets done,” said Wray.

Recent law enforcement operations, such as the Hive ransomware or the QakBot malware loader takedowns, included partners like Zscaler, who helped with the investigation.

Victim Organizations Encouraged to Work with the FBI

However, the prime example of such public-private collaborations highlighted by the FBI director is the 2022 takedown of the Cyclops Blink botnet, allegedly built by the Russian military agency (GRU). 

This is because, this time, the private partner WatchGuard was directly involved in the malicious campaign.

Wray explained: “The GRU’s Sandworm team had managed to implant malware on thousands of WatchGuard firewall devices worldwide. Those firewalls were primarily used by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Our collaboration with WatchGuard allowed us to reverse-engineer the malware and develop and execute a sophisticated technical operation, severing GRU’s ability to communicate with the command-and-control…

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A timely collaboration – Daijiworld.com

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A timely collaboration  Daijiworld.com

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AWS and Slalom Expand Next-Generation Strategic Collaboration

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LAS VEGAS–()–At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Slalom, LLC (Slalom), a global business and technology consulting company, announced a multiyear extension to the companies’ global Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA). The two companies will work together to develop vertical solutions and accelerators on AWS for customers in the energy, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, public sector, and media and entertainment industries, delivering specialized end-to-end cloud migration and modernization services to help accelerate their cloud journeys. In addition to supporting accelerated growth in Slalom markets in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand, AWS and Slalom in 2023 will jointly create go-to-market strategies and make co-investments in support of Slalom’s continued expansion into Ireland and the Netherlands, followed by additional countries in Latin America, Asia Pacific, and through Europe over the next three years.

As part of the agreement, AWS and Slalom are expanding upon their 2019 announced collaboration to deliver AWS | Slalom Launch Centers (Launch Centers) that help enterprises accelerate their business transformations and modernize information technology services. Launch Centers provide customers with access to the unique combination of AWS Professional Services—a global team of AWS experts who help customers reach their desired outcomes with the cloud—and Slalom’s expertise in business transformation, software engineering, and analytics capabilities. Over the last three years, more than 160 customers have migrated and modernized to AWS through their work with Launch Centers.

AWS is working with Slalom to develop solutions to help customers solve specific industry challenges. For example, Slalom offers the Slalom Meter Data Analytics solution on AWS, which uses Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models in the cloud and at the edge) to help utility and renewable energy customers improve billing and energy efficiency, and forecast power outages. In addition, the…

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How to combat voice security issues in collaboration platforms

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Internet-based telephony lets employees communicate with anyone at anytime, anywhere. While these modern voice services make workplaces more efficient and flexible, they also open a potential minefield of voice security issues. In this tip, we’ll explore several potential voice threats generated by modern enterprise collaboration platforms and discuss methods to address them.

Voice security challenges in modern collaboration platforms

Ironically, many of today’s voice threats stem from the technologies that make enterprise collaboration voice accessible from everywhere. While these collaboration systems are no doubt convenient, they create risks that were not plausible on traditional closed systems:

1. Compromised BYOD. Desktop and smartphone apps are now the de facto method of making and receiving internal and external business calls. In many cases, employees and contractors can use their personal laptops, phones and tablets to connect to business collaboration platforms. What keeps many cybersecurity professionals up at night is the potential that a hacker could access the corporate network through a voice collaboration app loaded on an unsecure personal device. Because organizations don’t own these devices, they can’t adequately manage BYOD OS and application updates.

2. SaaS platform compromises. SaaS voice applications can hamstring the ability of companies to oversee call manager platforms. Having a third party handle the responsibility of building, maintaining and securing voice and collaboration services is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, outsourcing these operations frees up the organization from managing servers, network operating systems and voice/collaboration services. On the other, it requires companies to place a tremendous trust in that service provider to properly manage and secure the service.

Additionally, large collaboration providers are a much bigger and potentially more lucrative target for bad actors. Thus, these providers are likely to be threatened with zero day vulnerabilities, DDoS attacks, malware and social engineering attempts. And because these companies serve a multitude of customers, a successful attack on a single provider has the…

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