Malware stealing gigabytes of your data as seen by Cognitive Threat Analytics

Overview

Recently, about 50 users across 20 companies were alarmed by the Cisco Cognitive Threat Analytics (CTA) about a malware that exfiltrates gigabytes of data from their computers. An example of such CTA detection:

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Cisco & MapR set a Software Defined Storage World Record

66 years in the making!

It sounds like a long time, but first we had to wait for a few milestones to precede us:

◈ 1951 – UNIVAC pioneers use of magnetic tape for storage
◈ 1993 – Severe Tire Damage is the first band to live stream
◈ 2007 – Netflix launches their streaming media business

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Analyzing Network Traffic with Encrypted Traffic Analytics

Today, knowing who is using your network is table stakes. What’s essential is knowing how the network is being accessed, what applications are being used, when they are used and most importantly, whether or not those applications are safe enough and compliant with your organization’s policies.

Independent testing company Miercom recently carried out a comprehensive set of tests to evaluate traffic analysis capabilities of Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture & Huawei’s Agile Solution along with a few other test areas.

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Cognitive Research: Learning Detectors of Malicious Network Traffic

Malware is constantly evolving and changing. One way to identify malware is by analyzing the communication that the malware performs on the network. Using machine learning, these traffic patterns can be utilized to identify malicious software. Machine learning faces two obstacles: obtaining a sufficient training set of malicious and normal traffic and retraining the system as malware evolves. This post will analyze an approach that overcomes these obstacles by developing a detector that utilizes domains (easily obtained from domain black lists, security reports, and sandboxing analysis) to train the system which can then be used to analyze more detailed proxy logs using statistical and machine learning techniques.

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The Race is On: Is Your Network 5G Ready?

The growing 5G momentum promises tremendous commercial opportunities for service providers, with estimates that the global 5G market will be worth US$12.3 trillion by 2035. To pursue these new untapped opportunities, service providers need to ramp up their network capabilities to support future 5G services.

As we move closer towards mainstream 5G adoption, mobile networks are increasingly expected to handle more data-intensive applications and deliver low-latency connectivity to more devices. How can service providers keep pace and get a leg up on the competition?

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Cognitive Threat Analytics: Turn Your Proxy Into Security Device

Some of us still intuitively believe that our extensively safeguarded corporate networks are safe from the risks we are exposed to when connecting directly to public Internet. Yet, evidence suggests that most companies now operate with significant persistent malware present in the network. At the same time, malware has also evolved, and we have witnessed a larger proportion of infections being brief with relatively low risk. But, even the seemingly low risk infections may open a pathway or potentially escalate into full-fledged attacks with serious business impact.­­­­­­­­­

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CMS Brute Force Attacks Are Still a Threat

Brute force attacks have existed long before the Internet. As a cryptanalytic attack, it started being used as an attempt to access encrypted data when there were no other options available. With the rise of the Internet, this type of attack was quickly adopted. In a nutshell, a brute force attack consists of systematically trying different credentials until the correct combination is found. It’s like trying to open a combination lock by going through all possible combinations: eventually, it will pop open.

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