AI Bedtime Stories, IBM Cloud, Docker Hub, & EU CyberSec Legislation – ESW #298
In the enterprise security news, Funding announcements take a bit of a break, We explore a few new vendors and organizations that have come to our attention recently, Wiz researchers annoy yet another cloud service by pointing out ridiculous vulnerabilities - IBM Cloud, this time, Docker Hub has tons of shady stuffs going on, EU strengthens cybersecurity with new legislation, The US Department of Defense releases Zero Trust strategy (no more Five Eyes?), Microsoft 365… outlawed in the EU?, Ransomware makes up the majority of all UK government crisis management meetings, AI can now tell kids bedtime stories, what could go wrong?
Announcements
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- 1. FUNDING: SPHERE Receives $31 Million for Series B Funding from Edison Partners, Forgepoint Capital
$31M Series B led by Edison Partners. Sphere is 13 years old, woman-owned, and aims to make attacks like ransomware more difficult, through identity hygiene.
- 2. FUNDING: Pangea Raises Series B from GV, Decibel and Okta Ventures
$26M Series B led by GV, for SPaaS (Security Platform as a Service). I think I remember their Series A. Interesting concept - it's a suite of API-based security services, designed to be easy for developers to adopt in their applications. Pay-as-you-go consumption model, designed to be similar to cloud service providers.
- 3. FUNDING: Holm Security Raises €4M in Funding
€4M post-Series A venture round, led by Subvenio Invest. The 7-year old, Stockholm-based company focuses on vulnerability management and claims over 750 global customers. What kind of vulnerability scanning? Traditional internal/external network vulnerability scanning (credentialed and uncredentialed, policy-based, etc). Web application scanning (DAST), Cloud scanning, and Phishing/Awareness training ("human" vulnerabilities is the idea here, I suppose).
- 4. ACQUISITIONS: Palo Alto Networks is buying Cider Security for up to $300M
Classic round acquisition numbers from Palo Alto. They've been hunting for an acquisition target for a while, and this one is earmarked for the company's Prisma cloud security platform. Cider has a suite of tools that aim to discover security issues along the CI/CD path: dependencies, infrastructure as code, kubernetes, containers. It also appears to have lots of integrations: github, Jenkins, K8s, Jira, Slack, etc.
Cider refers to its product as an "AppSec Operating System", because sure, why not. How about ESW as an "Enterprise Security News and Interview Operating System"? We'll just lose the term podcast, because it's old, obsolete, and not at all cool anymore.
- 5. NEW COMPANIES: Building Cyber Collective
This is an interesting concept - the idea is to attract advisors, startups, and investors to play matchmaker. Advisors commit to providing 4 hours of free consultation for startups, and then the terms of any ongoing partnership are between the two parties. the Collective was started by Ross Haleliuk, who is also head of product at LimaCharlie.
- 6. NEW COMPANIES: Prelude – Hardening Cyberdefenses for Everyone
Prelude appears to be somewhat in the breach and attack simulation space, with a product called "Operator". The general idea is to test your controls to ensure they work. Prelude builds the tests included in Operator, which also integrates with external tests, which can be imported with a few clicks. There is a free community license, along with paid Professional and Enterprise tiers.
- 7. NEW COMPANIES: Revelstoke SOAR
Another entry in the SOARv2 space that looks like it will be going head-to-head with the likes of Tines.
- 8. NEW FEATURES: Wiz becomes the first CNAPP to deliver integrated Data Security Posture Management
We're going to continue to see many flavors of DSPM. This is possibly the first we've seen within an existing cloud security vendor.
- 9. SUPPLY CHAIN: Hell’s Keychain – Supply Chain Attack in IBM Cloud’s Databases for PostgreSQL
This just came off embargo this morning, but apparently, Wiz researchers were able to reach behind the IBM Cloud curtain, thanks to some plaintext credentials and vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL.
- 10. RESEARCH: Analysis on Docker Hub malicious images: Attacks through public container images – Sysdig
- 11. LEGISLATION: EU decides to strengthen cybersecurity and resilience across the Union: Council adopts new legislation
- 12. FEDS: Department of Defense Releases Zero Trust Strategy and Roadmap
- 13. REGULATIONS: After 2 years of negotiation, Germany states there is no lawful way to use M365 under GDPR
HUGE if true
- 14. TRENDS: Ransomware incidents now make up majority of British government’s crisis management ‘Cobra’ meetings
Ransomware not going anywhere anytime soon
- 15. EDUCATION: CISA expanding cybersecurity education program nationwide
- 16. SQUIRREL: Create Stories for Kids – StoriesForKids.ai
It totally makes sense that story-writing would be a new area for AI generators to explore (and ruin), but why include the Dalle-2 imagery? Dalle 2 doesn't understand faces yet and the result often seems more like something out of an adult horror novel, not something young kids should be exposed to at bedtime.
Should we use this to create a story about the security weekly hosts?
- 17. SQUIRREL: Cocaine Bear – Wikipedia
This was a rabbit hole I just couldn't turn myself away from, partly because Knoxville is featured in this story and a movie is dropping in a few months.
