Authentic8 Blog Category: Cloud Browser

2019 - the Year of Fake Security

Posted by: Scott Petry
Published on:

Record data breaches and a new survey published in December indicate that cybersecurity snake oil peddlers had a ball last year. Their customers, not so much.

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Remember Francis ("Frankie") Archibald Keyes, Esquire from RSA 2018 and 2019? According to survey results from last year's RSA Conference in San Francisco, the fictitious cybersecurity figure enjoyed significantly higher trust among IT professionals than most real-life vendors or experts.

Of those surveyed in our Cybersecurity Approval Poll at RSA, a total of 88% stated that they trusted Mr. Keyes "much more," "slightly more" or "about the same" as "other cybersecurity vendors and experts."

Frankie was completely made up by Authentic8, and for a short while, his meteoric rise to notoriety had our sales team worried. Would he become more famous than Silo, our pioneering Silo cloud browser and web isolation platform?


Francis ("Frankie") Archibald Keyes, the face of Fake Security in 2019

Those fears were put to rest quickly (sorry, Frankie). At the same time,

JavaScript: How NPM Maintainer Accounts Amplify Risk

Posted by: Guest Contributor
Published on:

20 compromised JavaScript package “maintainer” accounts - that’s all it takes to bring down the global digital supply chain through malicious code executed in the browser.

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Attackers need to target only 20 specific maintainer accounts to reach more than half of the entire JavaScript npm ecosystem, security researchers warn. With regular browsers on the receiving end, ready to indiscriminately execute code from affected web pages, this can trigger a disastrous chain reaction.

More than 800,000 free and reusable software packages are available through the npm (“node package manager”) software package registry. Should an attacker breach one of these at-risk accounts, it could bring down the digital supply chain worldwide, the findings of the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt) in Germany indicate.

In their report for Usenix, Small World with High Risks: A Study of Security Threats in the npm Ecosystem, Markus Zimmermann, Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, Cam Tenny, and Michael Pradel shine a light on the widespread use of npm packages

Ideas That Become Obvious In Hindsight

Posted by: Gerd Meissner
Published on:

Interview: Authentic8 Co-founder and CEO Scott Petry on Leo Laporte's TWiT.tv

Were you excited when Apple presented the Newton mobile device to the world, a glimpse into a future starring the iPhone? Or perhaps relieved when the email Spam Wars were won by Postini, a Silicon Valley startup later bought by Google, where it became the core of Gmail?

The ideas and concepts that drove both breakthrough innovations initially faced ridicule (in the case of Newton) and skepticism. What they have in common is that today, they are obvious in hindsight.

What they also share is a name: Scott Petry. His career took him from Apple's Newton team to founding and later selling Postini - which solved the email spam problem - to Google and from there to his current role as Co-founder and CEO of Authentic8, which pioneered remote browser isolation in the cloud.

Do we have a theme here? Leo Laporte thinks so. The award-winning tech journalist and founder

What’s the ROI of Threat Hunting?

Posted by: Gerd Meissner
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How can IT security threat hunters measure success? That is one of the core questions raised by the new SANS 2019 Threat Hunting Survey, which was co-sponsored by Authentic8.

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The  answer may lie in a strategy and tool selection that avoids mission and  cost creep, and results in measurable effects - and savings - to prove  it.

That’s our main takeaway from this year’s Threat Hunting Survey. Co-authors Mathias Fuchs and Joshua Lemon capture the different  needs and challenges within organizations that are just starting their cyber threat hunting program, versus those who are honing their skills and programs.

Definitions of Threat Hunting

What is threat hunting? The SANS survey results document a wide variety of methodologies, spending  priorities, tools deployed, training needs - and opinions about what  constitutes effective threat hunting practices.

"Many organizations use an alert-driven approach to threat hunting or use indicators of compromise [IoCs] to guide their hunts," says Mathias Fuchs, a SANS instructor and threat

Operation “Shields Up”: Web Isolation in the U.S. Military

Posted by: Sean Heritage
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How can government organizations, private enterprises, and academic institutions minimize the cybersecurity and privacy risks associated with accessing the internet from desktop or mobile devices?

Valuable pointers come from the defense sector. A new case study, titled Shields Up: How a Military Unit Simultaneously Increased Network Access and Decreased Cyber Risk [PDF], showcases how Authentic8's remote browser isolation technology enabled a U.S. military unit to implement internet policies for personal web access, without increasing the risk of introducing any malware or malicious code into the unclassified network.

The growing need to access publicly available information (PAI) on the web and to leverage the internet for both official and personal business (check out my post on "morale browsing") is making secure access to the broader network a necessity for more military personnel.

"Shields Up" shows how remote browser isolation with Silo Cloud Browser is supporting this change process. Silo enables and secures responsible web use in organizations for which the security risks