Ariel Mahlmann is a sales and marketing intern with Fornetix. A recent University of Maryland graduate with a bachelor’s in economics, Ariel focuses on cyber security market research and social media marketing for Fornetix.

Would you consider giving up personal data in exchange for a third-party app to show you what your ninety-year-old self will look like? The rise of social media brought lots of joy to consumers’ lives, allowing users to get glimpses of their future selves, to find out their horoscopes, and to communicate with others across the globe.

The demand for connected devices is growing exponentially, but the technology to secure these devices is lagging creating cyber security vulnerabilities at a massive scale.

The Current State of Cyber Security

Every day we hear about breaches, hacks, and cyber-attacks affecting banks, hospitals, transportation, and even entire cities. In some instances, the impact can mean life or death. Our most trusted institutions – like the US election process – are not the pillars of security they once were. And yet the demand for “connected everything” continues to grow in all sectors and across the globe.

By Utilizing Fornetix Key Orchestration™, Ruckus Networks’ Customers Are Now Empowered to Maximize Security Controls Across All Ethernet-Based Networks

Our Chief Technology Officer at Fornetix, Chuck White, sat down with Professor Andre Hinton from the New Cyber Frontier podcast to explore the ways powerful encryption can solve the big problems of cybersecurity. Take a listen using the audio player below!

When looking at the problems we were trying to solve with Key Orchestration, IoT and IoE have always been part of the grand vision of Orchestration. As more and more systems break down the concept of perimeters or layers, there is a need to address the realities of these changes.

There is growing concern regarding the role that encryption on personal devices might play in the future of law enforcement activities. Strong encryption, which uses large keys that are controversially hard to crack, has caused complaints in recent years as manufacturers such as Apple and Google increasingly add these features to their devices. What these companies have done is not new technology, but the broader application of existing public-private key encryption in a way that’s easy to use for the average consumer.

A special thank you to Maha Amircani for her guest post discussing the reality of cyber vulnerabilities faced by major cities. Maha is an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia and founder of Amircani Law. A Georgia native born to immigrant parents from Egypt, Maha represents clients in city, state and federal court litigation as well as administrative proceedings. Her practice specializes in the areas of personal injury, criminal defense, and real estate closings.

There has been a lot of interest in protecting businesses from the threat of ransomware. But, city governments are at real risk and the impact reverberates to people like me who interact with them daily. After the City of Atlanta ransomware attack in March 2018, this became crystal clear.

Utilizing Key Orchestration During a Hospital Ransomware Event

In Part 2 of this series, we examined the ongoing transition from Cyber Security to Cyber Defense, discussing Cyber Defense effects and utilizing Key Orchestration to realize those effects. In this post, we continue the discussion as we demonstrate how Key Orchestration enables the effects in a real-world scenario.

For practical consideration, let’s examine the following environment: A healthcare enterprise with 15 hospitals, two data centers, and multiple third-parties who use hospital technology resources. The IT infrastructure represents a number networks, applications, storage solutions, and network-connected diagnostic equipment. 

It’s been a little over a year since exclaiming that Cyber Security is dead. In that year, we have seen broader acceptance of terms like Defense and Resiliency. We have even seen attempts to pass laws that are the cyber equivalent of the “castle doctrine” for home defense. All that aside, one term that is starting to show up in this space is Orchestration. In practice, tools that support AI, machine learning, or analytics are turning to the term Orchestration to address what happens next. Applying the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is an easy way to look at this — if SIEM, AI, machine learning, big data, etc. are about Observe and Orient, then Orchestration is about Decide and Act.

Fornetix is proud to announce the availability of Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support for both AWS and Azure Cloud Services.  This is made available through the Fornetix BYOK Orchestrator via APIs that allow the Fornetix Key Orchestration appliance to speak to cloud service providers in their preferred protocol for enhanced security of encryption keys.