Blog Archive

Tag: Cybersecurity

  1. Establishing a Zero Trust Environment

    James Leslie

    Introduction Zero Trust is a term that gets IT folk’s blood rushing with fantasies of playing with new tools and technologies that will once and forever solve all their cybersecurity problems. Implementing it may involve some new IT purchases, but you may find that in many cases, your existing tools can be applied in service…

    Read more »
  2. Why Zero Trust is Necessary

    Sean O'Neill

    As cyber threats evolve at an unprecedented rate, the importance of a Zero Trust (ZT) security model cannot be overstated. Zero Trust is not just a technology or a tool; it’s a comprehensive approach that demands collaboration across all departments, aligning with the stark realities of modern cybersecurity threats, and a model that operates on…

    Read more »
  3. Thoughts on President Biden’s Cybersecurity Executive Order

    Michael Magrath

    As President Biden’s personal belongings were being packed by his staff, marking the end of his term, the White House released a long-anticipated and long overdue Executive Order (E.O.) on Strengthening and Promoting Innovation in the Nation’s Cybersecurity. Today, virtually all sectors of the United States economy are under continuous attack from nation states, for-profit…

    Read more »
  4. MITRE Breach: A Case for Zero Trust Architecture

    James Leslie

    As creators of the well-known ATT&CK framework, the MITRE name is synonymous with cybersecurity. On April 19, 2024, MITRE issued a news release stating that in January 2024, their Network Experimentation and Research Environment (NERVE) had been breached by a nation-state threat actor, ending a 15-year stretch without a major cybersecurity incident. The attackers used…

    Read more »
  5. What is Zero Trust?

    Simone Alcorn

    Introduction As information is increasingly accessible online, the number of cybersecurity attacks, threats, and breaches continue to grow. From hackers pretending to be someone else for financial gain to major companies falling victim to ransomware, being able to achieve cyber resilience in today’s digital world is critical. It is important to ensure users and devices…

    Read more »
  6. The Shift Toward Continuous Authorization: Embracing Automation in Federal Compliance

    Pirooz Javan

    Continuous Authorization, or cATO, can mean different things depending on context. In the federal public sector, I’ve encountered numerous strategies and interpretations. Human-Driven Assessments: The Traditional ApproachTraditionally, authorization assessments have been human-driven. We’ve explored continuous approaches, which typically involves increasing the frequency of assessments while…

    Read more »
  7. The case for FedRAMP to adopt a common OSCAL API Specification

    Pirooz Javan

    The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) program management office (PMO) recently published a request for quote (RFQ) for a governance risk and compliance (GRC) solution that intends to implement OSCAL (Open Security Controls Assessment Language) and facilitate compliance activities with cloud vendors. This approach creates tremendous opportunity but also poses challenges…

    Read more »
  8. Updating an Open Specification for Exchanging OSCAL Content

    Brian Ruf

    I am excited to announce significant updates to the OSCAL Rest OpenAPI Specification and am looking forward to public feedback so we can improve it as a community! This is an open-source specification that freely enables the exchange of OSCAL XML, JSON and YAML content between tools and organizations. We defined the specification using REST…

    Read more »
  9. DevSecComp(liance)Ops with OSCAL

    Ray Gauss

    NIST’s held their 3rd Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) Workshop earlier this month, and it was abundantly clear from the content and participation that the OSCAL standard and community has gained momentum and has a real opportunity to revolutionize the entire security and privacy compliance assessment and authorization space. Easy Dynamics has been supporting…

    Read more »
  10. Passwords are dead (again), and that is good news for government

    JJ Harkema

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently announced that single-factor authentication – username and password – is now officially added to their catalog of bad practices – putting it to the list of things that actually help cyberattacks. To counter cyberattacks, a much better practice is to adopt multi-factor authentication, or MFA. This means…

    Read more »