Trend Cloud Security Blog – Cloud Computing Experts

Do You Encrypt Your Data? A Plea to Businesses from an Identity Theft Victim

Recently I became a victim of identity theft.  Criminals gained access to my name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number, social security number, and bank account number.  I’ve spent the last 10 years marketing Internet security solutions, but now I know firsthand how painful it can be to individuals when a data breach occurs. How did they get my personal information?  Working in the security industry, I’m pretty careful.  I’m good at recognizing phishing scams; emails that use various ploys to get you to reveal your personal information (see this paper I co-authored on the... read more

Government Data Seizures is Only One Type of Data Loss

Dave Asprey and Jonathan Gershater bring up good points in their blog posts about the USA PATRIOT Act (“The USA PATRIOT Act is Bad for Business” and “Patriot Act is not the first (nor likely) last law of its kind”).  The U.S. might seize your data or other governments might gain access for a multitude of reasons.  Even if your government doesn’t have laws that allow data access, they may work with a government that does, and may hand over your data—perhaps without your knowledge. But governmental seizure of data is only a small component of potential data loss. It doesn’t really... read more

Encryption is Not Enough for Cloud Security

By saying that encryption is not enough for cloud security, I don’t mean that you also need other types of protection like server security, identity management, etc.  I think most people deploying cloud computing plan to implement more than encryption for security.  What I mean is that encryption alone is not enough in an encryption solution when it comes to cloud environments.  Of course, industry-standard encryption is essential, but it’s table stakes.  When dealing the multi-tenant nature of the public cloud, or even the inter-departmental shared resources of a private cloud, how encryption... read more

Fighting Application Level DDoS Attacks Using Ambient Clouds – New Idea

The application-layer DDoS threat actually amplifies the risk to data center operators. That’s because IPS devices and firewalls become more vulnerable to the increased state demands of this emerging attack vector – making the devices themselves more susceptible to the attacks. Moreover, there is a distinct gap in the ability of existing edge-based solutions to leverage the cloud’s growing DDoS mitigation capacity, the service provider’s DDoS infrastructure or the dedicated DDoS mitigation capacity deployed upstream of the victim’s infrastructure. Current solutions do not take advantage... read more

“Hey, You, Get Off of iCloud!”

For all its hype iCloud does not represent a fundamentally new problem. Employees are already bringing personal devices to work and wanting to use them in their jobs, and these unmanaged devices are mixing personal and corporate data on a system that is outside the control of the security and IT teams. There are already many apps and cloud-based services for sharing data between users and between devices (such as Dropbox), and these services are giving security pros fits. What is new is that iCloud will make these things happen automatically, and potentially without the intent or even awareness... read more

The State of Cloud and Virtualization Security

For the last few months, we’ve been conducting a cloud, virtualization, and VDI security survey of 1200 IT professionals from larger companies in 6 countries around the world. Not only did I get to help shape the questions on the survey, I’ve also been on the team interpreting the results. We’ve learned more than a few things we actually were not expecting to learn. Here is a collection of the most interesting top findings about the state of cloud and virtualization security. I’ll be blogging about some of them in more detail over the next few weeks, but in the meantime, here is the big... read more

Ambient Cloud News: Skype protocol has been reverse engineered

This is pretty cool. I gave a talk last week at the Glue Conference in Denver about how ambient clouds ( http://cloudsecurity.trendmicro.com/good-clouds-evil-clouds-why-microsoft-has… )work and even used Skype as an example of a massive-scale ambient cloud. This case raises some very important new questions around ambient clouds. For instance, if you create an ambient cloud, one that you control using your own protocol, but where you have no control over when an endpoint may join it, what are the legal implications if someone else uses your protocol? In an open source world, slapping a lawsuit... read more

Chrome OS: So secure we don’t need security?

With the launch announcements of various Google Chrome netbooks, the focus of the press and security companies alike is beginning to take a closer look at the security promises made and also at some of the more ’media friendly‘ statements such as, “…users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates”.   Let’s have a look at some of the security features of Chrome OS:   1 – Get out of my playpen. Each process runs in its own sandbox.  Effectively this means that if an application is malicious or compromised, it is unable to interact with or otherwise affect... read more

Open Source Clouds Become Enterprise-Grade: Citrix and OpenStack

Today at Synergy, Citrix announced “Project Olympus,” effectively making open source clouds a more viable option for enterprises. In the past, it was cloud providers like Rackspace who tended to focus on open source cloud infrastructure, while enterprises tended to make more conservative choices where support contracts were available. The new support from Citrix, along with about 60 other supporting commercial hardware and software vendors, should go a long way towards helping enterprises see OpenStack as an enterprise-grade choice of cloud infrastructure. Enterprises can now get a Citrix-certified... read more

Did Amazon’s aggressive algorithms prevent customer data loss?

How difficult is it to run a public cloud service? As all of us know, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage on 21-Apr-2011 and that lasted for almost 4 days. Quite a lot of companies were affected and you can find the list here. The Internet was flooded with articles speculating what went wrong, whether cloud computing is viable in the long run, how Amazon services did not function as advertised, how the applications should be built, etc. While most offered their opinion in broad strokes such as “use multiple regions/clouds”, “use built-in redundancy”, “don’t use public clouds”,... read more

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