July 26, 2023

Network Resilience Coalition—Making the Network Safer

On Tuesday July 25th, 2023, Cisco hosted a webinar announcing the creation of the Network Resilience Coalition, an association of leading networking, cybersecurity, and service providers with the goal of improving the security of data and networks worldwide.

The Network Resilience Coalition is made up of an impressive consortium of founding members that include Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, BT Group, Fortinet, VMware, Palo Alto Networks, Intel, and Broadcom, and the team indicated that other companies were expressing interest in joining as well. Network Resilience Coalition

Global Cyberattacks on the Rise

This announcement is timely as we’re currently experiencing a rise in the frequency and sophistication of nation-state backed cyberattacks worldwide with many of these attacks targeting government agencies and critical infrastructure. The Storm-0558 attack is just one of the latest in a series of cyberattacks targeted almost exclusively against government agencies.

Unapplied Patches Expose Organizations to Cyberattacks

All too often, organizations become a victim of a cybersecurity attack because of infrastructure that is missing a critical security patch that was offered by the technology provider but never installed by the IT organization. Two incredibly damaging examples of this was the VMware ESXiArgs vulnerability that impacted thousands of servers earlier this year, and the Log4j vulnerability that exposed servers on the federal network last year. Both of these critical vulnerabilities had security patches available long before the servers were compromised, they were just never installed. Network Resilience Coalition

Un-Supported Hardware and Software—A Big Problem Too

Even if an organization is very good at rolling out patches to secure its infrastructure, there are many examples of infrastructure that was fully patched throughout its life but remains in service past its end-of-support and end-of life dates. This means that any new vulnerabilities identified in the terminal versions of these devices becomes a new attack vector.

Keeping Your Network Infrastructure Safe

The newly formed Network Resilience Coalition is planning on taking these issues head-on. The goal of the alliance is to increase awareness of the need for installing critical patches, and to remove barriers to installing these patches, making upgrades frictionless and scalable.

The Network Resilience Coalition also is looking into how to raise visibility for organizations to easily identify infrastructure that has reached end-of-support and provide a seamless path to upgrade them. The alliance has committed to investigating these issues and creating a report with actionable recommendations by the end of the year.

Bottom Line:

This is a huge problem in cybersecurity, and it’s encouraging to see companies that normally compete against each other coming together to address issues that impact not just an organization’s security, but also national security and even greater the overall global network security. Having a unified approach across technology providers to minimize the cybersecurity exposure within enterprises and government organizations may finally turn the tide against cybercriminal attacks.

See Craig LIVE for “Cybersecurity in the Age of AI: Fighting Fire With Fire”

Airing LIVE on Thursday, August 17th at 10 AM PT | 1 PM ET

Cybercriminals are aggressively weaponizing artificial intelligence (AI) to launch increasingly effective cyberattacks against organizations. These cybercriminals are using AI to launch sophisticated and stealthy cyberattacks, such as creating realistic deep fakes, generating malware that can evade detection systems, creating convincing phishing emails, or identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in real-time.

In this webinar, you will learn how AI can help you fight fire with fire to combat and survive these AI-powered cybersecurity attacks.

Some key areas we’ll cover:

How cybercriminals are changing the game with AI?
What solutions are available to combat these threats?
How emerging AI technologies will transform cybersecurity?

Network Resilience Coalition—Making the Network Safer