Skip to content

Safetica NXT, next-gen SaaS DLP, brings extremely fast time-to-protection of data

Safetica, the data security company with more than ten years of experience in developing the easiest to implement enterprise Data Loss Prevention*, enhances its next-gen SaaS DLP with easy management and the fastest implementation. Now any company with a hybrid workplace can deploy Safetica NXT with a single click and begin to protect their data in a matter of hours.

Implementation of legacy DLP (Data Loss Prevention) solutions used to be highly costly and inefficient projects with unclear outcomes. Safetica directly addresses this by continuously improving its SaaS product to turn this situation around for good.

Safetica NXT – the next-gen SaaS (Software as a Service) DLP – now provides truly easy-to-use data protection enhanced with automation and built-in templates. It’s continuing Safetica’s tradition of best practices in data security for SMB and small enterprises.

Developed to run and reside natively in the secured cloud, deploying Safetica NXT is possible in minutes. No in-house hardware infrastructure is needed.

Once Safetica Clients have been remotely installed on Windows or macOS devices, it takes as little as one day to complete setup and configuration (with the help of our new product guide). Then you can immediately audit data flow, classify sensitive data and begin protecting it.


According to our most recent experience with Safetica NXT deployment, it takes, on average, just ten days to collect all necessary information from a customer’s environment, evaluate it and produce the first report, including a sensitive data-flow audit and incident overview,  

says David Klíma, Product Manager, Safetica.  

When you have an overview of your data security posture, you can efficiently detect insider threats and risks, prevent data leaks, and audit incidents right away, adds David Klíma.

Effective data protection requires fast implementation, the least amount of time to administer, and the ability to respond to detected incidents rapidly. Safetica’s years of DLP experience and focus on easy implementation and use have been acknowledged by SoftwareReviews. In 2021/2022, Safetica was recognized as an industry Champion and Gold medalist in the DPL marketplace.

 

 

Safetica has been developing a risk-driven SaaS solution with a focus on simplicity and automation. Straightforward settings and a pre-configured environment help to free up admins’ hands. Smart auto-detection of risk, continuous auto-definition of the company’s safe digital workspace, and auto-generated security reports further support low-maintenance operations. So Safetica NXT only takes a couple of hours per week to manage.

Based on the constant analysis of sensitive data flow, Safetica NXT evaluates the risk level of each operation and every protected user. Holistic risk classification is presented in a simple format of low to high-risk indicators to help managers focus only on events that require fast response.



The admin can always decide which category of high-risk events should be automatically blocked or which situations warrant notifying users about a potential risk and letting them proceed with logging the event.

This is especially beneficial for hybrid workspaces with remote workers and employees working from home. Furthermore, smart scanning dynamically recognizes when an employee is used to working, regardless of normal business hours, to ensure more accurate risk evaluation and incident detection.


Implementation projects and administration of traditional DLP solutions have a terrible reputation. That’s why we decided to transform ours into a service that keeps sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands by detecting security risks and preventing incidents from day one, says Zbynek Sopuch, CTO of Safetica.


Availability  

Monthly and annual per-user subscriptions to Safetica NXT are available immediately through Safetica channel partners. The free web trial is open to any interested party via www.safetica.com.

Subscriptions include cloud-native management with easy-to-set sensitive data detection and protection rules and easy-to-read reports and logs for incidents investigation, plus Safetica Client installed on endpoint devices (Windows and macOS).

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About Safetica
Safetica is to provide small and mid-sized companies with the same quality data protection that corporations have – affordably, and without any additional IT administration or disruptions in operation.

DMaaS gives you more!

In our blog we have posted a few articles about data centers. We like them. They have grown on us. It is a branch of technology that interests us as much as bitcoin interests brothers-in-law or neighborhood projects interest retirees. For that reason, today, in our blog, we will deal with data management as a service or DMaaS.

Do you already know what DMaaS is and why you need it in your life?

We have talked about it in countless after-dinner conversations with cigars in hand: Data centers are centralized physical facilities used by companies to host their information and applications. Although data centers help us meet the requirements of sending data in real time, there can be problems with outages, and these are an expensive business for companies. On the other hand, the Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) is in charge of monitoring and giving us information about the IT components and facilities of our structure. That includes servers and storage to power distribution units or cooling equipment. The goal of a DCIM initiative is to provide managers with a comprehensive view of data center performance so that power, equipment, and space are used as efficiently as possible. Well, so far we knew everything and we had no rival until the desserts arrived. 

However, one might add (while stirring a cup of tea) that today’s data centers are becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated, and as they evolve, they ask for features in DCIM solutions to increase. For that reason, DCIM has to transcend the well-known Cloud and bring its capabilities. So, in order to improve the way data centers operate,Data Management-as-a-Service or DMaaS emerged.

DMaaS, definition and advantages

DMaaS is a type of cloud service that provides companies with centralized storage for different data sources. It enables the optimization of the IT layer by simplifying, monitoring and servicing the physical data center infrastructure for the company.

*Data of vital importance: DMaaS is not DCIM nor a SaaS version of DCIM.

Thanks to the DMaaS service you may analyze large sets of anonymous customer data and improve with machine learning. In no case, I give you my word, will a company using DCIM receive better information than it can get with a DMaaS approach. Not to mention cost savings, downtime reduction and overall performance improvement.

Easy to use and low cost, DMaaS makes it easy for IT professionals to increasingly monitor their data center infrastructure, receiving information in real time and with the additional ability to prevent possible failures as a seer octopus.

Still, in the midst of so much profit, it is very likely that if you were to do a worldwide survey of professionals and entrepreneurs, you would find that cost savings is the most important chosen feature of DMaaS. And it is that, thanks to DMaaS, companies only have to ask their users to register, while informing providers about the specific needs of the organization and the number of registered users. So the provider indeed provides, and manages the infrastructure based on what you have requested.  

In a somewhat modest third position among the advantages we would find the protection of a company’s data assets and the additional value obtained from them. As an example, for the data center, DMaaS allows you to maximize hardware security through smart alarms and remote troubleshooting.

One of the main differences to highlight with DCIM is that it is limited to a single data center, while DMaas can help analyze a much larger set, thus providing a more complete view. Furthermore, aside from providing us with analytical insights, the service continually learns and improves based on data collected from users. 

Conclusion

Although it is true that we could judge that DMaaS is still in an early stage, work is already being done to solve the main challenges it faces: data encryption, data management functions, data center reduction or performance increase.

Resources

Monitoring as a Service (MaaS)

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

Cyber Security Essential #3: Antivirus

Why is Antivirus Essential?

Antivirus software helps protect computers against malware and cybercriminals. Antivirus software looks at data – web pages, files, software, applications – traveling over the network to your devices. It searches for known threats and monitors the behavior of all programs, flagging suspicious behavior. It seeks to block or remove malware as quickly as possible.

antivirus and portnox

Antivirus protection is essential, given the array of constantly-emerging cyber threats. If you don’t have protective software installed, you could be at risk of picking up a virus or being targeted by other malicious software that can remain undetected and wreak havoc on your computer and mobile devices.

Necessary Antivirus Capabilities

Real-time Scanning

While all antivirus software is specifically designed to detect the presence of malware, not all of them detect in the same way. Ineffective products force you to run a manual scan to determine if any systems have been affected, while the best forms of software have dynamic scanning features that are repeatedly checking your computer for the presence of malicious entities. Without this feature, it’s much easier for something to infiltrate a device and begin causing damage before you even realize it.

Automatic Updates

Updates are vital for all forms of software, but this is especially true when it comes to antivirus. Because new types of malware are constantly being developed, antivirus software needs frequent updates in order to track and contain new threats that didn’t even exist when it was first installed. If you have to install updates manually, you might miss important new protections and expose your system to infection, so always make sure your antivirus software is capable of installing updates automatically and frequently.

Protection for Multiple Apps

Threats exist across the entire spectrum of applications and services that you rely on for your everyday tasks. From email clients, to your CRM, ERP, and beyond, harmful software can sneak into systems from a variety of different sources. Antivirus programs need to protect multiple vulnerable applications from potential dangers.

Auto-Clean

If the antivirus software immediately detects malicious software, why wouldn’t it delete the code on the spot? Unfortunately, some solutions simply place the malware in a quarantine zone upon detection, waiting for the user to log on and manually delete it. You should choose a program that utilizes an auto-clean feature to rid itself of viruses.

Fights Against All Types of Malware

Between trojans, bots, spyware, viruses, etc., there are many different types of malware that can harm your computer, and antivirus programs are sometimes designed only to target a specific type of software. It’s better to go with a program that can comprehensively detect all forms of malware.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About Portnox
Portnox provides simple-to-deploy, operate and maintain network access control, security and visibility solutions. Portnox software can be deployed on-premises, as a cloud-delivered service, or in hybrid mode. It is agentless and vendor-agnostic, allowing organizations to maximize their existing network and cybersecurity investments. Hundreds of enterprises around the world rely on Portnox for network visibility, cybersecurity policy enforcement and regulatory compliance. The company has been recognized for its innovations by Info Security Products Guide, Cyber Security Excellence Awards, IoT Innovator Awards, Computing Security Awards, Best of Interop ITX and Cyber Defense Magazine. Portnox has offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia. For information visit http://www.portnox.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.。

How to Properly Manage Secrets in Development Projects

Secrets like passwords and ssh keys are scattered throughout the software development process. However, few people can access this data. Controlled access is still a major challenge for development teams, due to difficulties in managing this information and adopting non-recommended standards.

The standards that can compromise the security of a system include weak passwords, a topic already addressed here in senhasegura‘s blog.

However, in this article, we will bring more details about the management of secrets in development processes. To facilitate your understanding, we divided our text into the following topics:

    1. What Are Secrets?
    2. Challenges to Manage Secrets in Development Projects
    3. Password Management: Non-Recommended Standards
    4. Five Key Practices for Secret Management
    5. Conclusion

Follow our text to the end!

  • What Are Secrets?

All authentication credentials used in applications and services in an IT structure are considered secrets. This includes passwords, ssh keys, API keys, OAuth tokens, and configuration files.

Secrets management can be viewed as enhanced password management, which includes creating, rotating, revoking, and storing credentials.

After all, the scope in this case is broader, but the purpose remains to protect against unauthorized access to data and systems, data losses, and breaches.

Secrets management contributes to cybersecurity in three instances. They are as follows:

  • Infrastructure Security – It prevents users, devices, applications, and other network elements from being invaded;
  • Cloud Service Security – It allows you to limit and manage access to cloud-based services;
  • Data Security – It makes it possible to protect critical systems, among other resources against data losses and breaches.

Another advantage of secrets management is to help bring organizations into compliance with the requirements of demanding cybersecurity standards, such as FIPS, NIST, and HIPAA.

  • Challenges to Manage Secrets in Development Projects

Secrets management involves some difficulties. Next, let’s point out the most common ones. Check it out:

 Lack of Visibility

With the migration of IT infrastructure to the cloud, the number of resources, systems, applications, and accounts changes frequently. As a consequence, the places where secrets are stored also change. 

Therefore, for an organization to remain secure, it is essential to know clearly where this information is stored. What’s more: A lack of visibility can also create obstacles to managing these resources, or when going through an audit.

 Lack of Management Policies 

To meet the criteria of security regulations and facilitate the control of the life cycle phases of a secret, companies must define rules in security policies, which does not always occur. 

 Manual Management

Most organizations do not use automated secret management capabilities to manage their digital credentials yet. In this way, they delay the management process and make the storage of secrets more vulnerable.

  • Password Management: Non-Recommended Standards

Many organizations still have non-recommended standards in their password management routine. Here are a few:

 Weak Passwords

Due to the difficulty in memorizing complex passwords, many people adopt simple and easy-to-remember codes. However, this is one of the main vulnerabilities when it comes to password management. After all, easy-to-remember passwords are just as easy to crack.

Also, malicious agents can discover embedded and encoded passwords with the help of verification tools, by performing a brute force attack or simply guessing.

 Password Sharing

Many companies use shared accounts and passwords to manage their systems, making it impossible to identify who performed each action within an online environment in the event of an incident.

In addition, their employees can share passwords with co-workers or others, facilitating the action of attackers interested in sensitive organization data. 

 Storing Secrets in Plain Text

It is common for employees in a company’s department to use text files that contain all passwords for critical situations or forward messages to colleagues with the necessary secrets to access a resource.

Nevertheless, these practices pose risks to the cybersecurity of organizations: attackers only need to obtain a file, message, or email to have tools to hack a system. 

 Reuse of Secrets 

It is also very common to reuse secrets for different services in order to facilitate their memorization and save time. However, if one malicious user discovers one code, the others will also be compromised.

 Unrevoked Secrets 

NIST has as a criterion the revocation of user credentials when necessary. This should occur in the event an employee is fired or a contract with a third-party supplier is terminated, for example. However, this security procedure is not followed by all organizations.

 Secrets Without Rotation

Various security standards dictate that passwords be changed within a given time frame, as do application keys and other types of secrets. Once again, it is not all companies that follow this recommendation. 

Five Key Practices for Secret Management

There are several ways to provide a secure method for protecting secrets. The following are five important steps to achieve this goal:

 Centralized Secrets Management

First, you should centralize your secrets in one place to ensure more security and facilitate their management. This makes it easier to build governance, security, and auditing to know who accesses this information and when it is accessed. 

 ACLs (Access Control Lists)

Once you have your secrets centralized in one place, make sure the right people have access to them. To do this, you can create human, machine, and application ACLs that give you control of that access. 

 Temporary Credentials

The third and fourth actions must occur simultaneously: they consist of having dynamic secrets. In practice, to ensure dynamic secrets, individuals and entities must be given temporary credentials to access the systems. 

Encryption

As mentioned, it is important that data in transit or at rest can be encrypted, with encryption keys centralized in secrets management.

 Audit

Now, you might be wondering how to audit your secrets management and know what was accessed by which user. 

Each dynamic secret can be used by a single user, who is properly authenticated when retrieving this information, and encryption as a service allows you to know who accessed an encryption and decryption operation. All of this can give you a complete picture of everything that happens in your IT infrastructure.

Conclusion

  • By reading this article you have learned what secrets are, how they should be managed, and what are the biggest challenges in managing this information. You were also able to understand which standards are not recommended in password management, such as:

  • Weak Passwords;
  • Password Sharing;
  • Storing Secrets in Plain Text;
  • Reuse of Secrets;
  • Unrevoked Secrets; and
  • Secrets Without Rotation.

In addition, we presented five fundamental practices for good secrets management. 

Did you like our text? Share it with someone interested in this information. 

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About Segura®
Segura® strive to ensure the sovereignty of companies over actions and privileged information. To this end, we work against data theft through traceability of administrator actions on networks, servers, databases and a multitude of devices. In addition, we pursue compliance with auditing requirements and the most demanding standards, including PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO 27001 and HIPAA.

Distributed Systems and the 21st century

At the end of the last century I had the opportunity to help in a very ambitious computer project: the search for radio messages emitted by extraterrestrial civilizations… And what the hell does it have to do with Distributed Systems?

Recently my colleagues wrote an interesting article on distributed network visibility, which I really liked and I came up with the idea of taking it to the next level. If this post tries to offer full knowledge of the different components in operation within our network, Distributed Systems go “further”; they reach where we lack control over the devices that comprise it.

I am going to exemplify both at the social science level, comparing a union versus a confederation (as a central of workers and unioI am going to exemplify both at the social science level, comparing a union versus a confederation (as a central of workers and unions and not from a political point of view).

*Confederacy

According to Merriam-Webster

1. A group of people, countries, organizations, etc. joined together for a common purpose or by a common interest: LEAGUE, ALLIANCE

Distributed computing, distributed systems, are they the same?

Distributed Systems

If you look for the concept of Distributed Systems on Wikipedia (that magical place), you will be redirected to the article called Distributed Computing and, I quote:

“Distributed computing also refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational problems. In distributed computing, a problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is solved by one or more computers, which communicate with each other via message passing.”

Without going any further: Wikipedia, if we consider ourselves as computers, it is a very high-level Distributed System, since we comply with its intrinsic characteristics… And what are they?

Features of Distributed Systems

A Distributed System (or Distributed Computing) has:

•   Concurrence: Which in the case of computers is a distributed program and in Wikipedia they are people… who use specialized software distributed by web browsers.

•   Asynchronous: Each computer (or Wikipedian) works independently without waiting for a result from the other, when it finishes its batch of work, it delivers it and it is taken in and saved.

•   Resilience: A computer device that breaks down or loses connection, or a person who dies, withdraws or is expelled from Wikipedia, in both environments does not mean stopping the work or global task. There will always be new resources, machines or humans, ready to join the Distributed System.

The aliens

Right, I started this article talking about them. In today’s -unfortunately- destroyed radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sent a message to the Hercules cluster, a group of galaxies 25,000 light years away from our planet.

“Hercules Globular Cluster (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hercules_Globular_Cluster,_EVscope-20211008.jpg) ”

That means that it will take 50 thousand years to get an answer, if there is life out there, but what if it is us who were already sent messages thousands or millions of years ago?

Well, this was the program Seti@home  about: it collected radio signals and chopped them into two-minute pieces that were sent to each person who wanted to collaborate in the analysis with their own computer. At the end of the calculation according to a special algorithm, the result was sent and a new piece of code was requested. If a computer after a reasonable time did not return an answer, then the same piece was sent to another computer that wanted to collaborate: the “prize” consisted in publicly recognizing the collaborator as a discoverer of life and intelligence outside this world.

I installed the program and put it as a screensaver, so I calculated while I was working on something else or resting.

“Seti@home (imagen de setiathome.berkeley.edu) ”

There you have it! A distributed system for analyzing the radio signals of the universe!

Distributed monitoring

Distributed monitoring depends on the network topology used, and I bring it up as an introduction or approach to monitoring a distributed system. If you are new to Pandora FMS, I recommend you take some time to read this post.

Essentially it is about distributed environments that give service to a company or organization but do not execute a common software and have very different areas or purposes between departments, supported in communication with a distributed network topology accompanied by a well planned security architecture in monitoring.

Pandora FMS offers in this field service monitoring, very well described in the official documentation.

Observability

It would be an attribute of a system, and the topic is worth a full blog post, but, in summary, I expose observability as a global concept that includes more alert monitoring and alert management activities, visualization and trace analysis for distributed systems, and log analysis.

Companies like Twitter have taken observability very seriously and, as you may have guessed, that addictive social network is a distributed system but with a diffuse end product (increase our knowledge and facts about the real world).

Transaction monitoring

How can we monitor a distributed system if it consists of very heterogeneous components and, as we saw, can reach any part of our known universe?

Pandora FMS has Business Transactional Monitoring, a tool that I consider the most appropriate for distributed systems since we can configure transactions, as many as we need, and then use the necessary transactional agents to do so.

It is a difficult topic to take in but our documentation starts with a simple and practical example, with which, as you experiment, you may add “blocks” of more complex transactions until you reach a point where you can have a panorama of the distributed system.

All this is possible with Pandora FMS since it has standard monitoring, remote checks, transaction synthetic monitoring and the Satellite server for distributed environments that can be used with transactional monitoring for distributed systems.

Present and future

The question is no longer whether we need distributed systems. That is a fact. Today people use distributed systems in computing services in the cloud or in data centers and the Internet.

Distributed systems can offer impossible functions in monolithic systems or take advantage of computer processes, such as performing restorations from backups by asking other systems for chunks that are missing or have deteriorated in the local system.

For all these cases, and in any case, the flexibility of Pandora FMS will always be useful and adaptable for current or future challenges.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About PandoraFMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.

Need help? Our team is just a message away