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Editor’s note: While this topic isn’t entirely security-specific, Trend Micro leader William Malik, has career expertise on the trending topic and shared his perspective.
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There was a provocative report recently that the Governor of New Jersey told reporters that the state of New Jersey needed COBOL programmers. The reason was that the number of unemployment claims had spiked, and the legacy system running unemployment claims had failed. That 40-year-old system was written in COBOL, so the conclusion was that the old language had finally given out. Hiring COBOL programmers would let the State update and modernize the application to handle the increase in load.
This might be the problem, but it probably is not. Here’s why.
From these points, we learn the following lessons.
Software Doesn’t Wear Out
Logic is indelible. A computer program is deterministic. It will do exactly what you tell it to do, even if what you tell it to do isn’t precisely what you meant it to do. Code never misbehaves – but your instructions may be incorrect. That’s why debugging is such a hard problem.
Incidentally, that’s also why good developers usually make lousy testers. The developer focuses her mind on one thing – getting a bunch of silicon to behave. The tester looks for faults, examines edge conditions, limit conditions, and odd configurations of inputs and infrastructure to see how things break. The two mindsets are antithetical.
Once a piece of software has been in production long enough, the mainline paths are usually defect free. In fact, the rest of the code may be a hot mess, but that stuff doesn’t get executed so those defects are latent and do not impact normal processing. Ed Adams published a report in 1984 titled “Optimizing Preventative Service for Software Products” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5390362, originally published in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, v 28, n 1). He concluded that once a product has been in production for a sufficient time, it was safer to leave it alone. Installing preventative maintenance was likely to disrupt the system. Most IT organizations know this, having learned the hard way. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the mantra for this wisdom.
As a corollary, new software has a certain defect rate. Fixes to that software typically have a defect rate ten times greater. So if a typical fix is large enough, you put in a new bug for every bug you take out.
Computers Are Constrained
All computers have constraints. The relative amount of resources mean some computers are better for some workloads than others. For mainframes, the typical constraint is processing power. That’s why mainframes are tuned to run at 100% utilization, or higher. (How do you get past 100% utilization? Technically, of course, you can’t. But what the measurements are showing you is how much work is ready to run, waiting for available processing power. The scale actually can go to 127%, if there’s enough work ready.)
Different types of computers have different constraints. Mainframes run near 100% utilization – the CPU is the most expensive and constrained resource. PCs on the other hand never get busy. No human can type fast enough to drive utilization above a few percent. The constrained resource on PCs is typically disk storage. That’s why different types of computers do better at different types of work. PCs are great for user interface stuff. Mainframes are perfect for chewing through a million database records. By chance we developed mainframes first; that’s not an indictment of either type, Both are useful.
Computers Can Run Out of Resources
Any IT infrastructure has a design point for load. That is, when you put together a computer you structure it to meet the likely level of demand on the system. If you over-provision it, you waste resources that will never be used. If you under-provision it, you will not meet your service level agreements. So when you begin, you must know what the customers – your users – expect in terms of response time, number of concurrent transactions, database size, growth rates, network transaction load, transaction mix, computational complexity of transaction types, and so on. If you don’t specify what your targets are for these parameters, you probably won’t get the sizing right. You will likely buy too much of one resource or not enough of another.
Note that cloud computing can help – it allows you to dynamically add additional capacity to handle peak load. However, cloud isn’t a panacea. Some workloads don’t flex that much, so you spend extra money for flexibility for a capability that you can provide more economically and efficiently if it were in-house.
Add Capacity in Balance
When I was in high school our physics teacher explained that temperature wasn’t the same as heat. He said “Heat is the result of a physical or chemical reaction. Temperature is simply the change in heat over the mass involved.” One of the kids asked (snarkily) “Then why don’t drag racers have bicycle tires on the back?” The teacher was caught off guard. The answer is that the amount of heat put into the tire is the same regardless of its size, but the temperature was related to the size of the area where the tire touched the road. A bicycle tire has only about two square inches on the pavement, a fat drag tire has 100 square inches or more. So putting the same amount of horsepower spinning the tire will cause the bicycle tire’s temperature to rise about 50 times more than the gumball’s will.
When you add capacity to a computing system, you need to balance related capacity elements or you’ll be wasting money. Doubling the processor’s power (MHz or MIPS) without proportionately increasing the memory or network capacity simply moves the constraint from one place to another. What used to be a system with a flat-out busy CPU now becomes a system that’s waiting for work with a queue at the memory, the disk drive, or the network card.
Adding Staff Makes Things Worse
Increasing any resource creates potential problems of its own, especially of the system’s underlying architecture is ignored. Fore the software development process (regardless of form) one such resource is staff. The book “The Mythical Man-Month” by Fred Brooks (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mythical-man-month-frederick-p-brooks-jr/1126893908) discusses how things go wrong.
The core problem is adding more people require strong communications and clear goals. Too many IT projects lack both. I once was part of an organization that consulted on a complex application rewrite – forty consultants, hundreds of developers, and very little guidance. The situation degenerated rapidly when the interim project manager decided we shouldn’t waste time on documentation. A problem would surface, the PM would kick off as task force, hold a meeting, and send everybody on their way. After the meeting, people would ask what specific decisions had been reached, but since there were no minutes, nobody could be sure. That would cause the PM to schedule another meeting, and so on. Two lessons I learned concerns meetings:
When you add staff, you must account for the extra overhead managing the activities of each person, and establish processes to monitor changes that every participant must follow. Scrum is an excellent way of flattening potentially harmful changes. By talking face to face regularly, the team knows everything that’s going on. Omit those meetings or rely on second-hand reports and the project is already off the rails. All that remains is to see how far things go wrong before someone notices.
In Conclusion …
If you have a computer system that suddenly gets a huge spike in load, do these things first:
If you are unable to resolve the capacity constraints with these steps, examine the programs for internal limitations:
Note that if you do not have (or cannot find) the relevant documentation, you will need to examine the source code. At this point, you may need to bring in a small set of experts in the programming language to recreate the relevant documentation. Handy hint: before you start working on the source code, regenerate the load modules and compare them with the production stuff to identify any patches or variance between what’s in the library and what’s actually in production.
Bringing in a bunch of people before going through this analysis will cause confusion and waste resources. While to an uninformed public it may appear that something is being done, the likelihood is that what is actually being done will have to be expensively undone before the actual core problem can be resolved. Tread lightly. Plan ahead. State your assumptions, then verify them. Have a good plan and you’ll work it out. Remember, it’s just ones and zeros.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, or @WilliamMalikTM.
The post “We Need COBOL Programmers!” No, You Probably Don’t appeared first on .
Dear Customers,
Together, we are facing a truly unprecedented situation and we have all had to adapt to the new reality. The global coronavirus pandemic is affecting our families, our communities, our organizations – indeed, it affects our perspective and way of life. As you certainly have too, at Trend Micro we have been busy over the past few weeks ensuring our employees are safe while also delivering uninterrupted service and protection for our customers. We have made it a priority to help organizations around the globe strengthen their security and ensure business continuity while so many of their employees work remotely.
As a global company with headquarters in Japan, we have been exposed to COVID-19 from the very early days when it first erupted in Asia. We have seen the massive impact this novel coronavirus has had on all of us: from social distancing, to families being separated, illness and even death. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who has been impacted by the virus, directly or indirectly.
The safety of our employees is our first priority and for the last few weeks the vast majority of our employees are all working from home – all 7,000 across 60 countries. It is heartwarming to see the different activities teams have launched to stay connected while being apart: virtual happy hours or morning coffee meetings, online sports classes to stay fit together, movie watching nights and even remote karaoke. I sometimes feel that we are more connected now than ever before.
In the midst of these difficult times, we have also seen the amazing power of positivity and kindness around the world. I am very touched and proud of how our employees, our Trenders, are stepping up even more than usual to engage in acts of generosity and community support. A few examples include:
We have also seen Trenders donating some of their accrued paid vacation days to colleagues who might need additional time off to take care of family. There have been thousands of such acts of kindness – likely many more that I’m not even aware of. Knowing the passion of our employees, I know that there are new activities being organized and happening at this exact moment.
In this same spirit, it is very important to me – as well as the entire executive team – that we do the right thing for our employees and our customers during these difficult times, rather than focusing solely on what’s best for our bottom line. We intend to retain all of our employees, and are working to ensure that our teams that work on commission will continue to have a steady income, no matter how business goes. We know that not every company is as fortunate as we are, and many family members of our employees are out of jobs, so our executives have also committed to reducing their salaries if necessary, to ensure that every employee will receive company bonuses for the first half of 2020. If we protect our Trend Micro family, our Trend Micro family can protect and care for their communities.
I understand these times are difficult and while we are celebrating acts of kindness and positivity, many of our friends and families are struggling with health issues and other concerns. Our hearts go out to all those who are affected, to our healthcare workers and all essential employees who help keep our lives going. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Please stay safe – and stay at home!
Kind regards,
Eva Chen
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Working from home? How do you keep your employees cyber-safe and cyber-secure? How do you protect your reputation, profit, and cash flow when you depend on your IT infrastructure as never before?
The National Cyber Security Alliance is hosting a series of webinars for small business owners, and we’re proud to support this effort with guest speakers to share our threat intelligence and security expertise.
The topics will help small companies deal with the challenges of COVID-19. The agenda is at https://staysafeonline.org/event_category/cybersecure-my-business/.
Here’s a quick overview of each session and why it might benefit your organization to tune in.
Telework Cybersecurity Best Practices – April 7: Many small business owners rely on face-to-face meetings with their teams. But, social distancing and work-from-home directives interrupt that way of doing things. In this session, we’ll discuss how to adjust your business to deal with a remote workforce. For some managers, not seeing every member of the team can be unsettling. We’ll talk about ways to overcome that barrier. For many organizations, using remote tools can put an extra burden on your IT gear and staff. We’ll talk about alternatives to lighten that load. And for most organizations, the new way of working can expose new and different information security vulnerabilities. We’ll offer some good practices to reduce your exposure.
Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be Greg Young and Ed Cabrera.
Spring has Sprung! Time for a Digital Spring Cleaning – April 14: One way to cut down on IT resource use is to get rid of unnecessary stuff. This webcast will suggest tactics to reduce the burden on your infrastructure. You will learn about cleaning up your storage, getting off unnecessary email lists, improving your – and your customers’ – privacy, and lowering your attack profile by getting rid of stale applications and services.
E-Commerce Security During COVID-19 – April 21, 2020: Businesses that rely on foot traffic are pivoting to on-line offerings. Restaurants support demand with delivery or curbside pick-up, which both put a strain on your IT resources. Unfortunately, the bad guys are exploiting weaknesses in on-line ordering and payment systems. We’ll talk about measures small businesses should consider to protect their reputation, cash flow, and profits during this transition.
Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be myself and Mitchel Chang.
How to Avoid COVID-19 Scams – May 5, 2020: Bad guys are trying to make money off Covid-19 worries. In this session, Lesley Fair, a Senior Attorney with the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission talks about different kinds of scams and what to do about them, hopefully before anyone gets conned, and what steps you can take if you think you might have gotten stung. Ths session will be repeated on May 26.
Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be myself and Jon Clay.
What Are Phishing, Vishing and Smishing? How Can I Protect My Small Business From These Threats? – May 12, 2020: This session will discuss attacks that can arrive through email, messages, and video chats. Small businesses are targets as well as big firms and the public at large – the bad guys are going anywhere they can to make a (dishonest) buck. You’ll help your employees and customers protect themselves with some good advice, practices, and tools.
Mitchel Chang will be a guest panelist.
How to Avoid COVID-19 Scams – May 26, 2020: A second session of the May 5 discussion. This time Jon Clay and Myla Pilao will be guest speakers from Trend Micro.
Telework Cybersecurity Best Practices – June 9, 2020: A second session of the April 7 event. Greg and Ed will give a repeat performance attendees.
Each session starts at 2:00 PM Eastern time. NCSA will record each session, but you should register to listen in and ask questions live. While the information is tuned to meet the needs of small businesses, individuals at larger organizations, and the general public, will find good ideas and helpful hints an tips to stay safe and cope with this challenging time. We hope to see you soon.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below or @WilliamMalikTM
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The corporate endpoint is a constant battle between cybersecurity white hats and criminal attackers. According to one study from the Ponemon Institute, 68% of organizations were victims of an attack on the endpoint in 2019. The risks and costs associated with undetected threats are immeasurable. Organizations need to detect and respond immediately before any significant damage is done.
In order to do this, CISOs must look beyond the endpoint to also include email, servers, cloud workloads and networks. This is the value of Trend Micro’s XDR platform. We heard feedback on this strategy recently, as Trend Micro was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2020.
Under fire and over-stretched
Enterprise IT security teams are under unparalleled pressure. On one hand, they’re bombarded with cyber-attacks on a massive scale. Trend Micro detected and blocked over 52 billion such threats in 2019 alone. On the other hand, they’re facing a range of continuously evolving black hat tools and techniques including fileless malware, phishing, and supply chain attacks, that could lead to data theft and service outages. The stakes couldn’t be higher, thanks to an ever-tightening regulatory regime. All of this must be done with workforce challenges: the current cyber skills shortage for North American firms stands at nearly 500,000 workers.
These are the kinds of challenges facing Trend Micro customer MedImpact Healthcare Systems, the largest privately held pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) in the US. Processing more than one million healthcare claims daily, MedImpact must protect two primary data centers, three call centers staffed 24/7, and multiple private network routing centers — all to the strict compliance requirements of HIPAA, PCI DSS and other regulations.
As Frank Bunton, VP, CISO for MedImpact knows, effective endpoint detection and response (EDR) is vital to modern organizations. “EDR accelerates the threat analysis process so we can get to the solution faster,” says Bunton. “Speed to resolution is critical because we see attacks every day on just about every network.”
But MedImpact is similar to a lot of other organizations today in that it also appreciates the need to go beyond the endpoint for critical cross-layer detection and response. “XDR gives us the added confidence that our organization is protected on all fronts. If an endpoint detects a problem, it automatically uploads the suspect object to a tool that analyzes that problem and fixes it. By the time we are aware of an issue, the issue is resolved. There is no way we could manage this much information without extended security automation,” says Bunton.
The future is XDR
This is where XDR comes in. It has been designed to look not just at endpoint detection and response, but also to collect and correlate data from across the organization, including: email, endpoint, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. With this enhanced context, and the power of our AI and expert security analytics, the platform is able to identify threats more easily and contain them more effectively.
This matters to organizations like MedImpact, whose key challenge was “finding security solutions that could communicate with each other and share valuable data in real time.” XDR has visibility across the entire IT environment to detect earlier and with more confidence. It provides a single source of the truth and delivers fewer higher-fidelity alerts to enhance protection and maximize limited IT resources.
But don’t just take our word for it. Forrester gave us a perfect score for product vision, security analytics, performance, market presence and much more. “Trend Micro has a forward-thinking approach and is an excellent choice for organizations wanting to centralize reporting and detection with XDR but have less capacity for proactively threat hunting,” the report concluded.
To find out more… check out the Forrester report on leaders in this space.
Learn more from MedImpact’s success story.
The post Riding another wave of success for our multi-layered detection and response approach appeared first on .
The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has affected peoples’ lives across the globe and has quickly swept through and impacted individuals, families, communities, and businesses around the world. At Trend Micro, our number one priority is to ensure that our employees and their families are as safe as possible, and our thoughts are with those who have been affected by the virus.
Our team has spent a great deal of time reviewing options to ensure both the continued protection of our customers and partners, as well as the physical safety of our employees. We realize this situation remains very dynamic, as information continues to change day-to-day, and as such we will continue to provide updates as we learn more, but in the meantime we remain committed to providing the superior service and support that our customers, partners and suppliers have come to expect of our company throughout this situation.
We know the critical role that Trend Micro plays in your organization to keep your company and employees protected. We have taken several measures to ensure that the COVID-19 crisis does not impact your experience with Trend Micro products or services.
Listed below are several actions that the team has taken to date to not only ensure that our employees are safe, but to continue to deliver business “as usual” during this time:
Safety of Employees
Our number one priority is the health and safety of our employees around the globe. To that measure, we have:
Continuity of Service
We are committed to ensuring that we continue to support the security needs of your organization, including but not limited to:
As an optimistic organization, we believe that because of this unfortunate situation, new ways to work together and incredible innovation will occur and will make us all stronger in the future.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to your local account representative or Trend Micro authorized support contact. We will continue to watch this situation closely, react accordingly and communicate any substantial changes with our customers and partners.
On behalf of everyone at Trend Micro, thank you for trusting us with your business. We wish health and safety to you and your families, employees, and customers.
Sincerely,
Kevin Simzer
Chief Operating Officer
Trend Micro Incorporated
The post A message from our COO regarding Trend Micro’s Customer commitment during the global Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) appeared first on .
So you suddenly have a lot of staff working remotely. Telework is not new and a good percentage of the workforce already does so. But the companies who have a distributed workforce had time to plan for it, and to plan for it securely.
A Lot of New Teleworkers All At Once
This event can’t be treated like a quick rollout of an application: there are business, infrastructure, and customer security impacts. There will be an increase of work for help desks as new teleworkers wrestle with remote working.
Additionally, don’t compound the problem. There is advice circulating to reset all passwords for remote workers. This opens the door for increased social engineering to attempt to lure overworked help desk staff into doing password resets that don’t comply with policy. Set expectations for staff that policy must be complied with, and to expect some delays while the help desk is overloaded.
Business continuity issues will arise as limited planning for remote workers could max out VPN licenses, firewall capacity, and application timeouts as many people attempt to use the same apps through a narrower network pipe.
Help Staff Make A Secure Home Office
In the best of times, remote workers are often left to their own devices (pun intended) for securing their work at home experience. Home offices are already usually much less secure than corporate offices: weak routers, unmanaged PCs, and multiple users means home offices become an easier attack path into the enterprise.
It doesn’t make sense to have workers operate in a less secure environment in this context. Give them the necessary security tools and operational tools to do their business. Teleworkers, even with a company-issued device, are likely to work on multiple home devices. Make available enterprise licensed storage and sharing tools, so employees don’t have to resort to ‘sketchy’ or weak options when they exceed the limits for free storage on Dropbox or related services.
A Secure Web Gateway as a service is a useful option considering that teleworkers using a VPN will still likely be split tunneling (i.e. not going through corporate security devices when browsing to non-corporate sites, etc.), unlike when they are in the corporate office and all connections are sanitized. That is especially important in cases where a weak home router gets compromised and any exfiltration or other ‘phone home’ traffic from malware needs to be spotted.
A simple way to get this information out to employees is to add remote working security tips to any regularly occurring executive outreach.
Operational Issues
With a large majority of businesses switching to a work-from-home model with less emphasis on in-person meetings, we also anticipate that malicious actors will start to impersonate digital tools, such as ‘free’ remote conferencing services and other cloud computing software.
Having a policy on respecting telework privacy is a good preventative step to minimize the risk of this type of attack being successful. Remote workers may be concerned about their digital privacy when working from home, so any way to inform them about likely attack methods can help.
Any steps to prevent staff trying to evade security measures out of a concern over privacy are likely a good investment.
Crisis Specific Risks
During any major event or crisis, socially engineered attacks and phishing will increase. Human engineering means using any lever to make it a little bit easier for targets to click on a link.
We’re seeing targeted email attacks taking advantage of this. Some will likely use tactics such as attachments named “attached is your Work At Home Allowance Voucher,” spoofed corporate guidelines, or HR documents.
Sadly, we expect hospitals and local governments will see increased targeting by ransomware due the expectation that payouts are likelier during an emergency.
But Hang On – It Is Not All Bad News
The good news is that none of these attacks are new and we already have playbooks to defend against them. Give a reminder to all staff during this period to be more wary of phishing, but don’t overly depend on user education – back it up with security technology measures. Here are a few ways to do that.
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