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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Which regulators and which regulations? Honestly curious because I don’t know. There is not exactly a comprehensive central cybersecurity regulator in the U.S. to my knowledge. Some might be governed by SEC, others by DOE, which can make recommendations which I’ve seen only practically enforced by market means through cyberinsurers refusing to underwrite policies without sets of protections put in place prior by the insured.

caused by regulators who promoted its use on the basis that it ensures full security with a single tick in the box.

Regulators/insurers don’t promote a specific vendor, but either suggest or mandate specific controls that might be able to map to particular products/features, which is probably a GRC (governance risk compliance) pencil pusher or auditor/consultant task. Crowdstrike Falcon is a platform with lots of different features that can be licensed, but is primarily an EDR/NGAV tool that runs on workstations and servers. You’ll check one or a couple checkboxes, but not all, such as increasingly required autonomous response capabilities within a network traffic analysis IDS/IPS which is situated much differently both physically and conceptually in a cybersecurity stack than a CrowdStrike EDR.

CrowdStrike seems to have such a large footprint because of excellent positioning and business development - they were first on the cloud-managed endpoint scene while other vendors were stuck supporting legacy on-premise solutions, and they had waves of VC funding that compounded their growth.

such as increasingly required autonomous response capabilities within a network traffic analysis IDS/IPS which is situated much differently both physically and conceptually in a cybersecurity stack than a CrowdStrike EDR.

I've found that when people handwave in this specific way there's usually a more interesting story they're condensing for time. Who is increasingly requiring autonomous response capabilities for IPS? My read is that it's barely even true on paper in 800-53 rev 5 or CMMC2.

Who is increasingly requiring autonomous response capabilities for IPS

Cyber insurers/underwriters for the policies I’ve seen which are common to a particular vertical I have exposure to. And then some extended federal requirements if the entity within that vertical has a service relationship with sensitive gov assets.

And they are legitimately considered very good in the industry by penetration testers.

They fucked up an update big time, but they got their market position by having a competitive product.

Which regulators and which regulations?

I'm pretty sure this is generally pointing at NIST guidance, compliance with which has been leveled as a requirement on Federal contractors, and probably has shown up in the private sector cited as best practice for things like insurers looking at IT risks. There have also been increasingly loud recommendations from the government about software development practices generally, but I'm not sure exactly how those are enforced.

Honestly most of the relevant regulations I've worked with aren't dumb. Sometimes painful to implement, and maybe sometimes overbearing, but not completely unreasonable.