September was another busy month for product development at AlienVault, an AT&T Company. We are excited that the AlienVault Agent is getting great traction with our USM Anywhere user base, and we are continuing to add feature enhancements to the Agent. You can keep up with all of our regular product releases by reading the release notes in the AlienVault Product Forum.

The first article in this series examined configuration hardening—essentially looking at ports, processes and services where security configuration management (SCM) is key. The second article looked at application and version hardening strategies. This third installment will discuss the role of automation in the coming of age of what’s called “continuous hardening.”

A series of high-profile data breaches in 2017 made it clear that it's becoming more difficult to protect your and your customer's sensitive information from nefarious agents. As businesses expand, they develop and implement security policies that help protect their sensitive information from outsiders.

The first article in this series examined configuration hardening, essentially looking at ports, processes and services as the “doors, gates and windows” into a network where security configuration management (SCM) becomes the job of determining which of these gateways should be open, closed, or locked at any given time. Now it’s time to look at application and version hardening.

Although many organizations are shifting security to the left and embracing the integration of security tools into their continuous integration / continuous delivery pipelines, there are others who have different wants and needs.

Google is shutting down its Google+ social network following the disclosure of a software glitch within Google+ that resulted in the exposure of personal-profile data belonging to hundreds of thousands of Google+ users. The glitch was live for close to three years, but Google elected to not make the breach public out of fear of regulation.