Three Ways to Help Improve the Nation’s Cybersecurity

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Three Ways to Help Improve the Nation’s Cybersecurity

By now, you’ve heard about Executive Order 14028 on “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity” which President Biden signed in May, 2021. It begins by stating, “The United States faces persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people’s security and privacy.  The Federal Government must improve its efforts to identify, deter, protect against, detect, and respond to these actions and actors.”

The experts at RunSafe Security have dissected the EO to break down the specific areas of improvement it’s addressing, how your enterprise may be affected, and what you can do to help ensure these improvements come to life within our nation’s cyber landscape.

How Can You Help Improve National Cybersecurity?

1. Modernize and implement stronger cybersecurity standards by enabling suppliers to insert security controls into critical software at build time (Section 4 (a)).

NIST 800.53 version 5 now states that RASP is a key control in protecting software. RunSafe Security enables your software development team to incorporate runtime protections into your software code at build time without slowing down. This approach protects software from both known and unknown vulnerabilities that scanning tools miss. All suppliers should incorporate this protection into their embedded software they ship to the U.S. Government, if not all customers across critical infrastructure. See Alkemist:Code for more information.

2. Improve software supply chain security by providing pre-hardened open source software packages with a complete software bill of materials – SBOM (Section 4 (e) vii).

North Carolina State University conducted a study that showed leading scanning tools failed to detect 97.5% of memory-based vulnerabilities in the Linux operating system over a ten-year period. RunSafe builds from source and hardens the most common open source packages (Apache, NGINX, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Reddis, Python [interpreter], Java [interpreter], and many more) from known and unknown vulnerabilities. Given the Executive Order, RunSafe is committed to incorporating a complete software bill of material as part of the package they deliver. See Alkemist:Repo for more information.

More about How to Protect Your Open Source Software

Read the full post from RunSafe Security to see their third tip for helping to improve the nation’s cybersecurity.

 

Learn from global ICS cybersecurity subject matter experts as they share insights on topics like Cybersecurity for Manufacturing, Energy and Infrastructure Industries and The Role of AI in ICS Cybersecurity at IIoT World’s Cybersecurity Day on October 6, 2021. The first 500 tickets are free, so register today.