Fortinet: Active Security for a Rapidly Evolving Threat Landscape
With the cost of a single corporate security breach reaching $4.88 million, a 10% rise in just one year, and the total cost of cybercrime expected to scale to $10.5 trillion globally by 2030, it’s no surprise that security remains IT executives’ number one priority. AI is opening the door to more sophisticated attacks by a broader range of bad actors, and anyone – from a guy living in his parents' basement to a nation state – can utilize this nefarious technology to annoy, disrupt, and steal from organizations and individuals. Any discussion on cloud is not complete without looking into the latest in cloud security solutions, and luckily for CFD22 delegates, Fortinet was on hand to give us a comprehensive update.
Fortinet is a leader in security solution delivery, with a broad suite of products in the marketplace for cloud-to-edge protection. The team at CFD22 walked us through the Fortinet Security portfolio with stress on active threat detection, a key capability that automatically detects early signs of attacks, combines multiple low-severity signals into one priority alert, and simplifies SecOps overhead with simplified alert communications and enhanced recommendations for action. The advancement of the comprehensive platform struck a common theme from what we’ve seen at the event – integration of advanced analytics and AI to improve cloud management of all types.
How does Fortinet’s solution work? They’ve developed something called Polygraph technology that ingests data from the environment with or without agents, analyzes data based on your cloud topology, and drives action. This works across network, platform, and application security, providing a broad scope of service delivery under one hood.
They’ve delivered this with a heritage of technology innovation, with over 1,000 patents in their portfolio. They’ve built the FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services platform that is analyzing trillions of events across the globe to continuously update threat detection for their >800,000 lifetime customers. Who does Fortinet work with? Over 300 partners to ensure seamless operation across public cloud services and private cloud stacks. This impressive solution has led Fortinet to be listed in a stunning 10 Gartner Magic Quadrants across security use cases.
It's notable that, since I heard from Fortinet at their last CFD session, they have upped the value of AI integration into the platform. This was demonstrated by Julian Petersohn and his teammates as they walked us through the powerful capabilities of the platform. Julian is a previous guest on the TechArena podcast, and always delivers a lively demo, this time playing the role of a hacker injecting a Java exploit into a cloud server environment. He quickly obtained root control of a Kubernetes container and started to spread control within the environment. Because this system resides in AWS, Julian was able to gain system identity information, seeing that the sys admin had left access open on this particular system - unfortunately an all-too-common occurrence. Julian explained that attackers who now have this control could use the compute capacity for their own purposes for free, sell access, or utilize compute cycles for crypto mining… all at the expense of the company charged for the service. He chose a crypto workload and was off making money.
Enter Forti-CNAPP, or cloud native application protection platform. Julian ceded the floor to his Forti-teammates who walked us through the paces of the solution to this crypto hacker. Forti-CNAPP constantly scans cloud activity, configurations, agentless scans, agent scans, and code itself, looking for anomalies in the data. The team walked us through a step-by-step process where Forti-CNAPP identified the anomaly on the Kubernetes cluster and pulled up the exact code Julian ran including the crypto miner. An alert was issued for engagement for cloud security, as well as network security. As we progressed into action, the team showed how the solution taps an artificial neural network to identify specific code blocks that were threats.
What’s the TechArena take? I’ve always been impressed with Fortinet, dating back to my days in industry when Fortinet was an early mover in confidential computing. The continuous advancement of Fortinet solutions demonstrates their commitment to investment in innovation. Their solutions provide a flexible foundation for customers with a single platform with broad capabilities for modern SecOps requirements, and should be on a shortlist of every organization’s security solution evaluations.
With the cost of a single corporate security breach reaching $4.88 million, a 10% rise in just one year, and the total cost of cybercrime expected to scale to $10.5 trillion globally by 2030, it’s no surprise that security remains IT executives’ number one priority. AI is opening the door to more sophisticated attacks by a broader range of bad actors, and anyone – from a guy living in his parents' basement to a nation state – can utilize this nefarious technology to annoy, disrupt, and steal from organizations and individuals. Any discussion on cloud is not complete without looking into the latest in cloud security solutions, and luckily for CFD22 delegates, Fortinet was on hand to give us a comprehensive update.
Fortinet is a leader in security solution delivery, with a broad suite of products in the marketplace for cloud-to-edge protection. The team at CFD22 walked us through the Fortinet Security portfolio with stress on active threat detection, a key capability that automatically detects early signs of attacks, combines multiple low-severity signals into one priority alert, and simplifies SecOps overhead with simplified alert communications and enhanced recommendations for action. The advancement of the comprehensive platform struck a common theme from what we’ve seen at the event – integration of advanced analytics and AI to improve cloud management of all types.
How does Fortinet’s solution work? They’ve developed something called Polygraph technology that ingests data from the environment with or without agents, analyzes data based on your cloud topology, and drives action. This works across network, platform, and application security, providing a broad scope of service delivery under one hood.
They’ve delivered this with a heritage of technology innovation, with over 1,000 patents in their portfolio. They’ve built the FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services platform that is analyzing trillions of events across the globe to continuously update threat detection for their >800,000 lifetime customers. Who does Fortinet work with? Over 300 partners to ensure seamless operation across public cloud services and private cloud stacks. This impressive solution has led Fortinet to be listed in a stunning 10 Gartner Magic Quadrants across security use cases.
It's notable that, since I heard from Fortinet at their last CFD session, they have upped the value of AI integration into the platform. This was demonstrated by Julian Petersohn and his teammates as they walked us through the powerful capabilities of the platform. Julian is a previous guest on the TechArena podcast, and always delivers a lively demo, this time playing the role of a hacker injecting a Java exploit into a cloud server environment. He quickly obtained root control of a Kubernetes container and started to spread control within the environment. Because this system resides in AWS, Julian was able to gain system identity information, seeing that the sys admin had left access open on this particular system - unfortunately an all-too-common occurrence. Julian explained that attackers who now have this control could use the compute capacity for their own purposes for free, sell access, or utilize compute cycles for crypto mining… all at the expense of the company charged for the service. He chose a crypto workload and was off making money.
Enter Forti-CNAPP, or cloud native application protection platform. Julian ceded the floor to his Forti-teammates who walked us through the paces of the solution to this crypto hacker. Forti-CNAPP constantly scans cloud activity, configurations, agentless scans, agent scans, and code itself, looking for anomalies in the data. The team walked us through a step-by-step process where Forti-CNAPP identified the anomaly on the Kubernetes cluster and pulled up the exact code Julian ran including the crypto miner. An alert was issued for engagement for cloud security, as well as network security. As we progressed into action, the team showed how the solution taps an artificial neural network to identify specific code blocks that were threats.
What’s the TechArena take? I’ve always been impressed with Fortinet, dating back to my days in industry when Fortinet was an early mover in confidential computing. The continuous advancement of Fortinet solutions demonstrates their commitment to investment in innovation. Their solutions provide a flexible foundation for customers with a single platform with broad capabilities for modern SecOps requirements, and should be on a shortlist of every organization’s security solution evaluations.
