In 2014, Keren Elazari, an expert Cyber Security Researcher, started speaking to us via her TED talk about how hackers are like the internet’s immune system. She has led the way in this concept and explained how they help and hurt, yet ultimately lead to a healthier, stronger network.
Assisting our immune system like inoculations, hackers give us a taste of a potentially larger problem and help us overcome the illness before it becomes unmanageable.
Venafi recently released a product called Venafi TrustNet. It was released to help monitor and measure the healthiness of the internet, supporting encrypted traffic and authentication. Certificate misuse is at an all-time high. As we use more x.509 certificates to encrypt communications and authentication entities, bad guys will only become more interested.
We’ve blindly trusted certificates, because we’ve lacked an immune system for the cyber realm to know what’s trusted or not. Now Venafi provides a way through TrustNet to establish a baseline of normal certificate use online and alert affected organizations if that baseline is broken, indicating potential certificate misuse. TrustNet allows immediate remediation through blacklisting. Then, as part of the Venafi Trust Protection Platform, organizations can use TrustAuthority to replace and revoke untrusted certificates and TrustForce to automatically complete the certificate and key lifecycle.
If you own a certificate that is being misused, revoke it. If someone is misusing a certificate, blacklist it. Just like Keren Elazari has mentioned, hackers are like our immune system by demonstrating illness. Venafi is the Immune System for the Internet™ that allows us to rapidly detect what shouldn’t be trusted and respond quickly. Hackers have repeatedly demonstrated that we have to do something right now to fix trust online, which is near the breaking point.
What are your thoughts about the Immune System for the Internet?