Aerohive eyes small firms with APs, cloud-based management software

Cisco notes the rising cost of data breaches in annual report

Over one-third of organizations that experienced a data breach in 2016 sustained major losses of revenue, customers and opportunity as cybercriminals increased their focus on exploiting gaps found in companies' security frameworks.

The "Cisco 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report," released this week, found that companies affected by data breaches not only lose money, but their reputations as well.

Hackers are seizing the opportunity to penetrate holes created by the number of security products deployed by enterprises, the Cisco report said. Sixty-five percent of organizations use from six to 50 security products, a patchwork that can leave a company vulnerable to malware and other attacks.

As a result, Cisco said the survey indicates criminals in 2016 went back to the basics: using adware and email spam to penetrate corporate environments -- the latter at levels not seen since 2010.

Data from Cisco security products indicates that as much as 65% of emails are spam, with 8% to 10% containing malicious content. Botnets are driving an increase in spam volumes.

"One of our key metrics highlighted in the 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report is the 'time to detection' -- the time it takes to find and mitigate against malicious activity. [But] a new metric -- the 'time to evolve' -- looked at how quickly threat actors changed their attacks to mask their identity," said David Ulevitch, Cisco's vice president of security business, in a statement.

The report, the 10th annual, surveyed nearly 3,000 CSOs and other execs from companies in 13 countries.

Arista release attempts to improve cloud security

Arista Networks beefed up its R-series leaf and spine switches with its Danz traffic analysis software to give customers additional visibility into network performance. The new capabilities, available later this quarter, will let cloud providers and other customers keep better tabs on 25 GbE and 100 GbE networks.

Danz uses a combination of Arista's CloudVision telemetry capabilities and packet capture to monitor and aggregate traffic. It supports microburst detection and virtual output queue architecture as well as GUI, API and CLI interfaces for management.

"The security and availability needs of today's cloud networks require visibility architectures that match their speed and scale. Danz 2017 is the visibility architecture that can scale to thousands of access points and hundreds of terabits of bandwidth," said Hugh Holbrook, Arista's vice president of software engineering, in a statement.

Arista's R series switches scale from 1 to 115 Tbps with densities of up to 432 ports of 100 GbE and 1152 ports of 25 GbE.