Virsec, the industry leader in application-aware workload protection, announced that regional companies emerging out of the pandemic are accelerating their investments into digital transformation. They are increasingly concerned about the everyday announcements of cybersecurity compromises at large and medium enterprises, global and regional.

As organizations face growing sophistication of cyberattacks, the demand for effective solutions is skyrocketing. Advanced attack techniques, that execute at runtime in the memory layer, have become mainstream and companies are struggling to combat them.

Virsec Security Platform delivers a powerful solution for container workload protection with runtime visibility and zero-dwell-time defense throughout running container images, including binaries, libraries, interpreted code, and memory.

“It is imperative we change the way we think about the protection of our assets and infrastructure. Conventional security tools, like blacklisting models, were designed to address yesterday’s challenges, and we can’t continue to accept these offerings as the ideal option to mitigate advanced threat scenarios,” said Bobby Gupta, Senior Vice President and Managing Director International, Virsec.

With more than 50 patents, Virsec provides the first and only application-aware workload protection platform that incorporates System Integrity Assurance, Application Control and Memory Protection into a single solution. Virsec delivers in-depth visibility across the entire workload and detects and blocks known and unknown threats that remain concealed by heuristic and endpoint security solutions.

“Security has entered a third wave, driven by the skyrocketing success of more damaging and sophisticated attacks across cloud workloads and virtual server infrastructure,” says Jim Routh, Chief Security Advisor and Board Participant at Virsec. “It is time for security to be re-evaluated at its deepest levels and approached holistically by integrating security into IT and application infrastructure in runtime across a broad range of IT environments and application languages. Virsec has pioneered this approach with its breakthrough platform.”

The Virsec solution maps the expected performance of each application on a workload and protects the memory those applications use to execute. Virsec ensures that the components of those applications are correct and unmodified before they are allowed to execute, and any deviation from the norm is treated as a threat.

Virsec also reported significant momentum in the first half of 2021 with strong revenue growth, strategic customer validation and testing, and industry acceptance of its non-traditional approach to reducing cyber threats.

Virsec’s growth correlates with increasing board-level concerns about the financial, safety, and intellectual property impacts of evolving threat scenarios and the subsequent need to have deeper visibility into application workloads at runtime.

By: PG Menon, Director of Marketing at Infoblox

Cloud-native technologies transform businesses at a global scale

Companies like Amazon and Netflix leveraged cloud technologies to go from being mail order companies to some of the world’s largest consumer on-demand businesses. Cloud-native technologies empowered them to make this transition by providing increased agility and productivity, improved scalability and reliability, and lower costs.

In a borderless enterprise identity is the new perimeter

DNS, DHCP and IP address management collectively automates network connectivity and provides visibility into network connected devices. They enable a foundational layer of visibility and security for your network. Network identity has long been used as a means for authentication and authorization because it ensures you are who you say you are, and, only allows you to do what you are permitted to do no matter where you are located and or your access method.

Identity now includes human users, devices and applications

In transitioning to cloud, the different types of cloud-native applications developed and deployed by organizations such as microservices, web applications or bots are inherently different than human identities and require additional oversight. For example, in operation, Kubernetes requires access to registries on the internet to download various containerized micro-services. There may be hundreds or even thousands of identities accessing resources across an enterprise network on a regular basis, each with its own unique set of circumstances.

Volume and variety of corporate identities are plaguing enterprise IT

Per IDC, it is not uncommon for applications to use their own LDAP directories. Managing those directories and controlling risk is a problem. Enterprise IT simply doesn’t have the level of visibility required to truly understand which identities are performing what actions on their critical resources across multiple and vastly different cloud operating models. Moreover, the identity teams don’t have the time or expertise to keep up with the proliferation of privileges, roles, resources and services across multiple cloud platforms.

ML and AI has transformed identity management

Identity lies in the core of security. Traditional identity mechanisms don’t apply to modern and often hybrid workloads. Runtime authorization decisions are now made within, applications. One integrated platform instead of several discrete Identity and Access Management solutions consumed in a SaaS-delivered manner is the answer. In addition, an ML/AI-driven approach that automates the identity management processes can improve operational efficiencies. AI and ML technologies continuously monitor access relationships and patterns for every cloud resource and aligns with zero trust network access (ZTNA) model for the enterprise.

Peer-to-peer fintech partnering with global businesses to offer bitcoin as payment option

Paxful, the leading global peer-to-peer fintech, today announced Paxful Pay, an e-commerce solution that allows businesses worldwide to receive bitcoin. The service is available today and allows customers to pay with almost 400 payment methods – exchanging into bitcoin that is sent to the merchant’s digital wallet. Businesses can register now to add Paxful Pay as a purchase option to their online checkout process.

Through Paxful Pay, businesses have the ability to manage their earnings and convert bitcoin into their local currency on the Paxful Marketplace using almost 400 payment methods. Merchants will also have control over the configuration of the solution on their Paxful Merchant Dashboard and can track every transaction. The company expects to expand to other digital currencies and also plans to introduce automatic conversion into stablecoins such as Tether (USDT). Further down the line, Paxful Pay will allow merchants to automatically convert bitcoin into their local currency within their bank account.

Consumers can expect the typical e-commerce flow — but will now have the option of selecting Paxful Pay as a payment method. This will prompt users to create a new profile or login as an existing Paxful user. Users can then use almost 400 payment methods to complete their purchase. With their Paxful login, users can also take advantage of Paxful’s other products such as Paxful Marketplace and Paxful Wallet.

Ray Youssef, CEO and co-founder of Paxful, said: “In many regions across the globe, we see people use bitcoin as a financial tool for purchasing goods and services. Bitcoin has several different use cases that we’ve only begun to leverage and e-commerce is a great example. At Paxful, it’s imperative that we give users and businesses around the world the opportunity to take advantage of the power of bitcoin to gain financial freedom.”

Artur Schaback, COO and co-founder of Paxful, said: “We’re thrilled to bring Paxful Pay to our global community. There is a clear need to offer local options for bitcoin and this product is a culmination of our efforts to deliver on that demand. By offering users the ability to complete purchases using almost 400 payment methods, they will now have an even stronger financial solution at their fingertips. We cannot wait to expand this offering to encompass as many merchants as possible.”

Currently, Paxful has over a hundred merchants on Paxful Pay. As the company ramps up the service, it expects to onboard a select number of new merchants in the coming weeks. From there, Paxful Pay will expand more generally.

Founded in 2015 and completely bootstrapped since then, Paxful is headquartered in New York with offices in Estonia, the Philippines and Russia. The team has doubled in size over the last 12 months, growing to over 400 people.