Thank you for following along with our security themed holiday calendar. Today, we summarize the last half of the calendar, in case you missed some days.

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.21.0! The focus of this new version has been unification. Across our websites and UI, you should see that it’s a much more modern and unified experience, whether you’re reading this blog post on cfengine.com, browsing the new documentation site, looking for modules on the CFEngine Build website, or adding input to modules within Build in Mission Portal.

“Security defense is exciting, because you’re always trying to stay ahead of the bad guys,” says Tracy T., senior staff detection engineer at ServiceNow. Who are these bad guys? They could be malware or hackers who try to threaten the security of employee data or the company network—or anything in between. Detection engineering plays a major role in keeping a company safe, especially amid changing tool capabilities and detection methods.

Microservices are loosely coupled software that provides flexibility and scalability to a cloud environment. However, securing this open architecture from vulnerabilities and malicious actors can be challenging without a service mesh. This blog post will demonstrate how you can create an Istio and Calico integration to establish a service mesh that will manipulate HTTP traffic in the application layer.

An Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is a network security and threat prevention tool. Its goal is to create a proactive approach to cybersecurity, making it possible to identify potential threats and respond quickly. IPS can inspect network traffic, detect malware and prevent exploits. IPS is used to identify malicious activity, log detected threats, report detected threats, and take precautions to prevent threats from harming users.

I’m excited to announce the general availability of the SUSE NeuVector container security platform version 5.1. With the 5.1 release, customers will benefit from more efficient and powerful vulnerability scanning and admission controls across multiple clusters through centralized enterprise scanning, auto-scaling scanners and support for the new Kubernetes (1.25+) pod security admission (PSA) standard. The release also supports the Cilium network plug-in.

Jason Chan is one of the world’s foremost cybersecurity authorities and we’re extremely proud to have him as a member of the Torq Advisory Board. He’s a pivotal figure in driving adoption of security automation best practices at many companies, including Netflix, where he led the information security organization.