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Question everything, including the data

Mike Rothman April 23, 2013 1 Comment

The good news about being in security is that you don’t have to look too far for criticism of your work. Most of the time it’s constructive criticism, so overall interaction with the security community makes your work markedly better. Which is why we live by the Totally Transparent Research process. It makes our work better. But when our pals at Verizon clogged up my Twitter timeline this morning with their annual DBIR masterpiece (you can also check out our guidance on the DBIR), they dragged my attention back to a post by Jericho from Attrition: “Threat Intelligence”, not always that intelligent, prompted by Symantec’s most recent security trends report. Jericho summed up the value of security trend reports as only he can, and explained why folks tend not to challenge them often. The reason? Security companies, professionals, and journalists are complacent. They are happy to get the numbers that help them. For some, it sells copy. For others, it gets security budget. Since it helps them, their motivation to question or challenge the data goes away. They never realize that their “threat intelligence” source is stale and serving up bad data. It’s not in the machine’s best interest to question the data. That’s why most folks (besides, me I guess) don’t poke at the vendor-sponsored survey data or other similar nonsense put forth as gospel in the security business. Anything that helps sell security is good, right? Well, no. Decisions based on faulty data tend to be faulty decisions. So Jericho presents a number of inconsistencies between Symantec’s vulnerability data and the OSVDB dataset he contributes to. It’s pretty compelling stuff. But we shouldn’t minimize either the effort involved in building these reports or the value they do provide. There is a lot of value in these threat and data breach reports, if the data is reasonably accurate. We’re security people. We question everything, so it’s reasonable to question the data you use to make the case for your existence. Photo credit: “Question” originally uploaded by ACU Library Share:

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Teaching Updated Cloud Security Class at Black Hat USA

Rich April 23, 2013 No Comments

This summer James Arlen and I are teaching the recently updated cloud security class we developed for the Cloud Security Alliance (CCSK Plus). We are pretty excited to teach this at Black Hat, and will be bringing a few extra tricks to handle the more advanced audience we expect. The class runs two days and covers a huge amount of material. The first day is mostly lecture, covering: Introduction to cloud computing and cloud architectures. Securing cloud infrastructure (public and private). Governing and managing risk in cloud computing (yep, we have to cover compliance, but we also include incident response). Securing cloud data. Application security and identity management for cloud. Selecting and managing cloud providers. This gives you everything you need to take the CCSK test if you want. The second day is where the real fun starts – we spend pretty much the entire time in labs. Including: Assessing cloud risk. This is a tabletop risk management exercise focused on practical scenarios. Launching and securing public cloud instances. You’ll learn the ins and outs of Amazon EC2 as you launch and secure your first instance. This includes a deep dive into security groups, picking AMIs, and using initialization scripts to auto-update and configure instances. Encrypting cloud data. We encrypt a storage volume using dm-crypt and dig into different key management scenarios and encryption options. We may have some new demos here of products just hitting the market. Building secure cloud applications. We expand on what we have created to build a multi-tier secure application, focusing on proper use of hypersegregation by splitting application components. Federated identity and using IAM to harden the management plane. We add a little OpenID to our application. Up to this point everything builds out into a complete stack and all the exercises tie together. We also work with AWS IAM and how to use different kinds of credentials and templates to segregate things at the management plane. Securing a private cloud. Using your laptops and our virtual machines we build a running OpenStack cloud in the classroom and run through the security essentials. But here is the trick for Black Hat. Aside from teaching a very recently updated version of the class, we are preparing for a more technical audience. We will be bringing more advanced exercise options (on top of the basics so people with less experience can still get something out of the class), and even a demo attack tool PoC. We will feel the audience out but we already have some advanced (self-guided) exercises together. If you’re interested you can sign up now. Also, although this isn’t an instructor class, anyone who takes this (and contacts us ahead of time) will be eligible to complete additional, web-based instructor training free of charge after Black Hat. We aren’t a training organization, and we care more about getting more teachers out there than keeping it all to ourselves. Hope to see you in Vegas! Share:

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