Good Morning:

I was at dinner over the weekend with a few buddies of mine, and one of my friends asked (again) which AV package is best for him. It seems a few of my friends know I do security stuff and inevitably that means when they do something stupid, I get the call.

You can be this guy… Seriously…This guy’s wife contracted one of the various Facebook viruses about a month ago and his machine still wasn’t working correctly. Right, it was slow and sluggish and just didn’t seem like it used to be. I delivered the bad news that he needed to rebuild the machine. But then we got talking about the attack vectors and how the bad guys do their evil bidding, and the entire group was spellbound.

Then it occurred to me: security folks could be the most interesting guy (gal) in the room at any given time. Like that dude in the Tecate beer ads. Being a geek – especially with security cred – could be used to pick up chicks and become the life of the party. Of course, the picking up chicks part isn’t too interesting to me, but I know lots of younger folks with skillz that are definitely interested in those mating rituals young people or divorcees partake in.

Basically, like every other kind of successful pick-up artist, it’s about telling compelling (and funny) stories. At least that’s what I’ve heard. You have to establish common ground and build upon that. Social media attacks are a good place to start. Everyone (that you’d be interested in anyway) uses some kind of social media, so start by telling stories of how spooky and dangerous it is. How they can be owned and their private data distributed all over China and Eastern Europe.

And of course, you ride in on your white horse to save the day with your l33t hacker skillz. Then you go for the kill by telling compelling stories about your day job. Like finding pr0n on the computer of the CEO (and having to discreetly clean it off). Or any of the million other stupid things people in your company do, which is actually funny if you weren’t the one with the pooper scooper expected to clean it up.

You don’t break confidences, but we are security people. We can tell anecdotes with the best of them. Like AndyITGuy, who shares a few humorous ones in this post. And those are probably the worst stories I’ve heard from Andy. But he’s a family guy and not going to tell his “good” stories on the blog.

Now to be clear (and to make sure I don’t sleep in the dog house for the rest of the week), I’m making this stuff up. I haven’t tried this approach, nor did I have any kind of rap when I was on the prowl like 17 years ago.

But maybe this will work for you, Mr. (or Ms.) L33t Young Hacker trying to find a partner or at least a warm place to hang for a night or three. Or you could go back to your spot on the wall and do like pretty much every generation of hacker that’s come before you. P!nk pretty much summed that up (video)…

– Mike

Photo credit: “Tecate Ad” covered by psfk.com

Incite 4 U
I’m not one to really toot my own horn, but I’m constantly amazed at the amount and depth of the research we are publishing (and giving away) on the Securosis blog. Right now we have 3-4 different content series emerging (DB Quant, Pragmatic Data Security, Network Security Fundamentals, Low Hanging Fruit, etc.), resulting in 3-4 high quality posts hitting the blog every single day. You don’t get that from your big research shops with dozens of analysts.

Part of this is the model and a bigger part is focusing on doing the right thing. We believe the paywall should be on the endangered species list, and we are putting our money where our mouths are. If you do not read the full blog feed you are missing out.

Prognosis for PCI in 2010: Stagnation… – Just so I can get my periodic shout-out to Shimmy’s new shop, let me point to a post on his corporate blog (BTW, who the hell decided to name it security.exe?) about some comments relative to what we’ll see in PCI-land for 2010. Basically nothing, which is great news because we all know most of the world isn’t close to being PCI compliant. So let’s give them another year to get it done, no? Oh yeah, I heard the bad guys are taking a year off. No, not really. I’m sure all the 12 requirements are well positioned to deal with threats like APT and even new fangled web application attacks. Uh-huh. I understand the need to let the world catch up, but remember that PCI (and every other regulation) is a backward looking indicator. It does not reflect what kinds of attacks are currently being launched your way, much less what’s coming next. – MR

This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Cloud – One of the things that annoys me slightly when people start bringing up cloud security is the tendency to reinforce the same old security ideas and models we’ve been using for decades, as opposed to, you know, innovating. Scott Lupfer offers some clear, basic cloud security advice, but he sticks with classic security terminology, when it’s really the business audience that needs to be educated. Back when I wrote my short post on evaluating cloud risks I very purposely avoided using the CIA mantra so I could better provide context for the non-security audience, as opposed to educating them on our fundamentals. With the cloud transition we have an opportunity to bake in security in ways we missed with the web transition, but we can’t be educating people about CIA or Bell La Padula – RM

Cisco milking the MARS cash cow? – Larry Walsh posted a bit on Cisco MARS Partners getting the ‘roving eye’, with nervous VARs and customers shopping around (or at the very least kicking some tires) of other SIEM and Log Management solutions. I have had some conversations with customers in regard to switching platforms, which support Larry’s premise, but there is far more speculation about Cisco investing in another vendor to prop up their aging SIEM product. And more still about Cisco’s lack of commitment to security altogether. Are either of those rumors true? No idea, but either premise makes sense given the way this is being handled. Reducing investment and letting a product slowly die while milking an entrenched customer base is a proven cash flow strategy. CA did it successfully for better than a decade. This is one of the themes I am interested in following up on at RSA. – AL

How long before Oracle gets into Network Security? – So Oracle completes the Sun deal, and now they are in the hardware business for real. The point of this cnet article is that Oracle’s competitors are not SAP and Sybase anymore, but rather HP and IBM. It also means Oracle needs to keep buying hardware products to build up a broad and competitive offering. They’ve got the servers and the storage, but they have nothing for network or security, for that matter. HP has some (security devices in their ProCurve line), IBM has killed the network security stuff a few times (not really, but where is ISS again?), and Oracle needs some to really be considered a broad Big IT provider. So investment bankers, listen up – now you can go to Oracle City and try to sell that crappy UTM company everyone else passed on. But seriously, Oracle has no issue writing billion-dollar checks, and over the long run that’s a good thing for folks in the security industry. – MR

Monitor Servers too – Hopefully you’ve been following the Network Security Fundamentals series I’ve been posting over the past week. One of the points I made is to Monitor Everything and that really focused on the network layer. Yet server (and device) change detection is also a key data source for figuring out when you are attacked. This article from Mike Chapple on SearchMidMarketSecurity does a good job of highlighting the key points of host integrity monitoring (registration required). It covers topics such as selecting a product, developing a baseline, and tuning performance. The piece is pretty high level, but it’s a good overview. – MR

Brain Science – I’ve found the relatively recent “security is psychology” trend to be pretty amusing. Anyone with any background in physical security learned this lesson a long time ago. When I was running security for concerts and football games you learn really fast that the only advantage your crew of 250 has over 53,000 drunk fans is your ability to fool them into thinking you have the advantage. And the term “magical thinking” has roots in the scientific skeptical community whom uses it to describe our gullibility for things like worthless supplements (Airborne, ginko, and anything “homeopathic”). As I like to say, people are people, and don’t ever expect human behavior to change. Thus I enjoy reading posts like Lang’s compilation over at Financial Cryptography, but instead of fighting the masses I think we will be better served by understanding why people act the way they do, and adjusting our strategies to take advantage of it. – RM

That analysis doesn’t happen by itself… – Cutaway makes a good point in this post about the analysis of log files relative to incident response. He points out that without a well worn and practiced IR plan, you will be hosed. That key, and highlighted in the P-CSO relative to containing the damage when you are attacked. Cutaway points out that just to wade through firewall logs after an attack can take weeks without significant automation and an familiar process. And to be clear, you don’t have weeks when you are being attacked. – MR

It’s not the answer, it’s the discussion… – The cnet article Which is more secure, Mac or PC make me ask again: Why is this a question we are asking? The answer is totally irrelevant. First, because no one is going to choose a Mac over a PC because of their relative security. Second, even if it is more secure today, who knows what exploits will show up tomorrow? But I do love this conversation. I love it because we are actually discussing the merits of computer platform security, in the open, on a web site read by average computer users. That’s a good thing! And I love it because there are some great quotes from security practitioners and researchers. I especially enjoyed Chris Wysopal’s comment. Check it out! – AL