Research

We’re happy to post the next SecurosisTV episode, in which yours truly goes through the Low Hanging Fruit of Endpoint Security. This is a pretty high-level view of the 7 different tactics (discussed in much more detail in the post), intended to give you a quick (6 minute) perspective on how to improve endpoint security posture with minimal effort. Direct Link: http://blip.tv/file/3281010 See it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIwjc5jwN8 Yes, we know embedding a video is not NoScript friendly, so for each video we will also include a direct link to the page on blip.tv and on YouTube. We just figure most of you are as lazy as we are, and will appreciate not having to leave our site. We’re also learning a lot about video production with each episode we do. Any comments you have on the video would be much appreciated. Whether it’s valuable, what we can do to improve the quality (besides getting new talent), and any other feedback you may have. Share:

As I’ve been digesting all I saw and heard last week at the RSA show, the major topic of wireless security re-emerged with a vengeance. To be honest, wireless security had kind of fallen off my radar for a while. Between most of the independent folks being acquired (both on the wireless security and wireless infrastructure sides) and lots of other shiny objects, there just wasn’t that much to worry about. We all know retailers remained worried (thanks, Uncle TJX!) and we saw lots of folks looking to segregate guest access from their branch networks when offering wireless to customers or guests. But WEP was dead and buried (right?) and WPA2 seemed reasonably stable. What was left to worry about? As with everything else, at some point folks realized that managing all these overlay networks and maintaining security is a pain in the butt. So the vendors inevitably get around to collapsing the networks and providing better management – which is what we saw at RSA. Secure Wireless Cisco puffed its chest out a bit and announced its Security Without Borders strategy, which sounds like someone over there overdosed on some Jack Welch books (remember borderlessness?). Basically they are finally integrating their disparate security devices, pushing the IronPort and ASA boxes to talk to each other, and adding some stuff to the TrustSec architecture. In concept, being able to enable business users to access information from any device and any location with a high degree of ease and security sounds great. But the devil is in the details, which makes this feels a lot like the “self-defending network.” Great idea, not so hot on delivery. So if you have Cisco everywhere and can be patient, the pieces are there. But if you work in a heterogeneous world or have problems today, then this is more slideware from Cisco. Wireless Security On the other side of the coin, you have the UTM vendors expanding from their adjacent markets. Both Fortinet and Astaro made similar announcements about entering the wireless infrastructure market. Given existing strength in the retail market, it makes sense for UTM vendors to introduce thin access points, moving management intelligence to (you guessed it) their UTM gateways. Introducing and managing wireless security policy from an enterprise perspective is a no-brainer (rogue access points die die die), though there isn’t much new here. The wireless infrastructure folks have been doing this for a while (at a cost, of course). The real barrier to success here isn’t technology, it’s politics. Most network folks like to buy gear from network companies, so will it be the network team or the security team defining the next wave of wireless infrastructure roll-out? Who Wins? My bet is on the network team, which means “secure wireless” will prevail eventually. I suspect everyone understands security must be a fundamental part of networks, data centers, endpoints, and applications, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. Rugged or not. This provides an opening for companies like Fortinet and Astaro. But to be clear, they have to understand they are selling to different customers, where they have very little history or credibility. And since the security market still consists mostly of lemmings, I suspect you’ll see a bunch more wireless security activity over the next few months as competitors look to catch up with Cisco’s slideware. Share:

To stir the pot a bit before the RSA Conference, I did a FireStarter wondering out loud if social media would ever replace big industry conferences. Between the comments and my experiences last week, I’d say no. Though I can say social media provides the opportunity to make business acquaintances into friends and let loudmouths like Rich, Adrian and myself make a living having on an opinion (often 3 or 4 between us). So I figured this week, I’d do a Top 10 list of things I can’t do on Twitter, which will keep me going to the RSA Conference as long as they keep letting me in. This is your life – Where else can I see 3 CEOs who fired me in one room (the AGC conference)? Thankfully I left my ice pick in the hotel room that morning. Everybody knows your name – Walk into the W Hotel after 9pm, and if you’ve been in the business more than a week, odds are you’ll see plenty of people you know. Trend spotting – As we expected, there was lots of APT puffery at the show, but I also saw lots of activity on wireless security – that was mildly surprising. And group conversations provided additional unexpected perspectives. Can’t do that on Twitter. Evasive maneuvers – To save some coin, I don’t stay in the fancy hotels. But that means you have to run the panhandler gauntlet between the parties and the hotel. I was a bit out of practice, but escaped largely unscathed. Rennaissance security folks – It seems lots of security folks are pretty adept at some useful skills. Like procuring entire bottles of top shelf liquor at parties. Yes, very useful indeed. Seeing the sights – I know Shimmy doesn’t like booth babes, but that’s his problem. I thought I took a wrong turn when I got to the Barracuda party and ended up at the Gold Club, though I was happy I had a stack of $1s in my pocket. Making new friends – The fine folks at SafeNet held a book signing for The Pragmatic CSO at the show. I got to meet lots of folks and they even got to take home copies. Can’t do that on Twitter either. Splinter conferences – Given the centralization of people that go to RSA, a lot of alternative gatherings happen during RSA week. Whether it’s BSides, Cloud Security Alliance, Metricon, AGC, or others, most folks have alternatives to RSA Conference panel staples. Recovery Breakfast – Once again, we held our Disaster Recovery Breakfast and it was the place to be on Thursday morning. A who’s who of security royalty passed through to enjoy the coffee, bloody mary’s, and hot tasty breakfast. Thanks to Threatpost for co-sponsoring with us. Elfin underwear – Where else can your business partner pull down his pants in front of 500 people and not get put in the slammer? That’s right, RSA. Check it out – it was really funny. So in a nutshell, from an educational standpoint I’m not sure spending a week at the RSA Conference makes sense for most practitioners. But from a networking and fun perspective, it remains the best week of the year. And thankfully I have 12 months to dry out and rest my liver for next year’s show. – Mike Photo credit: “Frank Chu Bsides SF” originally uploaded by my pal St0rmz Incite 4 U Ah, digging out from under the RSA mayhem is always fun. There was lots to see, many meaningless announcements, and plenty of shiny objects. Here is a little smattering of stuff that happened at the show, as well as a few goodies not there. AP(ressure)T Explained – As Rich pointed out, APT was in full swing last week at RSA and Richard Bejtlich has been calling out folks with extreme malice for this kind of behavior – which we all think is awesome. But to really understand the idiocy, you need to relate it to something you can understand. Which is why I absolutely loved Richard’s analogy of how martial arts folks dealt with a new technique based on pressure points. Read this a post a few times and it will click. Folks either jump on the bandwagon or say the bandwagon is stupid. Not many realize something new and novel is happening and act accordingly. – MR Patch Tuesday, Exploit Monday – You have to feel for the guys in the Microsoft security center. They line up their latest patch set, and some bad guys blow it by attacking unpatched vulnerabilities before Microsoft can include them in the latest release. I’m a big fan of the Patch Tuesday cycle, but that means anything released on “Exploit Wednesday” or even close to Patch Tuesday potentially has a month to run before Microsoft can fix it. MS is pretty good at releasing out of band patches if something is being widely exploited, and they’re the ones providing the warning, but it makes me long for the days when an 0day was so rare as to be nearly mythical. This latest attack hits IE 6 and 7 on various platforms, and you can mitigate with a content filtering gateway or an alternative browser, or by following some suggestions in the linked article (setting IE security zone settings to High). – RM Creating the Insecurity Index – If we know that your A/V and anti-malware only catch 20% of malicious code, or your firewall only blocks 20%, and your WAF only blocks 60% of application flaws, and so on, can we create some meaningful metrics on application security FAIL? Kind of a Mean Time Between Failure analysis for IT? I got to thinking about this when talking to Kelly Jackson Higgins at RSA about her post on Dark Reading regarding application testing, which found that 60% of applications they tested remained vulnerable. To me this is not a surprise at all, given that most adopt a security model to surround applications with add-on services and appliances to protect the application from the nasty attackers and viruses rather than fix the code itself. For most large organizations the amount of work necessary to fix

On the eve of perhaps the biggest conference we security folks have (RSA Conference), we wanted to bait the echo chamber a bit, and wonder what the future of conferences is – especially given the amount and depth of information that is available via blogs and social media. Interestingly enough, we don’t necessarily have a consistent opinion here, but we want to hear what the community has to say. Hypothesis: Security conferences continue to decrease in importance because the events don’t really help customers do their jobs any better. The Bad and the Ugly Weak sessions: In general, most sessions at any big conference are weak. Either poor content, poor speaking skills, or the double whammy of both, make most sessions intolerable – unless you dig making fun of the speaker on Twitter throughout the entire session. Vendor Shiny Objects: The expo floors have degraded to a combination of booth babes and bandwagon-jumping exhibitors who are just trying to capitalize on whatever the buzzword or attack du jour happens to be. The Good Relationship building: All the folks I talk to continue to value the networking and relationship building opportunities that can only be accomplished in a face to face environment. These shows provide an opportunity to compare notes and figure out if you are missing something. Personally, this is the #1 reason I go to RSA and Black Hat and other conferences. Trend watching: Clearly the “hallway track”, the show floor, and the conversations after hours provide guys like me with a good idea of what is hot and happening. Not necessarily what is working in the real world, but tracking trends is important too – especially for end users trying to make sure they aren’t losing too much ground to the bad guys. Getting out of the office: With the number of directions the typical practitioner is pulled when they’re setting at their desk, sometimes they need to get out to have a chance to focus. Going to a nice locale is only part of this, but also the ability to do a lot of research in a short time. Social Media Impact So the real question is: can you replicate the relationship building and trend-spotting aspects of great conferences via social media? If you Twitter, can you build relationships and stay in tune with what is happening out there? The answer is yes, but not entirely. Personally, interacting with folks via Twitter allows me to stay in touch much more frequently and interact on a less superficial level than grabbing a beer at the W during RSA. And via blogs, online media, and forums, focused end users can do the kind of research typically possible only at a big show in the past, with a level of objective commentary which was simply not available before. So overall, social media certainly has the basis to largely supplant conferences over the next few years. But as Rich pointed out during his review of this post, in a lot of cases social media can add impact to a conference. There is nothing like actually meeting someone you interact with through the ether, but the electronic interactions eliminates a lot of the “getting to know you” phase, because through social media you can familiarize yourself with the folks in your networks. And as Adrian mentioned, social media brings us back to an another advantage of attendance – conversations amongst small groups of folks, which gets lost in a crowd of 10,000 of your closest friends. Not So Fast Before we start shoveling the dirt on big security conferences, we need to look at the dark side of social media. Adrian actually calls it “anti-social media”, and he’s right. It seems vendors are working hard to screw up social media and make it basically an always-on trade show. Unfortunately, without the booth babes to make it tolerable. For example, many bloggers got hammered with LinkedIn spam in the now-infamous Rapid7 incident a few weeks ago. My Twitter stream is polluted by PR types basically just linking to press releases and other press coverage notes. I won’t friend work contacts on Facebook (for the most part) because it’s hard enough keeping up with all the folks from high school I don’t want to hear from. Unless folks figure out how to increase the signal to noise ratio, many of the social media networks will become as fun and as well attended as CSI. Yeah, I know that’s a low blow. Conference 2.0 So what should the organizers be doing to change this trend? Here are a couple ideas, which may or may not be interesting. At least they should get the conversation going. Get Small(er) Kill Keynotes (will you miss the hot air?) Community-driven content (like B-sides) More pragmatism and tactics, less pontificating in sessions The good news (for RSAC anyway) is that the show organizers recognize some of these issues and are working to address them. RSA specifically has been very welcoming to blogger types, and is experimenting with programs like the ESPP and Innovation Sandbox to add value. Over the past few years, there has also been a focus on improving the sessions through greater reviews and more oversight of presentation materials. This includes sending speaker scores from previous conferences to selection committee members in an attempt to eliminate crappy speakers from subsequent shows. But is it enough? What do you think? At some point will you bypass the big cons for the warm confines of social media? Share:

Rich, Mike, and Adrian keep pretty busy schedules at RSA each year, so we are likely to be quiet on the blog this week. If you happen to be at the show, here are the speaking sessions and other appearances we’ll be doing throughout the week. Hopefully you’ll come up and say “Hi.” Rich and Adrian don’t bite. Speaking Sessions STAR-106: Security Groundhog Day – Third Time’s a Charm – Mike and Rich (Tuesday, March 2 @ 1pm) EXP-108: Winnovation – Security Zen through Disruptive Innovation and Cloud Computing – Rich and Chris Hoff (Tuesday, March 2 @ 3:40pm) END-203: How to Expedite Patching in the Enterprise? A View from the Trenches – Rich (Wednesday, March 3 @ 10:40 AM) P2P-304A: Security Posture: Wading Through the Hype… – Mike (Thursday, March 4 @ 1pm) DAS-403: Securing Enterprise Databases – Adrian (Friday, March 5 @ 11:20am) Other Events America’s Growth Capital Conference: Mike will be roaming around the AGC conference for portions of Monday. The event is taking place at the Westin San Francisco on Market Street. You need an invite to this one. RSA Conference Experienced Security Professionals Program: All of us will be at this event (you need to have pre-registered) at the Moscone on Monday as well. Security Blogger Meet Up: Securosis will be at the 3rd annual Security Blogger Meet Up at the classified location. You need to have a blog and be pre-registered to get in. Securosis and Threatpost Disaster Recovery Breakfast: Once again this year Securosis will be hosting the Disaster Recovery Breakfast on Thursday, March 4 between 8 and 11. RSVP and enjoy a nice quiet breakfast with plenty of food, coffee, recovery items (aspirin & Tums), and even the hair of the dog for those of you not quite ready to sober up. PechaKucha (PK) Happy Hour: Rich will be presenting at the PK Happy Hour on Thursday, March 4 between 5 and 6:30 pm in the Crypto Commons. See if he can get through 20 slides in about 6 1/2 minutes. Fat chance, but Rich is going to try. Share:

I’m probably not supposed to do this, as I took the security marketer’s oath to get my first VP Marketing gig. But I’m going to pull the curtain back on some of the wacky stuff vendors do to sell their product/services. Today’s specific tactic is what I’ll dub retro buffoonery, which is when a vendor looks back in time, and states that they could have stopped attack X, Y and Z – if only their products were deployed before the attack. You see this stuff all the time. Whether it was TJX, Heartland, ZeuS, or now the APT, vendor after vendor builds a marketing program saying they could have stopped or detected the attack. They build very specific timelines and show how their product theoretically defended customers. Note I said ‘theoretically’, because I’ve yet to see a case where a vendor had an actual customer to say “I didn’t get hosed by [Attack X] because I was using [Product Y].” To illustrate my point, let’s take a look at McAfee’s recent post-mortem on Operation Aurora. Now I’m singling out McAfee here, but there is nothing personal. Every vendor does it. I’ve done it probably a hundred times. If you work for a vendor, you’ve done it too. Rees Johnson, the blogger, did his job and pieced together a somewhat plausible story about how a combination of McAfee products could have been assembled to defend against the Aurora attack. Basically, if you had all your traffic going through a SSL proxy, had reputation working on every single gateway seeing network traffic, had whitelisting on every single device running code, and a huge research arm that could tell you there was something going on – then you could have detected the attack. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like either an economically feasible or realistic user experience situation – but let’s not split hairs here. And we know plenty of folks were running McAfee, but they don’t seem to have any success stories of actual Aurora detection ahead of the fact to share. Now to be clear, retro buffoonery tells a good marketing story and allows sales people to make a compelling case to customers for a company’s technology. Even better, by referencing a real attack, it can create enough customer urgency to get a check written. Which is good because security sales reps have those monthly BMW payments to make. But please understand, this Tuesday Morning Quarterback exercise will not help you protect your environment any better for the next attack. In the 20 years I’ve been in this business, we have proven to be lousy at predicting the future. How many of you predicted that a 0-day attack against IE6 on XP would constitute 30+ huge and successful attacks over the past 3 months? Probably the same folks who predicted SQL Slammer, TJX-style wireless POS attacks, and Heartland-style network sniffers. Even better, there are always multiple vendors telling stories about how different classes of products stop these attacks. Yet the attacks still happen, so it always gets back to the same thing – in hindsight, you’re sure you could’ve caught the attack. In reality, not so much. Vendors hope we’ll forget that it’s more than just a signature or a product that actually protects us against these attacks. We also must remember process and people complete the picture. Maybe if you backed up the truck and implemented everything McAfee has to sell you, you could have stopped Aurora. But probably not, because most companies have at least one unsuspecting employee who would have clicked on the wrong thing from the wrong place, and given the attacker a foothold on your network. And remember what persistent means. These folks are targeting you, so they’ll find a way in, regardless of how many cents per share you contribute to the bottom line of your favorite security vendor. So sorry, Mr. Retro Buffoonery Tuesday Morning Quarterback Always Completing the Pass Because It’s Easy to See in the Rear View Mirror, I don’t buy it. There are too many other things that go wrong to believe a wacky marketing claim that any set of products would stop a determined, well-funded attacker specifically targeting your organization. But you’ll see plenty of this bravado at the RSA Conference next week. And hopefully you’ll do as I do, and just laugh. Share:

To end a fine day, let’s continue through the Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference 2010 and discuss something that has been plaguing most of us since we started in this business: security management. Security Management For the past 20 years, we’ve been buying technologies to implement security controls. Yet management of all this security tends to be considered only when things are horribly broken – and they are. What We Expect to See There are four areas of interest at the show relative to security management: Log Religion: Driven by our friends at the PCI Security Standards Council, the entire industry has gotten the need to aggregate log data and do some level of analysis. Thank you, Requirement 10! So at the show this year, we’ll find a log management infestation, with a new vendor poking out of every nook and cranny to espouse a new architecture, disruptive pricing, or some other eye candy. And yes, you do need to collect logs, so focus your efforts at the show on figuring out what is the best fit for your organization. Are you just collecting logs, or do you need to correlate and alert? What are your volume and scalability requirements? What kind of reporting do you need? What about integration with the rest of your infrastructure? The point here is not to make a decision but to establish a short list of 3-4 vendors to dig deeper into after the show. Platform Mentality: Since security management is supposed to make your life easier, you don’t need to be a genius to realize that having a management console for every device type in your network doesn’t make a lot of sense. So you’ll hear a lot about SIEM + Log Management + Configuration/Patch + Vulnerability + Network Flow = Nirvana. To be clear, management leverage is good. Getting it by adding even more complexity to your environment: not so much. So to the degree that you are ready to start integrating management disciplines, focus your discussions on migration. How do you get to the promised land? Which hopefully doesn’t involve a truckload of high-priced consultants to do the ‘customization’. Risk Mumbo Jumbo: Risk is likely to be a hot topic at RSA as well. The more mature security programs have figured out that ‘security’ means nothing to senior management, but C-level folks get ‘risk’. Unfortunately, there are no accepted mechanisms to define or quantify risk. So when a vendor starts talking about “risk scores” you should focus on the amount of effort to get a risk model set up and what’s required to keep it up to date. You can’t go down to Best Buy and get Risk Management in a box, so the question is how much effort you are willing to put in to show a graph – which may or may not reflect reality – to the CFO. Operational Efficiency: Finally, you’ll likely hear a lot about improving the operations of your environment. That was a major theme last year in the depths of the recession, but the issue hasn’t gone away. This plays into the themes around integration and platforms, but ultimately there will be a number of niche tools (like firewall policy managers) designed to make your operational teams more efficient, saving money. Depending on the size and/or maturity of your security program, some of these tools may yield value. But adding yet another widget isn’t a good thing unless you can redeploy resources onto other functions by taking advantage of automation. For those so inclined (or impatient), you can download the entire guide (PDF). Or check out the other posts in our RSAC Guide: Network Security, Data Security, Application Security, Endpoint Security, Content Security, and Virtualization/Cloud Security. Share:

The fun is just beginning. We continue our trip through the Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference 2010 by discussing what we expect to see relative to Endpoint Security. Endpoint Security Anti-virus came onto the scene in the early 90’s to combat viruses proliferated mostly by sneakernet. You remember sneakernet, don’t you? Over the past two decades, protecting the endpoint has become pretty big business, but we need to question the effectiveness of traditional anti-virus and other endpoint defenses, given the variety of ways to defeat those security controls. This year we expect many of the endpoint vendors to start espousing “value bundles” and alternative controls such as application whitelisting, while jumping on the cloud bandwagon to address the gap between claims and reality. What We Expect to See There are four areas of interest at the show for endpoint security: The Suite Life: There are many similarities between current endpoint security suites and office automation suites in the early part of the decade. The applications don’t work particularly well, but in order to keep prices up, more and more stuff you don’t need gets bundled into the package. There is no end to that trend in sight, as the leading endpoint agent companies have been acquiring new technologies (such as full disk encryption and DLP) to broaden their suites and maintain their price points. But at the show this year, it’s reasonable to go to your favorite endpoint agent vendor and ask them why they can’t seem to “get ahead of the threat.” Yes, that is a rhetorical question, but we Securosis folks like to see vendors squirm, so that would be a good way to start the conversation. Also be on the lookout for the folks offering “Free AV” and talking about how ridiculous it is to be paying for AV nowadays. Just be aware, the big booths with the Eastern European models don’t come cheap, so they will get their pound of flesh in the form of management consoles and upselling to more full-featured suites (which actually may do something). The Cloud Messiah: Endpoint vendors aren’t the only ones figuring the ‘cloud’ will save them from all their issues, but they will certainly be talking about how integrating malware defenses into the ‘cloud’ will increase effectiveness and keep the attackers at bay. This is another game of three-card monty, and the endpoint vendors are figuring you won’t know the difference. After you’ve asked the vendor why they can’t stop even simplistic web attacks or detect a ZeuS infection, they’ll probably start talking about “shared intelligence” and the great googly-moogly malware engine in the sky. At this point, ask a pretty simple question: “How do you win this arms race?” With 2-3 million new malware attacks happening this year, how long can this signature-based approach work? That should make for more interesting conversation. Control Strategies: Given that traditional anti-virus is mostly useless against today’s attacks, you are going to hear a number of smaller application whitelisting vendors start to go more aggressively after the endpoint security companies. But this category (along with USB device control technology) suffers from a perception that the technology breaks applications and impacts user experience. As with every competitive tete-a-tete, there is some truth to that argument. So challenge the white listing vendors on how they impact the user experience (or don’t) and can provide similar value to an endpoint security suite (firewall, HIPS, full disk encryption, etc.). Laptop Encryption: You’ll likely also be hearing about another feature of most of the endpoint suites: full disk encryption (FDE). There will be lots of FUD about the costs of disclosure and why it’s just a lot easier to encrypt your mobile devices and be done with it. For once, the vendor mouthpieces are absolutely right. But this brings us to the question of what features you need, whether FDE should be bundled into your endpoint suite, and how you can recover data when users inevitably lose passwords and devices are stolen. So if you have mobile users (and who doesn’t?), it’s not an issue of whether you need the technology – it’s the most effective way to procure and deploy. For those so inclined (or impatient), you can download the entire guide (PDF). Or check out the other posts in our RSAC Guide: Network Security, Data Security, and Application Security. Share:

Over the next 3 days, we’ll be posting the content from the Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference 2010. We broke the market into 8 different topics: Network Security, Data Security, Application Security, Endpoint Security, Content (Web & Email) Security, Cloud and Virtualization Security, Security Management, and Compliance. For each section, we provide a little history and what we expect to see at the show. First up is Network Security. Network Security Since we’ve been connecting to the Internet people have been focused on network security, so the sector has gotten reasonably mature. As a result, there has been a distinct lack of innovation over the past few years. There have certainly been hype cycles (NAC, anyone?), but most organizations still focus on the basics of perimeter defense. That means intrusion prevention (IPS) and reducing complexity by collapsing a number of functions into an integrated Unified Threat Management (UTM) device. What We Expect to See There are four areas of interest at the show for network security: Application Awareness: This is the ability of devices to decode and protect against application layer attacks. Since most web applications are encapsulated in HTTP (port 80) or HTTPS (port 443) traffic, to really understand what’s happening it’s important for network devices to dig into each packet and understand what the application is doing. This capability is called deep packet inspection (DPI), and most perimeter devices claim to provide it, making for a confusing environment with tons of unsubstantiated vendor claims. The devil is in the details of how each vendor implements DPI, so focus on which protocols they understand and what kinds of policies and reporting are available on a per-protocol basis. Speeds and Feeds: As with most mature markets, especially on the network, at some point it gets down to who has the biggest and fastest box. Doing this kind of packet decodes and attack signature matching requires a lot of horsepower, and we are seeing 20gbps IPS devices appear. You will also see blade architectures on integrated perimeter boxes, and other features focused on adding scale to the environment as customer networks continue to go faster. Since every organization has different requirements, spend some time ahead of the show on understanding what you need and how you’d like to architect your network security environment. Get it down on a single piece of paper and head down to the show floor. When you get to the vendor booth, find an SE (don’t waste time with a sales person) and have them show you how their product(s) can meet your requirements. They’ll probably want to show you their fancy interface and some other meaningless crap. Stay focused on your issues and don’t leave until you understand in your gut whether the vendor can get the job done. Consolidation and Integration: After years of adding specific boxes to solve narrow problems, many organizations’ perimeter networks are messes. Thus the idea of consolidating both boxes (with bigger boxes) and functions (with multi-function devices) continues to be interesting. There will be lots of companies on the show floor talking about their UTM devices, targeting small companies and large with similar equipment. Of course, the needs of the enterprise fundamentally differ from small business requirements, so challenge how well suited any product is for your environment. That means breaking out your one-page architecture again, and having the SEs on the show floor show you how their integrated solutions can solve your problems. Also challenge them on their architecture, given that the more a box needs to do (firewall, IPS, protocol decode, content security, etc.) the lower its throughput. Give vendor responses the sniff test and invite those who pass in for a proof of concept. Forensics: With the understanding that we cannot detect some classes of attacks in advance, forensics and full packet capture gear will be high profile at this year’s conference. This actually represents progress, although you will see a number of vendors talking about blocking APT-like attackers. The reality is (as we’ve been saying for a long time under the React Faster doctrine) that you can’t stop the attacks (not all of them, anyway), so you had better figure out sooner rather than later that you have been compromised, and then act accordingly. The key issues around forensics are user experience, chain of custody, and scale. Most of today’s networks generate a huge amount of data, and you’ll have to figure out how to make that data usable, especially given the time constraints inherent to incident response. You also need to get comfortable with evidence gathering and data integrity, since it’s easy to say the data will hold up in court, but much harder to make it do so. And for those of you who cannot stand the suspense, you can download the entire guide (PDF). Share:

It is said that unhappiness results from either not getting what you want, or getting what you don’t want. I’m pretty sure strep throat qualifies as something you don’t want, and it certainly is causing some unhappiness in Chez Rothman. Yesterday, I picked up 4 different antibiotics for everyone in the house except me, which must qualify me for some kind of award at the Publix pharmacy. I like to think of myself as a reasonably flexible person who can go with the flow – but in reality, not so much. I don’t necessarily have a set schedule, but I know what I need to get done during the day and roughly when I want to work on certain things. But when the entire family is sick, you need to improvise a bit. Unfortunately that is hard for a lot of people, including me. So when the best laid plans of sitting down and cranking out content were subverted by a high maintenance 6 year old – who wanted to converse about all sorts of things and wanted me to listen – I needed to engage my patience bone. Oh yeah, I don’t have a patience bone. I don’t even have a patience toenail. So I got a bit grumpy, snarled a bit, and was generally an ass. The Boss was good in pointing out I’m under a lot of stress heading into a big conference and to give me a wide berth, but that’s a load of crap. I had my priorities all screwed up. I needed to take a step back and view this as a positive and figure this is another great opportunity to work on my patience and show the flexibility that I claim to have. So I chat with my girl when she’s done watching Willy Wonka, and I go out to the pharmacy and get the medicine. Here is the deal – crap is going to happen. You’ll get sick at the most inopportune time. Or your dog will. Or maybe it’s your kid. Or your toilet will blow up or your washing machine craps out. It’s always something. And there are two ways to deal with it. You can get pissy (like I did this morning), which doesn’t really do anything except make a bad situation worse. My other option was to realize that I’m lucky to have a flexible work environment and a set of partners who can (and do) cover for me. Yes, the latter is the right answer. So I cover at home when I need to and soon enough I’ll be back to my regular routine and that will be good too. Um, I’m not sure who wrote this post, but I kind of like him. – Mike Photo credit: “Be Flexible” originally uploaded by Chambo25 Incite 4 U I’d like say it’s the calm before the storm, but given that 4 out of the 5 people I live with are sick, there’s no calm on the home front, and there is always the last minute prep work involved in getting ready for the RSA Conference that makes the week before somewhat frantic. And that’s a good description of this week thus far. If you are heading out to San Francisco, check out our Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference 2010 (PDF), or the bite-size chunks as we post them on the blog this week. That should help you get a feel for the major themes and what to look for at the show. Finally, make sure to RSVP for the Disaster Recovery Breakfast we are hosting on Thursday morning with the fine folks of Threatpost. Without exploits, what’t the point? – Andy the IT Guy wrote a piece about whether pen tests require the use of exploits. He cites some PCI chapter and verse, coming to the conclusion that exploits are not required for the pen testing requirement of PCI. Whether it is or is not required is up to your assessor, but that misses the point. Yes, exploits can be dangerous and they can knock stuff down. But pen testing using real exploits is the closest you are going to get to a real world scenario. That old adage that any battle plan doesn’t survive contact with the enemy – it’s true. So your vulnerability scanner will tell you what’s vulnerable, not what can be exploited, and I can assure you the bad guys don’t just stop once they’ve knocked on your door with Nessus. – MR IE6 + Adobe = Profit! – An article by Brian Krebs on a new experimental tool to prevent drive-by malware on Windows got me thinking. Blade (BLock All Drive-by Exploits) doesn’t stop the exploit, but supposedly eliminates the ability to install a download without user approval. Assuming it works as advertised, it could be useful, although it won’t stop horny users from installing malware in attempts to view videos of nekked folks. But the interesting part is the statistics from their testing – over 40% of attacks are against IE 6, with a whopping 67% of drive by attacks targeting Adobe Reader or Flash. If those numbers don’t give you at least a little juice with management to update your applications and get off IE6, or to prioritize Adobe patches, perhaps it’s time to polish the resume. – RM Socially Inept – Security Barbie had a good post on the Rapid 7 incident in “My ode to Rapid7” where a few sales people Twitter & LinkedIn spammed the bejesus out of the entire security community. Or at least the echo chamber of folks most likely to bitch about it. “Fine, fine. I’m gonna take them off my list of successful people today.” I am not poking fun at Rapid7, but there are strange boundaries of what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior on venues like Twitter. It’s fine to ask my friends what they think of a product or company, but not OK for people I don’t know from that company to offer an opinion. Every corporation out there has a PR and media strategy for