In this portion of our Tokenization Guidance series I want to offer some advice to auditors. I am addressing both internal auditors going through one of the self assessment questionnaires, as well as external auditors validating adherence to PCI requirements. For the most part auditors follow PCI DSS for the systems that process credit card information, just as they always have. But I will discuss how tokenization alters the environment, and how to adjust the investigation process in the select…
The forensics use case we discussed previously is about taking a look at something that already happened. You presume the data is already lost, the horse is out of the barn, and Pandora’s Box is open. But what if we tried to look at some of these additional data types in terms of making security alerts better, with the clear goal of reducing the window between exploit and detection: reacting faster?
Secure USB devices – ain’t they great? They offer us the ability to bring trusted devices into insecure networks, and perform trusted operations on untrusted computers. If I could drink out of one, maybe it would be the holy grail. Services like cryptographic key management, identity certificates and mutual authentication, sensitive document storage, and a pr0nsafe web browser platform. But over the last year, as I look at the mobile computing space – the place where people will want to use…
Most organizations don’t really learn about the limitations of event logs, until forensic investigators hold up their hands and explain they know what happened, but aren’t really sure how. Huh? How could that happen? It’s pretty simple: logs are a backward-looking indicator. They can help you piece together what happened, but you can only infer how.
I really enjoyed Marco Arment’s I finally cracked it post, both because he captured the essence of Apple TV here and now, and because his views on media – as a consumer – are exactly in line with mine. Calling DVRs “a bad hack” is spot-on. I went through this process 7 years ago when I got rid of television. I could not accept a 5 minute American Idol segment in the middle of the 30 minute Fox ‘news’ broadcast. Nor the other 200 channels of crap surrounding the three channels I wanted. At the…
It all started with a simple tweet from The Mogull, which succinctly summed up a lot of the meat grinder of high tech marketing. You see the industry is based on upgrades and refreshes, largely driven by planned obsolescence. Let’s just look at Microsoft Word. I haven’t really used any new functionality since Office 2003. You? They have overhauled the UI and added some cloudiness (which they call Office Live), but it’s really moving deck chairs around. A word processor is a word processor for…
Yesterday I was in Vegas to participate in a panel at IBM’s Information on Demand Conference. To my amusement and frustration, I was already in Vegas that weekend, drove 4.5 hours home to Phoenix on Sunday, then flew back Monday evening (4 hours door to door).
In the introduction to our Applied Network Security Analysis series, we talked about monitoring everything and the limitations of a log-centric data collection approach, in our battle to improve security operational processes. Now let’s dig in a little deeper and understand what kind of data collection foundation makes sense, given the types of analysis we need to deal with our adversaries.
Flat Stanley has it pretty good. If you have elementary school age kids, you probably know all about him. Flat Stanley is a cute story about a kid who gets flattened, and then spends most of the book trying to regain his natural form. Many teachers have kids do a Flat Stanley project, where they color a picture and send it to a friend or relative.
Back in 2007 we – it was actually just Rich back then – published Understanding and Selecting Database Activity Monitoring – the first in-depth examination of what was then a relatively new security technology. That paper is, and remains, the definitive guide for DAM, but a lot has happened in the past 4 years. The products – and the vendors who sell them – have all changed. The reasons customers bought four years ago are not the reasons they buy today. Furthermore, the advanced features of…