We realized last week that we may have hit the saturation point for activity on the blog. Right now we have three ongoing blog series and NSO Quant. All our series post a few times a week, and Quant can be up to 10 posts. It’s too much for us to keep up with, so I can’t even imagine someone who actually has to do something with their days.
There’s a lot of hype in the press (and vendor pitches) about APT – the Advanced Persistent Threat. Very little of it is informed, and many parties within the security industry are quickly trying to co-opt the term in order to advance various personal and corporate agendas. In the process they’ve bent, manipulated and largely tarnished what had been a specific description of a class of attacker. I’ve generally tried to limit how much I talk about it – mostly restricting myself to the occasional…
In our introductory post we discussed how customers are looking to derive additional value form their SIEM and log management investments by looking at additional data types to climb the stack. Part of the dissatisfaction we hear from customers is the challenge of turning collected data into actionable information for operational efficiency and compliance requirements. This challenge is compounded by the clear focus on application-oriented attacks. For the most part, our detection only pays…
Now that we’ve been through the drivers for evolved, application-aware firewalls, and a lot of the technology enabling them, how does the selection process need to evolve to keep pace? As with most of our research at Securosis, we favor mapping out a very detailed process, and leaving you to decide which steps make sense in your situation. So we don’t expect every organization to go through every step in this process. Figure out which are appropriate for your organization and use those.
Reality has a funny way of intruding into the best laid plans.
Some of you might have noticed I haven’t been writing that much for the past couple weeks and have been pretty much ignoring Twitter and the rest of the social media world. It seems my wife had a baby, and since this isn’t my personal blog anymore I was able to take some time off and focus on the family. Needless to say, my “paternity leave” didn’t last nearly as long as I planned, thanks to the work piling up.
Given how much time we’ve spent discusing application awareness and how these new capabilities pretty much stomp all over existing security products like IDS/IPS and web filters, does that mean standalone network security devices go away? Should you just quietly accept that unified threat management (UTM) is the way to go because the enterprise firewall provides multiple functions? Not exactly.
Tuesday, September 21st, at 11am PST / 2pm EST, I will be presenting a webinar: “Keys to Selecting SIEM and Log Management”, hosted by NitroSecurity. I’ll cover the basics of SIEM, including data collection and deployment, then dig into use cases, enrichment, data management, forensics, and advanced features.
In our last post we detailed content protection requirements, so now it’s time to close out our discussion of technical requirements with infrastructure integration.
After digging into application awareness features in Part 1, let’s talk about non-application capabilities. These new functions are really about dealing with today’s attacks. Historically, managing ports and protocols has sufficed to keep the bad guys outside the perimeter; but with today’s bumper crop of zombies & bots, the old ways don’t cut it any more.
Now that you’ve figured out what information you want to protect, it’s time to figure out how to protect it. In this step we’ll figure out your high-level monitoring and enforcement requirements.