Research

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

February 23rd (this Tuesday) at 12:00pm EST, I will be presenting “Understanding and Selecting a Database Activity Monitoring Solution” in a Webinar with Netezza. I’ll cover the basic value propositions of platforms, go over some of the key functional components to understand prior to an evaluation, and discuss some key deployment questions to address during a proof of concept. You can sign up for the Webinar here. We will take 10-15 minutes for Q&A, so you can send questions in ahead of time and I will try to address them within the slides, or you can submit a question in the WebEx chat facility during the presentation. Share:

Like any analyst, I spend a lot of time on vendor briefings and meeting with very early-stage startups. Sometimes it’s an established vendor pushing a new product or widget, and other times it’s a stealth idea I’m evaluating for one of our investor clients. Usually I can tell within a few minutes if the idea has a chance, assuming the person on the other side is capable of articulating what they actually do (an all too common problem). In 2007 I posted on the primary technique I use to predict security markets, and as we approach RSA I’m going to build on that framework with one of my favorite examples: IT-GRC. IT-GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) products promise a wonderland of compliance bliss. Just buy this very expensive product – which typically requires major professional services to implement, and all your business units to buy-in and participate – and all your risk and compliance problems will go away. Your CEO and CIO get a kick-ass dashboard that allows him or her to assess all your risk and compliance issues across IT, and you can have all the reports your auditor could ever ask for with the press of a button. Uh-huh. Right. Because that always works so well, just like ERP. Going back to my framework for predicting security markets, there are three classes of markets: Threat/Response – Things that keep your customer website from being taken down, ensure people can surf during lunch, and keep the CEO from asking what’s wrong with his or her email. All those other threats? They don’t matter. Compliance – Something mandated by your auditor or assessor, with financial penalties if you don’t comply. And those penalties have to cost more than the solution. Internal Motivation/Efficiency – Things that help you do your job better and improve efficiency with corresponding cost savings. The vast majority of security spending is in response to noisy, in-your-face threats that disrupt your business (someone stealing your data doesn’t count, unless they burn the barn behind them). The rest deals with compliance mandates and deficiencies. I think we only spend single-digit percentages of our security budget on anything else, maybe. So let’s look at IT-GRC. It doesn’t directly stop any threats and it’s never mandated for compliance. It’s a reporting and organization tool – and a particularly expensive one. Thus we only see it succeeding in the largest of large companies, where it shows a financial return by reducing the massive manual costs of reporting. Mid-sized and small companies simply aren’t complex enough to see the same level of benefits, and the cost of implementation alone (never mind the typically 6-figure product costs) aren’t justified by the benefit. IT-GRC in most organizations is like chasing Paris Hilton the Unicorn. It’s expensive and high-maintenance, with mythical benefits – and unless you have some serious bank, it isn’t worth the chase. That’s not my assessment – it’s a statement of the realities of the market. I don’t even have to declare GRC dead (not that I’m against that). If you have any contacts in one of these companies – someone who will tell you the honest truth – you know that these products don’t make sense for mid-sized and small companies. This post isn’t an assessment of value – it’s a statement of execution. In other words, this isn’t my opinion – the numbers speak for themselves. All you end users reading this already know what I’m saying, since none of you are buying the products anyway. Share:

As most of the industry gets ramped up for the festivities of the 2010 RSA Conference next week in San Francisco, your friends at Securosis have decided to make things a bit easier for you. We’re putting the final touches on our first Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference. As usual, we’ll preview the content on the blog and have the piece packaged in its entirety as a paper you can carry around at the conference. We’ll post the entire PDF tomorrow, and through the rest of this week we’ll be highlighting content from the guide. To kick things off, let’s tackle what we expect to be the key themes of the show this year. Key Themes How many times have you shown up at the RSA Conference to see the hype machine fully engaged about a topic or two? Remember 1999 was going to be the Year of PKI? And 2000. And 2001. And 2002. So what’s going to be news of the show in 2010? Here is a quick list of three topics that will likely be top of mind at RSA, and why you should care. Cloud/Virtualization Security Cloud computing and virtualization are two of the hottest trends in information technology today, and we fully expect this trend to extend into RSA sessions and the show floor. There are few topics as prone to marketing abuse and general confusion as cloud computing and virtualization, despite some significant technological and definitional advances over the past year. But don’t be confused – despite the hype this is an important area. Virtualization and cloud computing are fundamentally altering how we design and manage our infrastructure and consume technology services – especially within data centers. This is definitely a case of “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”. Although virtualization and cloud computing are separate topics, they have a tight symbiotic relationship. Virtualization is both a platform for, and a consumer of, cloud computing. Most cloud computing deployments are based on virtualization technology, but the cloud can also host virtual deployments. We don’t really have the space to fully cover virtualization and cloud computing in this guide, though we will dig a layer deeper later. We highly recommend you take a look at the architectural section of the Cloud Security Alliance’s Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing (PDF). We also draw your attention to the Editorial Note on Risk on pages 9-11, but we’re biased because Rich wrote it. Cyber-crime & Advanced Persistent Threats Since it’s common knowledge that not only government networks but also commercial entities are being attacked by well-funded, state-sponsored, and very patient adversaries, you’ll hear a lot about APT (advanced persistent threats) at RSA. First let’s define APT, which is an attacker focused on you (or your organization) with the express objective of stealing sensitive data. APT does not specify an attack vector, which may or may not be particularly advanced – the attacker will do only what is necessary to achieve their objective. Securosis has been in the lead of trying to deflate the increasing hype around APT, but vendors are predictable animals. Where customer fear emerges the vendors circle like vultures, trying to figure out how their existing widgets can be used to address the new class of attacks. But to be clear, there is no silver bullet to stop or even detect an APT – though you will likely see a lot of marketing buffoonery discussing how this widget or that could have detected the APT. Just remember the Tuesday morning quarterback always completes the pass, and we’ll see a lot of that at RSA. It’s not likely any widget would detect an APT because an APT isn’t an attack, it’s a category of attacker. And yes, although China is usually associated with APT, it’s bigger than one nation-state. It’s a totally new threat model. This nuance is important, because it means the adversary will do what is necessary to compromise your network. In one instance it may be a client-side 0-day, in another it could be a SQL injection attack. If the attack can’t be profiled, then there is no way a vendor can “address the issue.” But there are general areas of interest for folks worried about APT and other targeted attacks, and those are detection and forensics. Since you don’t know how they will get in, you have to be able to detect and investigate the attack as quickly as possible – we call this “React Faster”. Thus the folks doing full packet capture and forensic data collection should be high on your list of companies to check out on the show floor. You’ll also want to check out some sessions, including Rich and Mike’s Groundhog Day panel, where APT will surely be covered. Compliance Compliance as a theme for RSA? Yes, you have heard this before. Unlike 2005, though, ‘compliance’ is not just a buzzword, but a major driver for the funding and adoption of most security technologies. Assuming you are aware of current compliance requirements, you will be hearing about new requirements and modifications to existing regulations (think PCI next or HIPAA/HiTech evolution). This is the core of IT’s love/hate relationship with compliance. Regulatory change means more work for you, but at the same time if you need budget for a security project in today’s economy, you need to associate the project with a compliance mandate and cost savings at the same time. Both vendors and customers should be talking a lot about compliance because it helps both parties sell their products and projects, respectively. The good news at this point is that security vendors do provide value in documenting compliance. They have worked hard to incorporate policies and reports specific to common regulations into their products, and provide management and customization to address the needs of other constituencies. But there will still be plenty of hype around ease of use and time to value. So there will be plenty of red “Easy PCI” buttons to bring back for your kids, and promises of “Instant Sarbanes-Oxley” and “Comprehensive HIPAA support” in every

I know what you are thinking. “Oh god, they should stick to podcasting.” You’re probably right about that – it’s no secret that Rich and I have faces made for radio. But since we hang around with Adrian, we figured maybe he’d be enough of a distraction to not focus on us. You didn’t think we keep Adrian around for his brains, do you? Joking aside, video is a key delivery mechanism for Securosis content moving forward. We’ve established our own SecurosisTV channel on blip.tv, and we’ll be posting short form research on all our major projects this way throughout the year. You can get the video directly through iTunes or via RSS, and we’ll also be embedding the content on the blog as well. So on to the main event: Our first video is an RSA Conference preview highlighting the 3 Key Themes we expect to see at the show. The video runs about 15 minutes and we make sure to not take ourselves too seriously. Direct Link: http://blip.tv/file/3251515 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. We just figure most of you are as lazy as we are, and will appreciate not having to leave our site. We’re also interested in comments on the video – please let us know what you think. Whether it’s valuable, what we can do to improve the quality (besides getting new talent), or any other feedback you may have. Share:

I’d like some fail, with a little fail, and a side of fail. Rothman was out in Phoenix this week for some internal meetings and to record some video segments that we will be putting out fairly soon. I have a slightly weird video recording and production setup, designed to make it super-fast and dirt easy for us to put segments together. I’ve tested most of it before, although I did add a new time saver right before Mike showed up. Yeah, you know where this is headed. First, the new thing didn’t work. It was so frustrating that we almost ran out and bought a new camera so we wouldn’t need the extra box. Actually, we did run out, but it turns out almost no consumer cameras with high def have FireWire anymore. I dropped back into troubleshooting and debugging mode once I realized we were stuck. My personal process is first to eliminate as many variables as possible, and then slowly add one function or component at a time until I can identify where the failure is. Rip it back to the frame, then build and test piece by piece. That didn’t work. So I moved on to option 2, which has helped me more in my IT career than I care to admit (in my tech days I was the one they pulled in when no one else could get something to work). It’s no big secret – I just screw with it until the problem goes away. I try all sorts of illogical stuff that shouldn’t work, and usually does. I call this “sacrificing a chicken” mode. I toss out all assumptions as to how a computer system should work, and just start mashing the keys in some barely-logical way. I figure there are so many layers of abstraction and so many interconnections in modern software, that it is nearly impossible to completely model and predict how things will really work. It totally worked. With that up and running, the next bit failed. The software we use to live mix the video couldn’t handle our feeds, even though our setup is well within the performance expectations and recommendations. We use BoinxTV, but it was effectively useless on a tricked out MacBook Pro. That one I couldn’t fix. No prob – I had a backup plan. Record the video, then edit/mix on my honking Mac Pro with 12gb of RAM and 8 core. You really know where this is headed. Despite the fact I’ve done this before with test footage, using the exact same process, it didn’t work. Something about the latest version of Boinx. So I restored the old version using Time Machine, and it still wouldn’t work. Oh, and then there’s the part where my Mac suddenly informed me it was missing memory (fixed with a re-seating, but still annoying). I’ve sent 2 tech support requests in, but no responses yet. Had this happened pre-Macworld Expo, I could have cornered them on the show floor. Ugh. My wife came up with one last option that I haven’t tried yet. Our best guess is that something in one of Apple’s Mac OS X updates caused the problem. She suggested I restore Leopard onto her MacBook and test on that. Better yet – I have spare drives in the Mac Pro to test new versions of operating systems, and there’s no reason I can’t install the old version. I’m also going to upgrade my video card. I don’t expect any of this to work, but I really need to produce these videos, and am not looking forward to the more time consuming traditional process. But for those of you who troubleshoot, my methodology almost always works. Back out to nothing and build/test build/test, or randomly screw with stuff that shouldn’t help, but usually does. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading posts on The Cost of Database Security, and Oracle 0-day fun. Rich’s endpoint DLP deployment tips at TechTarget. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: Network Security Fundamentals: Looking for Not Normal Mike Rothman: Adrian’s paper on DB Assessment Great paper. Really digs into the why and how. Adrian Lane: The VA White Paper, of course! Rich: It was a slow week on the blog with all of us distracted by my video failures, but here’s a nugget from when this was my personal blog, not a business. Security is like dentistry. Other Securosis Posts Incite 2/17/2010 – Open Your Mind Favorite Outside Posts Adrian Lane: The List of Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors. When I first read the post I was thinking it could be re-titled “Why Web Programmers Suck”, but when you get past the first half dozen or so poor coding practices, it could be pretty much any application. And let’s face it, web apps are freaking hard because you cannot trust the user or the user environment. Regardless, print this out and post on the break room wall for the rest of the development team to read every time they get a cup of coffee. Pepper: Urine Sample Hacked? Mike Rothman: No one knows what the F*** they are doing. Awesome post to understand and remind you that you don’t have all the answers. But you had better know what you don’t know. Rich: Rafal reminds people to know who you are giving your data to. He can be a bit reactionary at times, but he nails it with this one. How do you think Facebook and Google make their money? They aren’t evil, but they are what they are. Project Quant Posts Project Quant: Database Security – Masking Research Reports and Presentations Report: Database Assessment Database Audit Events Top News and Posts Got Bluescreen? Check for Rootkits. A very good composite of the Google Attacks. SQL Azure Update 1 available. Adobe issues emergency patch. Security bug in Google Buzz. Chinese hackers at work in India cracking government systems. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected, Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. This week’s best comment goes to Erin (Secbarbie), in response to What is Your Plan B?.

In what remains a down economy, you may be suspicious when I tell you to think about leaving your job. But ultimately in order to survive, you always need to have Plan B or Plan C in place, just in case. Blind loyalty to an employer (or to employees) died a horrendous death many years ago. What got me thinking about the whole concept was Josh Karp’s post on the CISO Group blog talking about the value of vulnerability management. He points out the issues around selling VM internally and some of those challenges. Yet the issues with VM didn’t resonate with me. It was the behavior of the CTO, who basically squelches the discussion of vulnerabilities found on their network because he doesn’t want to be responsible for fixing them. To be clear, this kind of stuff happens all the time. That’s not the issue. The issue is understanding what you would do if you worked there. I would have quit on the spot, but that’s just me. Do you have the stones to just get up, pack your personal effects, and leave? It takes a rare individual with the kind of confidence to just get up and leave – heading off into the unknown. Assuming it would be unwise to act rashly (which I’ve been known to do from time to time), you need to revisit your personal Plan B. Or build it, if you aren’t the type of person with a bomb shelter in your basement. I advise all sorts of folks to be very candid about their ability to be successful, given the expectations of their jobs and the resources they have to execute. If the corporate culture allows a C-level executive to sweep legitimate risks under the rug, then there is zero chance of security success. If you can’t get simple defenses in place, then you can’t be successful – it’s a simple as that. If you find yourself in this kind of situation (and it’s not as rare as it seems), it’s time to execute on Plan B and find something else to do. Being a contingency planner at heart, I also recommend folks have a list of “things you will not do” under any circumstances. There are lots of folks in Club Fed who were just following the instructions of their senior executives, even though they knew they were wrong. My Dad told me when I first joined the working world that I would only get one chance to compromise my integrity, and to think very carefully about everything I did. It makes sense to run those scenarios through your mind ahead of time. So you’ll know where your personal line is, and when someone has crossed it. I know it’s pretty brutal out there in the job market. I know it’s scary when you have responsibilities and people depend on you to provide. But if someone asks you to cross that line, or you know you have no chance to be successful – you owe it to yourself to move on quickly. But you need to be ready to do so, and that preparation starts now. Here is your homework over the weekend: Polish your resume. Hopefully that doesn’t take long because it’s up to date, right? If not, get it up to date. Then start networking and make it a habit. Set up a lunch meeting with a local peer in another organization every week for two months. There is no agenda. You aren’t looking for anything except to reconnect with someone you lost touch with or to learn about how other folks are handling common issues. Two months becomes three months becomes a year, and then you know lots of folks in your community. Which is invaluable when the brown stuff hits the fan. You also need to get involved in your local community, assuming you want to stay there. Go to your local ISSA, NAISG, or InfraGard meeting and network a bit. Even if you are happy in your job. As Harvey MacKay says, Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty. Share:

I was in the car the other day with my oldest daughter. She’s 9 (going on 15, but that’s another story) and blurted out: “Dad, I don’t want to go to Georgia Tech.” Huh? Now she is the princess of non-sequiturs, but even this one was surprising to me. Not only does she have an educational plan (at 9), but she knows that GA Tech is not part of it. So I figured I’d play along. First off, I studied to be an engineer. So I wasn’t sure if she was poking at me, or what the deal was. Second, her stance towards a state school is problematic because GA residents can go to a state school tuition-free, thanks to the magic of the Hope Scholarship, funded by people who don’t understand statistics – I mean the GA Lottery. Next I figured she was going to blurt out something about going to MIT or Harvard, and I saw my retirement fund dwindle to nothing. Looks like I’ll be eating Beef-a-Roni in my twilight years. But it wasn’t that. She then went on to explain that one of her friends made the point that GA Tech teaches engineering and she didn’t want to be an engineer. Now things were coming more into focus for me. I then asked why she didn’t want to be an engineer. Right, it’s more about the friend’s opinions, then about what she wants. Good, she is still 9. I then proceeded to go through all the reasons that being an engineer could be an interesting career choice, especially for someone who likes math, and that GA Tech would be a great choice, even if she didn’t end up being an engineer. It wasn’t about pushing her to one school or another – it was about making sure she kept an open mind. I take that part of parenting pretty seriously. Peer and family pressure is a funny thing. I thought I wanted to be a doctor growing up. I’m not sure whether medicine actually interested me, or whether I just knew that culturally that was expected. I did know being a lawyer was out of the question. (Yes, that was a zinger directed at all my lawyer friends.) Ultimately I studied engineering and then got into computers way back when. I haven’t looked back since. Which is really the point. I’m not sure what any of my kids’ competencies and passions will be. Neither do they. But it’s my job (working with The Boss) to make sure they get exposed to all sorts of things, keep an open mind, and hopefully find their paths. – Mike Photo credit: “Open Minds” originally uploaded by gellenburg Incite 4 U Things are a little slow on the blog this week. Rich, Adrian, and I are sequestered plotting world domination. Actually, we are finalizing our research agendas & upcoming reports, and starting work on a new video initiative. Thus I’m handling the Incite today, so Adrian and Rich can pay attention to our clients. Toward the end of the week, we’ll also start posting a “Securosis Guide to RSAC 2010” here, to give those of you attending the conference a good idea of what’s going to be hot, and what to look for. I also want to throw a grenade at our fellow bloggers. Candidly, most of you security bloggy types have been on an extended vacation. Yes, you are the suxor. We talked about doing the Incite twice a week, but truth be told, there just isn’t enough interesting content to link to. Yes, we know many of you are enamored with Twitter and spend most of your days there. But it’s hard to dig into a discussion in 140 characters. And our collective ADD kicked in, so we got tired of blogging after a couple years. But keep in mind it’s the community interaction that makes all the difference. So get off your respective asses and start blogging again. We need some link fodder. Baiting the Risk Modeling Crowd – Given my general frustration with the state of security metrics and risk quantification, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to link to a good old-fashioned beat down from Richard Bejtlich and Tim Mullen discussing risk quantification. Evidently some windbag puffed his chest out with all sorts of risk quantification buffoonery and Tim (and then Richard) jumped on. They are trying to organize a public debate in the near future, and I want a front row seat. If only to shovel some dirt on the risk quantification model. Gunnar weighed in on the topic as well. – MR Meaningful or Accurate: Pick One – I like Matthew Rosenquist’s attempts to put security advice in a fortune cookie, and this month’s is “Metrics show the Relevance of Security.” Then Matthew describes how immature metrics are at this point, and how companies face an awful decision: using meaningful or accurate metrics, but you only get to pick one. The root of the issue is “The industry has not settled on provable and reliable methodologies which scale with any confidence.” I know a lot of folks are working on this, and the hope is for progress in the near term. – MR Wither virtual network appliances? – Exhibit #1 of someone who now seems to think in 140 characters is Chris Hoff. But every so often he does blog (or record a funny song) and I want to give him some positive feedback, so maybe he blogs some more. In this post, Chris talks about the issues of network virtual appliances – clearly they are not ready for prime time, and a lot of work needs to be done to get them there, especially if the intent is to run them in the cloud. Truth be told, I still don’t ‘get’ the cloud, but that’s why I hang out with Rich. He gets it and at some point will school me. – MR Getting to the CORE of Metasploit – Normally vendor announcements aren’t interesting (so $vendor, stop asking if we are going to cover your crappy 1.8 release on

To state the obvious (as I tend to do), we all have too much to protect. No one gets through their list every day, which means perhaps the most critical skill for any professional is the ability to prioritize. We’ve got to focus on the issues that present the most significant risk to the organization (whatever you mean by risk) and act accordingly. I have’t explicitly said it, but the key to network security fundamentals is figuring out how to prioritize. And to be clear, though I’m specifically talking about network security in this series, the tactics discussed can (and need to) be applied to all the other security domains. To recap how the fundamentals enable this prioritization, first we talked about implementing default deny on your perimeter. Next we discussed monitoring everything to provide a foundation of data for analysis. In the last post, correlation was presented to start analyzing that data. By the way, I agree with Adrian, who is annoyed with having to do correlation at all. But it is what it is, and maybe someday we’ll get all the context we need to make a decision based on log data, but we certainly can’t wait for that. So to the degree you do correlate, you need to do it effectively. Pattern Matching Going hand in hand with prioritization is the ability to match patterns. Most of the good security folks out there do this naturally, in terms of consuming a number of data points, understanding how they fit together, and then making a decision about what that means, how it will change things and what action is required. The patterns help you to understand what you need to focus on at any given time. The first fundamental step in matching patterns involves knowing your current state. Let’s call that the baseline. The baseline gives you perspective on what is happening in your environment. The good news is that a “monitor everything” approach gives you sufficient data to establish the baseline. Let’s just take a few examples of typical data types and what their baselines look like: Firewall Logs: You’ll see attacks in the firewall logs, so your baseline consists of the normal number/frequency of attacks, time distribution, and origin. So if all of a sudden you are attacked at a different time from a different place, or much more often than normal, it’s time to investigate. Network Flows: Network flows show network traffic dynamics on key segments, so your baseline tells you which devices communicate with which other devices – both internal and external to your network. So if you suddenly start seeing a lot of flow from an internal device (on a sensitive network) to an external FTP site, it could be trouble. Device Configurations: If a security device is compromised, there will usually be some type of configuration and/or policy change. The baseline in this case is the last known good configuration. If something changes, and it’s not authorized or in the change log, that’s a problem. Again, these examples are not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive, just to give an idea about the types of data you are already collecting and what the baseline could look like. Next you set up the set of initial alerts to detect attacks that you deem important. Each management console for every device (or class of devices) gives you the ability to set alerts. There is leverage in aggregating all this data (see the correlation post), but it’s not necessary. Now I’ll get back to something discussed in the correlation post, and that’s the importance of planning your use cases before implementing your alerts. You need to rely on those thresholds to tell you when something is wrong. Over time, you tune the thresholds to refine how and when you get alerted. Don’t expect this tuning process to go quickly or easily. Getting this right really is an art, and you’ll need to iterate for a while to get there – think months, not days. You can’t look for everything, so the use cases need to cover the main data sources you collect and set appropriate alerts for when something is outside normal parameters. I call this looking for not normal, and yes it’s really anomaly detection. But most folks don’t think favorably of the term “anomaly detection”, so I use it sparingly. Learning from Mistakes You can learn something is wrong in a number of ways. Optimally, you get an alert from one of your management consoles. But that is not always the case. Perhaps your users tell you something is wrong. Or (worst case) a third party informs you of an issue. How you learn you’ve been pwned is less important than what you do once you are pwned. Once you jump into action, you’re looking at the logs, jumping into management consoles, and isolating the issues. How quickly you identify the root cause has everything to with the data you collect, and how effectively you analyze it. We’ll talk more about incident response later this year, but suffice it to say your only job is to contain the damage and remediate the problem. Once the crisis ends, it’s time to learn from experience. The key, in terms of “looking for not normal”, is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The attackers do their jobs well and you will be compromised at some point. Make sure they don’t get you the same way twice. The old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you – fool me twice, shame on me,” is very true. So part of the post-mortem process is to define what happened, but also to look for that pattern again. Remember that attackers are fairly predictable. Like the direct marketers that fill your mailbox with crap every holiday season, if something works, they’ll keep doing it. Thus, when you see an attack, you’ll need to expect to see it again. Build another set of rules/policies to make sure that same attack is detected quickly and accurately. Yes, I know this is a black list mindset, and there are limitations to this approach since you

The Securosis team is proud to announce the availability of our latest white paper: Understanding and Selecting a Database Assessment Solution. We’re very excited to get this one published – not just because we have been working on it for six months, but also because we feel that with a couple new vendors and a significant evolution in product function, the entire space needed a fresh examination. This is not the same old vulnerability assessment market of 2004 that revolved around fledgling DBA productivity tools! There are big changes in the products, but more importantly there are bigger changes in the buying requirements and users who have a vested interest in the scan results. Our main goal was to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders. We worked hard to provide enough technical information for customers to differentiate between products, while giving non-DBA stakeholders – including audit, compliance, security, and operations groups – an understanding of what to look for in any RFI/proof-of-concept. We want to especially thank our sponsors, Application Security Inc. (AppSec), Imperva, and Qualys. Without them, we couldn’t produce free research like this. As with all our papers, the content was developed independently and completely out in the open using our Totally Transparent Research process. We also want to thank our readers for helping review all our public research, and Chris Pepper for editing the paper. This is version 1.0 of the document, and we will continue to update it (and acknowledge new contributions) over time, so keep coming with the comments if you think we’ve missed anything, or gotten something wrong. Share: