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I was over at Rich’s place this week while we were recording the network security podcast. When finished we were just hanging out and Riley, Rich’s daughter, came walking down the hall. At 9 months old I was more shocked to see her walking than she was at seeing me standing there in the hall. She looked up at me and sat down. I extended my hand thinking that she would grab hold of my fingers, but she just sat there looking at me. I heard Rich pipe up … “She’s not a dog, Adrian. You don’t need to let her sniff your hand to make friends. Just say hello.” Yeah. I guess I spend too much time with dogs and not much time with kids. I’ll have to work on my little people skills. And the chew toy I bought her for Christmas was, in hindsight, a poor choice. This has been the week of the Rothman for us. Huge changes in the new year – you probably noticed. But it’s not just here at Securosis. There must have been five or six senior security writers let go around the country. How many of you were surprised by the Washington Post letting Brian Krebs go? How freakin’ stupid is that!?! At least this has a good side in that Brian has his own site up (Krebs on Security), and the quality and quantity are just as good as before. Despite a healthy job market for security and security readership being up, I expect we will see the others creating their own blogs and security continuing to push the new media envelope. And as a reminder, with the holidays over, Rich and I are making a huge press on the current Project Quant metrics series: Quant for Database Security. We are just getting into the meat of the series, and much like patch management, we are surprised at the lack of formalized processes for database security, so I encourage your review and participation. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Mike’s podcast with Amrit Williams on Log Management and SIEM.(transcript) Podcast with Dennis Fisher on Metrics and the Securosis/Security Incite Merger. Blog post on TechTarget’s Security Bytes regarding the merger. Securosis takes over the Network Security Podcast. Rich’s excellent article for Macworld on Mac security reality check: scams. Adrian’s Dark Reading post on Data Masking. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Quant for Database Security, Patches. Mike 2009 Wrap: Changes in Perspective – It’s critical to take some time every quarter and reflect on what you’ve learned and how that will change plans/tactics moving forward. Things move too quickly to just plod along doing the same old, same old. Adrian: Introducing Securosis Plus: Now with 100% More Incite! Meier: Google, Privacy, and You. Mort: Password Policy Disclosure. Other Securosis Posts Getting Your Mindset Straight for 2010 Incite – 1/6/2009 – The Power of Contrast RSA Treks to Sherwood Forest and Buys the Archer Password Policy Disclosure Securosis + Security Incite Merger FAQ Mike Rothman Joins Securosis Prison Computer ‘Hacker’ Sentenced Rich’s Personal Security Guiding Principles Hosting Providers and Log Security The POPE visits Security Incite + Securosis. Security Incite Contracts a Case of Securosis. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Matt’s Guide to Vendor Responses. Should be required reading for vendors. Mike: A Way Forward – Shostack gets into our heads and makes the point that our issues are partly self-inflicted. He’s dead on. Adrian: Maybe this will Help by Jack Daniels. And it did. We talk about being pragmatic here, but I catch myself once a week, at least, yanking content out of a post of presentation because it is simply not accessible to the IT masses. This is a nice encapsulation of the perspective you need to have when producing for non-security audiences interested in accomplishing security tasks. Mort: Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It Amrit does it again – funny, snarky, and all too true. Meier: Brian Krebs on FBI investigating $3M in stolen funds. Pepper: Schneier’s TSA Logo Contest Motto: either “Tedium, Stupidity, & Arrogance” or “Terror, Slowdowns, & Aggravation”. Pepper #2: NIST Certified USB Encryption Broken. Project Quant Posts Project Quant: Database Security – Patch Project Quant: Database Security – Discovery Top News and Posts Blogger’s Twitter account implicated in ‘Leak’. Wired post on changes to No-Fly list. Hacker demonstrated how to Geographically Locate Servers. Jeremiah Maps WASC to OWASP list, mum on blood feud. Political Websites Hacked. New Botnet Infiltrated. NIST Hash Competition. FBI Investigates $3M Theft in eWeek. Not security, but a glimpse at the dirty underbelly of technology PR. And Dave Lewis on Cyber-Ninjas post deserves honorable mention for making me laugh out loud. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected Securosis makes a $25.00 donation to Hackers For Charity. This week’s best comment comes from ‘smithwill’ in response to Mike Rothman’s post on Getting Your Mindset Straight for 2010: Bravo. Security common sense in under 1000 words. And the icing on the cake: buy our s#it and you won’t have to do anything line. Priceless. Congratulations! We will contribute $25.00 to HFC in ‘smithwill’s name! Share:

Good Morning: It’s been quite a week, and it’s only Wednesday. The announcement of Securosis “Plus” went extremely well, and I’m settling into my new digs. Seems like the last two days just flew by. As I was settling in to catch some zzzz’s last night, I felt content. I put in a good day’s work, made some progress, and was excited for what the next day had to bring. Dare I say it? I felt happy. (I’m sure I’ve jinxed myself for another 7 years.) It reminds me of a lyric from Shinedown that really resonated: There’s a hard life for every silver spoon There’s a touch of grey for every shade of blue That’s the way that I see life If there was nothing wrong, Then there’d be nothing right -Shinedown, What a Shame It’s about contrast. If I didn’t have less than stellar job experiences (and I’ve had plenty of those), clearly I couldn’t appreciate what I’m doing now. It’s also a big reason why folks that have it pretty good sometimes lose that perspective. They don’t have much bad to contrast. Keep that in mind and if you need a reminder of how lucky you are, head down to the food bank for a few hours. The most surprising thing to me (in a positive way) about joining the team is the impact of having someone else look at your work, challenge it and suggest ways to make it better. Yesterday I sent a post that will hit Friday on FUDSEC to the team. The first draft was OK, but once Rich, Adrian, Mort and Chris Pepper got their hands on it and suggested some tuning – the post got markedly better. Then I got it. Just to reinforce the notion, the quote in today’s InformationWeek Daily newsletter hit home as well: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. -African proverb True dat. Have a great day. -Mike Incite 4 U This week Mike takes the bulk of the Incite, but did get some contributions from Adrian. Over the coming weeks, as we get the underlying systems in place, you’ll be getting Incite from more of the team. We’ll put our initials next to each snippet we write, just so you know who to send nasty email. Monetizing Koobface: I’m fascinated by how the bad guys monetize their malware, so this story on Dark Reading highlighting some research from Trend Micro was interesting. The current scheme du jour is fake anti-virus. It must be working since over the holiday I got a call from my FiL (Father in Law) about how he got these pop-ups about needing anti-virus. Thankfully he didn’t click anything and had already made plans to get the machine re-imaged. – MR Identity + Network = MUST: Gartner’s Neil MacDonald has a post entitled Identity-Awareness Should be a Feature, not a Product, where he’s making the point that as things virtualize and hybrid computing models prevail, it’s not an option to tie security policies to physical attributes. So pretty much all security products will need to tie into Active Directory, RADIUS and LDAP. Yes, I know most already do, but a while back IP to ID was novel. Now, not so much. – MR Puffery Indeed: I had a personal ban on blogging about the Cloud in 2009 as there were a lot of people doing a lot of talking but saying very little. This NetworkWorld post on “Tone-deaf Unisys official on why cloud computing rocks; Or what shouldn’t get lost in all the puffery over cloud technology” is the embodiment of the puffery. The point of the post – as near as I can tell – was to say companies need to “embrace cloud computing” and “security concerns are the leading cause of enterprise and individual users’ hesitancy in adopting cloud computing”. Duh! The problem is that the two pieces of information are based on unsubstantiated vendor press releases and double-wrapped in FUD. Richard Marcello of Unisys manages to pose cloud technologies as a form of outsourcing US jobs, and Paul Krill says these are a mid-term competitive requirement for businesses. Uh, probably not on either account. Still, giving them the benefit of the doubt, I checked the ‘survey’ that is supposed to corroborate hesitancy of Cloud adoption, but what you get is an unrelated 2007 survey on Internet trust. A subsequent ‘survey’ link goes to a Unisys press releases for c-RIM products. WTF? I understand ‘Cloud’ is the hot topic to write about, but unless your goal is to totally confound readers while mentioning a vendor a bunch of times, just stop it with the random topic association. – AL Speeds and Feeds Baby: Just more of an observation because I’ve been only tangentially covering network security over the past few years. It seems speeds and feeds still matter. At least from the standpoint of beating your chest in press releases. Fortinet is the latest guilty party in talking about IPv6 thruput. Big whoop. It kills me that “mine is bigger than yours” is still used as a marketing differentiator. I’m probably tilting at windmills here a bit, since these filler releases keep the wire services afloat, so it’s not all bad. – MR Time for the Software Security Group: It’s amazing how we can get access to lots of data and still ignore it. Gary McGraw, one of the deans of software security, has a good summary of his ongoing BSIMM (Building Security In) research on the InformIT blog. He covers who should do software security, how big your group should be, and also how many software security folks there are out there (not enough). In 2010, band-aids (WAFs, etc.) will still prevail, but if you don’t start thinking of how to structurally address the issue, which means a PROGRAM and a group responsible to execute on that program, things are never going to improve. – MR Saving Private MySQL: Charles Babcock’s post on “MySQL’s Former Owner Can’t ‘Save’ It After Selling It” was thought provoking. It seems

EMC/RSA announced the acquisition of Archer Technologies for an undisclosed price. The move adds an IT GRC tool to EMC/RSA’s existing technologies for configuration management (Ionix) and SIEM/Log Management (EnVision). Though EMC/RSA’s overall security strategy remains a mystery, they claim to be driving towards packaging technologies to solve specific customer use cases – such as security operations, compliance, and cloud security. This kind of packaging makes a lot of sense, since customers don’t wake up and say “I want to buy widget X today” – instead they focus on solving specific problems. The rubber meets the road based on how the vendor has ‘defined’ the use case to suit what its product does. Archer as an IT GRC platform fills in the highest level of the visualization by mapping IT data to business processes. The rationale for EMC/RSA is clear. Buying Archer allows existing RSA security and compliance tools, as well as some other EMC tools, to pump data into Archer via its SmartSuite set of interfaces. This data maps to business processes enumerated within Archer (through a ton of professional services) to visualize process and report on metrics for those processes. This addresses one of the key issues security managers (and technology companies) grapple with: showing relevance. It’s hard to take security data and make it relevant to business leaders. A tool like Archer, properly implemented and maintained, can do that. The rationale for Archer doing the deal now is not as clear. By all outward indications, the company had increasing momentum. They brought on Bain Capital as an investor in late 2008, and always claimed profitability. So this wasn’t a sale under duress. The Archer folks paid lip service to investing more in sales and marketing and obviously leveraging the EMC/RSA sales force to accelerate growth. The vendor ranking exercises done by big research also drove this outcome, as Archer faced an uphill battle competing against bigger players in IT GRC (like Oracle) for a position in the leader area. And we all know that you need to be in the leader area to sell to large enterprises. Ultimately it was likely a deal Archer couldn’t refuse, and that means a higher multiple (as opposed to lower). The deal size was not mentioned, though 451 Group estimates the deal was north of $100 million (about 3x bookings) – which seems too low. Customer Impact IT GRC remains a large enterprise technology, with success requiring a significant amount of integration within the customer environment. This deal doesn’t change that because success of GRC depends more on the customer getting their processes in place than the technology itself working. Being affiliated with EMC/RSA doesn’t help the customer get their own politics and internal processes in line to leverage a process visualization platform. Archer customers see little value in the deal, and perhaps some negative value since they now have to deal with EMC/RSA and inevitably the bigger organization will slow innovation. But Archer customers aren’t going anywhere, since their organizations have already bet the ranch and put in the resources to presumably make the tool work. More benefit accrues to companies looking at Archer, since any corporate viability concerns are now off the table. Users should expect better integration between the RSA security tools, the EMC process automation tools, and Archer – especially since the companies have been working together for years, and there is already a middleware/abstraction layer in the works to facilitate integration. In concept anyway, since EMC/RSA don’t really have a sterling track record of clean and timely technology integration. Issues As with every big company acquisition, issues emerge around organizational headwinds and channel conflict. Archer was bought by the RSA division, which focuses on security and sells to the technology user. But by definition Archer’s value is to visualize across not just technology, but other business processes as well. The success of this deal will literally hing on whether Archer can “break out” of the RSA silo and go to market as part of EMC’s larger bag of tricks. Interestingly enough, back in May ConfigureSoft was bought by the Ionix group, which focuses on automating IT operations and seemed like a more logical fit with Archer. As a reminder to the hazards of organizational headwinds, just think back to ISS ending up within the IBM Global Services Group. We’ll be keeping an eye on this. Issues also inevitably surface around channel conflict, especially relative to professional services. Archer is a services-heavy platform (more like a toolkit) that requires a significant amount of integration for any chance of success. To date, the Big 4 integrators have driven a lot of Archer deployments, but historically EMC likes to take the revenue for themselves over time. How well the EMC field team understands and can discuss GRC’s value will also determine ongoing success. Bottom Line IT GRC is not really a market – it’s the highest layer in a company’s IT management stack and only really applicable to the largest enterprises. Archer was one of the leading vendors and EMC/RSA needed to own real estate in that sector sooner or later. This deal does not have a lot of impact on customers, as this is not going to miraculously result in IT GRC breaking out as a market category. The constraint isn’t technology – it’s internal politics and process. We also can’t shake the nagging feeling that shifting large amounts of resources away from security and into compliance documentation may not be a good idea. Customers need to ensure that any investment in a tool like Archer (and the large services costs to use it) will really save money and effort within the first 3 years of the project, and is not being done to the exclusion of security blocking and tackling. The truth is it’s all too easy for projects like this to under-deliver or potentially explode – adding complexity instead of reducing it – no matter how good the tool. Share:

I’m incredibly excited to finally announce that as of today, Mike Rothman is joining Securosis. This is a full merger of Security Incite and Securosis, and something I’ve been looking forward to for years. Back when I started the Securosis blog over 3 years ago I was still an analyst at Gartner and was interested in participating more with the open security community. A year later I decided to leave Gartner and the blog became my employer. I wasn’t certain exactly what I wanted to do, and was restricted a bit due to my non-compete, but I quickly learned that I was able to support myself and my family as an independent voice. Mike was running Incite at the time, and seeing him succeed helped calm some of my fears about jumping out of a stable, enjoyable job. Mike also gave me some crucial advice that was incredibly helpful as I set myself up. One of my main goals in leaving Gartner was to gain the freedom to both participate more with, and give back to, the security community. Gartner was great, but the nature of its business model prevents analysts from giving away their content to non-clients, and restricts some of their participation in the greater community. It’s also hard to perform certain kinds of primary research, especially longer-term projects. Since I had a non-compete, I sort of needed to give everything away for free anyway. Things were running well, but I was also limited in how much I could cover or produce on my own. I may have published more written words than any other security analyst out there (between papers and blog posts), but it was still a self-limiting situation. Then about 18 months ago Adrian joined and turned my solo operation into an actual analyst firm. At the same time Mike and I realized we shared a common vision for where we’d like to take the research and analysis game, and started setting up to combine operations. We even had a nifty company name and were working on the nitty-gritty details. When we had our very first conversation about teaming up, Mike told me there was only one person he’d work for again, but there wasn’t anything on the radar. Then, of course, he got the call right before we wrote up the final paperwork. We both saw this as a delay, not an end, and the time is finally here. This is exciting to me for multiple reasons. First, we now gain an experienced analyst who has been through the wringer with one of the major firms (Meta), thrived as an independent analyst, and fought it out on the mean streets of vendor-land. There aren’t many great analysts out there – and even fewer with Mike’s drive, productivity, experience, and vision. This also enables us to create the kind of challenging research environment I’ve missed since leaving Gartner. With Mike and our Contributors (David Mortman, David Meier, and Chris Pepper) we now have a team of six highly-opinionated and experienced individuals ready to challenge and push each other in ways simply not possible with only 2-3 people. Mike also shares my core values. Everything we write is for the end user, no matter the actual target audience. We should always give away as much as possible for free. We should conduct real primary research, as opposed to merely commenting on the world around us. Everything we produce should be pragmatic and help someone get their job done better and faster. Our research should be as objective and unbiased as possible, and we’ll use transparency and our no-BS approach as enforcement mechanisms. Finally, we’re lifers in the security industry – this is a lifestyle business, not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is also an amazing opportunity to work closely with one of the people I respect most in our industry. Someone I’ve become close friends with since first meeting on the rubber-chicken circuit. In our updated About section and the Merger FAQ, there’s a lot of talk about all the new things this enables us to do, and the additional value for our supporters and paying clients. But to me the important part is I get to work with someone I like and respect. Someone I know will push me like few others out there. Someone who shares my vision, and is fun to work with. The only bad part is the commute. It’s going to be a real bi%^& to fly Mike out to Phoenix for Happy Hour every week. Share:

Technology start-ups are unique organisms that affect employees very differently than other types of companies. Tech start-ups are about bringing new ideas to market. They are about change, and often founded on an alternative perspective of how to conduct business. They are more likely to leverage new technologies, hire unique people, and try different approaches to marketing, sales, and solving business problems. People who work at start-ups put more of themselves into their jobs, work a little harder, and are more impassioned about achievement and success. The entire frenetic experience is accelerated to the point where you compress years into months, providing an intimate level of participation not available at larger firms – the experience is addictive. When technology start-ups don’t succeed (the most common case), they take a lot out of their people. Failures result in layoffs or shutdown, and go from decision to unfortunate conclusion overnight. The technology and products employees have been pouring themselves into typically vanish. That’s when you start thinking about what went right and what went wrong, what worked and what didn’t. You think about what you would do differently next time. That process ultimately ends with some pent-up ideas and frustrations which – if you let them eat at you – eventually drive you back into the technology start-up arena. It took me 12 years and 5 start-ups to figure out that I was on a merry-go-round without end, unless I made the choice to step off and be comfortable with my decision. It took significant personal change to accept that no matter how good the vision, judgement, execution, and assembled team were, success was far from guaranteed. Where am I going with this? As you have probably read by now, 18 months ago Rich Mogull, Mike Rothman, and I planned a new IT research firm. Within a few weeks we got the bad news: Mike was going to join a small security technology company to get back on the merry-go-round. From talking with Mike, I knew he had to join them for all the reasons I mentioned above. I could see it in his face, and in the same position I would have done exactly the same thing. Sure, Securosis is a technology start-up as well, but it’s different. While hopeful Mike would be back in 24 months, I could not know for certain. If you are a follower of the Securosis blog, you have witnessed the new site launch in early 2009 and seen our project work evolve dramatically. Much of this was part of the original vision. We kept most of our original plans, jettisoned a few, streamlined others, and moved forward. We found some of our ideas just did not work that well, and others required more resources. We have worked continuously to sharpen our vision of who we are and why we are different, but we have a ways to go. I can say both Rich and I are ecstatic to have Mike formally join the team. It’s not change in my mind, but rather empowerment. Mike brings skills neither of us possesses, and a renewed determination that will help us execute on our initial vision. We will be able to tackle larger projects, cover more technologies, and offer more services. Plus I am looking forward to working with Mike on a daily basis! This is a pretty big day for us here, and thought it appropriate to share some of the thoughts, planning, and emotions behind this announcement. Share:

What are you announcing? Today, we are announcing that Mike Rothman is joining Securosis as Analyst/President (Rich remains Analyst/CEO). This is a full merger of Securosis and Security Incite. Why is this a good move for Securosis? Not to sound trite, but bringing on Mike is a no-brainer. This immediately and significantly broadens Securosis’ coverage and positions us to grow materially in ways we couldn’t do without another great analyst. There are very few people out there with Mike’s experience as an independent analyst and entrepreneur. Mike proved he could thrive as a one-man operation (his jump to eIQ wasn’t a financial necessity), completely shares our values, and brings an incredible range of experience to the table. Those who read our blog and free research reports gain additional content in areas we simply couldn’t cover. Mike will be leading our network and endpoint security coverage, as well as bringing over the Pragmatic CSO (sorry, you still have to pay for it) and the Daily Incite (which we’re restructuring a bit, as you’ll see later in this FAQ). Given Rich and Adrian’s coverage overlap, adding Mike nearly doubles our coverage… with our contributors (David Mortman, Dave Meier, and Chris Pepper) rounding us out even more. Mike is also a “high producer”, which means we’ll deliver even more free content to the community. Our existing clients now gain access to an additional analyst, and Mike’s clients now gain access to all of the Securosis resources and people. Aside from covering different technical areas, Mike brings “in the trenches” strategy, marketing, and business analysis experience that neither Rich nor Adrian have, as they specialize more on the tech side. In terms of the company, this also allows us to finally execute on the vision we first started building 18 months ago (Securosis has been around longer, but that’s when we came up with our long-term vision). As we’ll discuss in a second, we have some big plans for new products, and we honestly couldn’t achieve our goals without someone of Mike’s experience. Why is this a good move for Security Incite and Mike Rothman? Mike digs a lot deeper into his perspectives in a POPE (People, Opportunity, Product, Exit) analysis, but basically there was a limitation in the impact Mike could have and what he could do as a solo practitioner. Finding kindred spirits in Rich and Adrian enables us to build the next great IT research firm. This, in turn, is a prime opportunity to build products targeting a grossly underserved market (mid-market security and IT professionals), while continuing to give back to the community by publishing free research. This allows Mike to get back to his roots as a network security analyst and enables Securosis to provide full and broad coverage of all security and compliance topics, which benefits both end user and vendor clients. But mostly it’s as Rich said: a great opportunity to work with great guys and build something great. What is the research philosophy of Securosis? Will that change now that Mike Rothman is part of the team? Securosis’ core operating philosophy is Totally Transparent Research. That says it all. Bringing Mike to the team doesn’t change a thing. In fact, he wouldn’t have it any other way. As Mike has produced (as a META analyst) and bought (as a vendor) “mostly opaque” research from the big research shops, he certainly understands the limitations of that approach and knows there is a better way. Who is your target customer? Securosis will target mid-market security and IT professionals. These folks have perhaps the worst job in IT. They have most of the same problems as larger enterprises, but far fewer resources and less funding. Helping these folks ensure and accelerate the success of their projects is our core objective for new information products and syndicated research offerings in 2010. Will all the research remain free and available on the Securosis blog? Yes, all of the Securosis primary research will continue to be published on the blog. Our research may be packaged up and available in document form from our sponsors, but the core research will always appear first on the blog. This is a critical leg of the Totally Transparent Research model. Our community picks apart our research and makes it better. That makes the end result more actionable and more effective. What kind of information products are you going to produce? We’re not ready to announce our product strategy quite yet, but suffice it to say we’ll have a family of products designed to accelerate security and compliance project success. The entry price will be modest and participating in a web-based community will be a key part of the customer experience. What about the existing retainer clients of Securosis? How will they be supported? Securosis will continue to support existing retainer customers. We’ve rolled out a new set of retainer packages for clients interested in an ongoing relationship. All our analysts participate in supporting our retainer clients. What’s going to happen to the Daily Incite? The Daily Incite is becoming the Securosis Incite and will continue to provide hard-hitting and hopefully entertaining commentary on the happenings in the security industry. Now we have 6 contributors to add their own “Incite” to the mix. We are also supplementing the Incite with other structured weekly blog posts including the “Securosis FireStarter,” which will spur discussion and challenge the status quo. We’ll continue producing the Securosis Weekly Summary to keep everyone up to date on what we’ve been up to each week. What about the Pragmatic CSO? The Pragmatic CSO is alive and well. You can still buy the book on the website and that isn’t changing. You may have noticed many of the research models Securosis has rolled out over the past year are “Pragmatic” in both name and nature. That’s not an accident. Taking a pragmatic approach is central to our philosophy of security and the Pragmatic CSO is the centerpiece of that endeavor. So you can expect lots more Pragmatism from Securosis over the coming years.

I am no fan of “security through obscurity”. Peer review and open discourse on security have proven essential in development of network protocols and cryptographic algorithms. Regardless, that does not mean I choose to disclose everything. I may disclose protocols and approach, but certain details I choose to remit. Case in point: if I were Twitter, and wanted to reduce account hijacking by ridding myself of weak passwords which can be easily guessed, I would not disclose my list of weak passwords to the user community. As noted by TechCrunch: If you’re on Twitter, that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ (cough cough) and ‘123456’ are too obvious to be picked. It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page. Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voila, there they are, all 370 of them. The common attack vector is to perform a dictionary attack on known accounts. A good dictionary is an important factor for success. It is much easier to create a good dictionary if you know for certain many common passwords will not be present. Making the list easy to discover makes it much easier for someone to tune their dictionary. I applaud Twitter for trying to improve passwords and thereby making them tougher to guess, but targeted attacks just got better as well. Because here’s a list of 370 passwords I don’t have to test. Share:

Fall of 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the start of my professional security career. That was the first day someone stuck a yellow shirt on my back and sent me into a crowd of drunk college football fans at the University of Colorado (later famous for its student riots). I’m pretty sure someone screwed up, since it was my first day on the job and I was assigned a rover position – which normally goes to someone who knows what the f&%$ they are doing, not some 18 year old, 135-lb kid right out of high school. And yes, I was breaking up fights on my first day (the stadium wasn’t dry until a few years later). If you asked me then, I never would have guessed I’d spend the next couple decades working through the security ranks, eventually letting my teenage geek/hacker side take over. Over that time I’ve come to rely on the following guiding principles in everything from designing my personal security to giving advice to clients: Don’t expect human behavior to change. Ever. You cannot survive with defense alone. Not all threats are equal, and all checklists are wrong. You cannot eliminate all vulnerabilities. You will be breached. There’s a positive side to each of these negative principles: Design security controls that account for human behavior. Study cognitive science and practical psychology to support your decisions. This is also critical for gaining support for security initiatives, not just design of individual controls. Engage in intelligence and counter-threat operations to the best of your ability. Once an attack has started, your first line of security has already failed. Use checklists to remember the simple stuff, but any real security must be designed using a risk-based approach. As a corollary, you can’t implement risk-based security if you don’t really understand the risks; and most people don’t understand the risks. Be the expert. Adopt anti-exploitation wherever possible. Vulnerability-driven security is always behind the threat. React faster and better. Incident response is more important than any other single security control. With one final piece of advice – keep it simple and pragmatic. And after 20 years, that’s all I’ve got… Share:

I just noticed this story in my feed reader from before Christmas. I don’t know why I found the Computerworld story on the Massachusetts inmate ‘hacker’ so funny, but I do. Perhaps it is because I envision the prosecutor struggling to come up with a punishable crime. In fact I am not totally sure what law Janosko violated. An additional 18 month sentence for ‘abusing’ a computer provided by the correctional facility … I was unaware such a law existed. Does the state now have to report the breach? In 2006, Janosko managed to circumvent computer controls and use the machine to send e-mail and cull data on more than 1,100 Plymouth County prison employees. He gained access to sensitive information such as their dates of birth, Social Security Numbers, telephone numbers, home addresses and employment records. That’s pretty good as terminals, especially those without USB or other forms of external storage, can require a lot of manual work to hack. I bet the prosecutors had to think long and hard on how to charge Janosko. I don’t exactly know what ‘abusing’ a computer means, unless of course you do something like the scene from Office Space when they exact some revenge on a printer. He pleaded guilty to “one count of damaging a protected computer”, but I am not sure how they quantified damages here as it seems improbable a dumb terminal or the associated server could be damaged by bypassing the application interface. Worst case you reboot the server. Maybe this is some form of “unintended use”, or the computer equivalent to ripping off mattress tags. If I was in his shoes, I would have claimed it was ‘research’! Share:

It’s easy to say that every year’s been a big year, but in our case we’ve got the goods to back it up. Aside from doubling the size of the Securosis team, I added a new member to my family and managed to still keep things running. With all our writing and speaking we managed to hit every corner of the industry. We created a new model for patch management, started our Pragmatic series of presentations, popped off a few major whitepapers on application and data security, launched a new design for the site, played a big role in pushing out the 2.0 version of the Cloud Security Alliance Guidance, and… well, a lot of stuff. And I won’t mention certain words I used at the RSA Conference (where we started our annual Disaster Recovery Breakfast), or certain wardrobe failures at Defcon. On the personal front, aside from starting my journey as a father, I met Jimmy Buffett, finally recovered enough from my shoulder surgery to start martial arts again, knocked off a half-marathon and a bunch of 10K races, spent 5 days in Puerto Vallarta with my wife, and installed solar in our home (just in time for a week of cloudy weather). It’s been a pretty great year. I’ve never been a fan of predictions, so I thought it might instead be nice to collect some lessons learned from the Securosis team, with a peek at what we’re watching for 2010. – Rich Adrian The biggest change for me over the last year has been my transformation from CTO to analyst. I love the breadth of security technologies I get to work with in this role. I see so much more of the industry as a whole and it totally changed my perspective. I have a better appreciation for the challenges end users face, even more than as a CIO, as I see it across multiple companies. This comes at the expense of some enthusiasm, the essence of which is captured in the post Technology vs. Practicality I wrote back in July. Moving forward, the ‘Cloud’, however you choose to define it, is here. Informally looking at software downloads, security product services and a few other security related activities over the last 30 days, I see ‘s3.amazon.com’ or similar in half the URLs I access. This tidal wave has only just begun. With it, I am seeing a renewed awareness of security by IT admins and developers. I am hearing a collective “Hey, wait a minute, if all my stuff is out there…”, and with it comes all the security questions that should have been posed back when data and servers were all on-premise. This upheaval is going to make 2010 a fun year in security. Meier 2009 for me wasn’t a whole lot different than the past couple of years from a consultative role. Although I probably pushed the hardest I ever have this year to build security in as architecture (not as an afterthought) I still, quite often, found myself in a remediation role. Things are changing – slowly. The enterprise (large and mid-size) is very aware of risk, but seems to still only be motivated in areas where it’s directly tied to monetary penalties (i.e., PCI and the government / defense side). I hope next year brings better balance and foresight in this regard. As for 2010 I’m going to agree with Adrian in reference to the ‘Cloud’ and its unquestionable impetus. But it will still be an interesting year of pushing the seams of these services to the limits and finding out where they don’t hold water. Mid to late 2009 showed me some examples of cloud services being pulled back in-house and the use case considerably reengineered. 2010 is going to be a good year for an oft quiet topic: secure network architecture – especially with regards to services utilizing the ‘Cloud’. The design and operation of these hybrid networks is going to become more prevalent as network and transport security are continually hammered on for weaknesses. I’m sure it’s safe to say we’ll see a few cloudbursts along the way. Rich My research moved in a bit of a different direction than I expected this year. Actually, two different directions. Project Quant really changed some of my views on security metrics, and I’m now approaching metrics problems from a different perspective. I’ve come to believe that we need to spend more time on operational security metrics than the management and risk metrics we’ve mostly focused on. Operational metrics are a far more powerful tool to improve our efficiency and effectiveness, and communicate these to non-security professionals. If after decades we’re still struggling with patch management, it seems long past time to focus on the basics and stop chasing whatever is sexy at the moment. I’ve also started paying a lot more attention to the practical implications of cognitive science, psychology, and economics. Understanding why people make the decisions they do, and how these individual decisions play out on a collective scale (economics) are, I believe, the most important factors when designing and implementing security. I learned that we shouldn’t assume everyone has the basics down, and that if we understand how and why people make the decisions they do, we can design far more effective security. On the side, I also learned a lot about skepticism and logical fallacies, which has heavily influenced how I conduct my research. Our security is a heck of a lot better when it’s mixed with a little science. In 2010 I plan to focus more on building our industry up. I’d like to become more involved in information-sharing exercises and improving the quality of our metrics, especially those around breaches and fraud. Also, like Hoff and Adam, I’m here if Howard Schmidt and our government call – I’d love to contribute more to our national (and international) cybersecurity efforts if they’re willing to have me. We need to stop complaining and start helping. I’ve been fortunate to have a few opportunities to