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We in the security industry tend to lump small and medium businesses together into “SMB”, but there are massive differences between a 20-person retail outlet and even a 100-person operation. These suggestions are specifically for small businesses with limited resources, based on everything we know about the latest threats and security defenses. The following advice is not conditional – there really isn’t any safe middle ground, and these recommendations aren’t very expensive. These are designed to limit the chance you will be hit with attacks that compromise your finances or ability to continue business operations, and we’re ignoring everything else: Update all your computers to the latest operating systems and web browsers – this is Windows 7 or Mac OS X 10.6 as of this writing. On Windows, use at least Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.6 (Firefox isn’t necessarily any more secure than the latest versions of IE). On Macs, use Firefox 3.6. Most small business struggle with keeping malware off their computers, and the latest operating systems are far more secure than earlier versions. Windows XP is nearly 10 years old at this point – odds are most of your cars are newer than that. Turn on automatic updates (Windows Update, or Software Update on Mac) and set them to check and automatically install patches daily. If this breaks software you need, find an alternative program rather than turning off updates. Keeping your system patched is your best security defense, because most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities. But since those vulnerabilities are converted to attacks within hours of becoming public (when the patch is released, if not earlier), you need to patch as quickly as possible. Use a dedicated computer for your online banking and financial software. Never check email on this system. Never use it to browse any Web site except your bank. Never install any applications other than your financial application. You can do this by setting up a non-administrative user account and then setting parental controls to restrict what Web sites it can visit. Cheap computers are $200 (for a new PC) and $700 (for a new Mac mini) and this blocks the single most common method for bad guys to steal money from small businesses, which is compromising a machine and then stealing credentials via a software key logger. Currently, the biggest source of financial losses for small business is malicious software sniffing your online bank credentials, which are then used to transfer funds directly to money mules. This is a better investment than any antivirus program. Arrange with your bank to require in-person or phone confirmation for any transfers over a certain amount, and check your account daily. Yes, react faster is applicable here as well. The sooner you learn about an attempt to move money from your account, the more likely you’ll be able to stop it. Remember that business accounts do not have the same fraud protections as consumer accounts, and if someone transfers your money out because they broke into your online banking account, it is very unlikely you will ever recover the funds. Buy backup software that supports both local and remote backups, like CrashPlan. Backup locally to hard drives, and keep at least one backup for any major systems off-site but accessible. Then subscribe to the online backup service for any critical business files. Remember that online backups are slow and take a long time to restore, which is why you want something closer to home. Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Mac OS X Backups is a good resource for developing your backup strategy, even if you are on Windows 7 (which includes some built-in backup features). Hard drives aren’t designed to last more than a few years, and all sorts of mistakes can destroy your data. Those are my top 5, but here are a few more: Turn on the firewalls on all your computers. They can’t stop all attacks, but do reduce some risks, such as if another computer on the network (which might just mean in the same coffee shop) is compromised by bad guys, or someone connects an infected computer (like a personal laptop) to the network. Have employees use non-administrator accounts (standard users) if at all possible. This also helps limit the chances of those computers being exploited, and if they are, will limit the exploitation. If you have shared computers, use non-administrator accounts and turn on parental controls to restrict what can be installed on them. If possible, don’t even let them browse the web or check email (this really depends on the kind of business you have… if employees complain, buy an iPad or spare computer that isn’t needed for business, and isn’t tied to any other computer). Most exploits today are through email, web browsing, and infected USB devices – this helps with all three. Use an email service that filters spam and viruses before they actually reach your account. If you accept payments/credit cards, use a service and make sure they can document that their setup is PCI compliant, that card numbers are encrypted, and that any remote access they use for support has a unique username and password that is changed every 90 days. Put those requirements into the contract. Failing to take these precautions makes a breach much more likely. Install antivirus from a major vendor (if you are on Windows). There is a reason this is last on the list – you shouldn’t even think about this before doing everything else above. Share:

You all know the story. If you need to know the time, ask the consultant, who will then proceed to tell you the time from your own watch. We all laugh, but there is a lot of truth in this joke – as there usually is. Consultants are a necessary evil for many of us. We don’t have the leeway to hire full time employees (especially when Wall Street is still watching employee rolls like hawks), but we have too much work to do. So we bring in some temporary help to get stuff done. I’ve been a consultant, and the Securosis business still involves some project-oriented work. The problem is that most organizations don’t utilize their consultants properly. My thinking was triggered by a post on infoseccynic.com from 2009 (hat tip to infosecisland) that discusses the most annoying consultants. It’s easy to blame the consultant when things go wrong, and sometimes they are to blame. You tend to run into the dumb, lame, and lazy consultants; and sometimes it’s too late before you realize the consultant is taking you for a ride. Each of the profiles mentioned in the annoying consultant post is one of those. They waste time, they deliberate, and they ride the fence because it usually ends up resulting in more billable hours for them. Having been on both sides of the fence with consultants, here are a few tips to get the most out of temporary resources. Scope tightly – Like it or not, consultants need to be told what to do. Most project managers suck at that, but then get pissed when the consultant doesn’t read their minds. Going into any project: have a tight scoping document, and a process for changes. Fixed price – Contracting for a project at a fixed cost will save you a lot of heartburn. There is no incentive for the consultant to take more time if they are paid the same whether the project takes 5 hours or 10. And if you have specified a process for changes, then there are no surprises if/when the scope evolves. Demand accountability – This gets back to Management 101. Does the consultant do a weekly or daily status report (depending on the project)? Do you read them the riot act when they miss dates? Some consultants will take you for a ride, but only if you let them. Change the horse – Many project managers are scared to get rid of an underperforming consultant. One of the reasons you got temporary help in the first place is to avoid HR issues if it doesn’t work out. Make sure you have a clear ‘out’ clause in the contract, but if it isn’t working, don’t waste time deliberating – just move on. Pay for value – Some folks have very specialized skills and those skills are valuable. But the best folks in the world demand a premium because they’ll get the job done better and faster than someone else. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Get the right person and let them do the work – you’ll save a lot in the long term. Be accountable – Ultimately the success (or failure) of any project lies at the feet of the project manager. It’s about proper scoping, lining up executive support, working the system, lining up the resources, and getting the most out of the project team. When things go wrong, ultimately it’s the project manager’s fault. Don’t point fingers – fix the problem. So go back and look at the annoying consultant profiles mentioned in the post above. If any of those folks are on your project teams, man (or woman) up and take care of business. As I’ve said a zillion times over the years, I’m not in the excuses business. Neither are you. Consultants are a necessary evil, but they can be a tremendous resource if utilized effectively. Share:

If you keep up with the security news at all, you know that on June 9th the email addresses and the device ICC-ID for at least 114,000 3G iPad subscribers were exposed. Leaving aside any of the hype around disclosure, FBI investigations, and bad PR, here are the important bits: We don’t know if bad guys got their hands on this information, but it is safest to assume they did. For most of you, having your email address potentially exposed isn’t a big deal. It might be a problem for some of the famous and .gov types on the list. The ICC-ID is the unique code assigned to the SIM card. This isn’t necessarily tied to your phone number, but… It turns out there are trivial ways to convert the ICC-ID into the IMSI here in the US according to Chris Paget (someone who knows about these things). The IMSI is the main identifier your mobile operator uses to identify your phone, and is tied to your phone number. If you know an IMSI, and you are a hacker, it greatly aids everything from location tracking to call interception. This is a non-trivial problem, especially for anyone who might be a target of an experienced attacker… like all you .gov types. You don’t make phone calls on your iPad, but any other 3G data is potentially exposed, as is your location. Everything you need to know is in this presentation from the Source Boston conference by Nick DePetrillo and Don Bailey.](http://www.sourceconference.com/bos10pubs/carmen.pdf) Realistically, very few iPad 3G owners will be subject to these kinds of attacks, even if bad guys accessed the information, but that doesn’t matter. Replacing the SIM card is an easy fix, and I suggest you call AT&T up and request a new one. Share:

This Monday’s FireStarter prompted a few interesting behind-the-scenes conversations with a handful of security vendors centering on product strategy in the face of the recent acquisitions in Database Activity Monitoring. The questions were mostly around the state of the database activity monitoring market, where it is going, and how the technology complements and competes with other security technologies. But what I consider a common misconception came up in all of these exchanges, having to do with the motivation behind Oracle & IBMs recent acquisitions. The basic premise went something like: “Of course IBM and Oracle made investments into DAM – they are database vendors. They needed this technology to secure databases and monitor transactions. Microsoft will be next to step up to the plate and acquire one of the remaining DAM vendors.” Hold on. Not so fast! Oracle did not make these investments simply as a database vendor looking to secure its database. IBM is a database vendor, but that is more coincidental to the Guardium acquisition than a direct driver for their investment. Security and compliance buyers are the target here. That is a different buying center than for database software, or just about any hardware or business software purchases. I offered the following parallel to one vendor: if these acquisitions are the database equivalent of SIEM monitoring and auditing the network, then that logic implies we should expect Cisco and Juniper to buy SIEM vendors, but they don’t. It’s more the operations and security management companies who make these investments. The customer of DAM technologies is the operations or security buyer. That’s not the same person who evaluates and purchases database and financial applications. And it’s certainly not a database admin! The DBA is only an evaluator of efficacy and ease of use during a proof of concept. People think that Oracle and IBM, who made splashes with Secerno and Guardium purchases, were the first big names in this market, but that is not the case. Database tools vendor Embarcadero and security vendor Symantec both launched and folded failed DAM products long ago. Netezza is a business intelligence and data warehousing firm. Fortinet describes themselves as a network security company. Quest (DB tools), McAfee (security) and EMC (data and data center management) have all kicked the tires at one time or another because their buyers have shown interest. None of these firms are database vendors, but their customers buy technologies to help reduce management costs, facilitate compliance, and secure infrastructure. I believe the Guardium and Secerno purchases were made for operations and security management. It made sense for IBM and Oracle to invest, but not because of their database offerings. These investments were logical because of their other products, because of their views of their role in the data center, and thanks to their respective visions for operations management. Ultimately that’s why I think McAfee and EMC need to invest in this technology, and Microsoft doesn’t. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading post: Massachusetts Data Privacy Standard: Comply Or Not? Rich quoted in Entrepreneur Magazine. Mike quoted in Information Security Magazine. Adrian quoted in Open Source Databases Pose Unique Security Challenges. Rich, Zach, and Martin on episode 200 of the Network Security Podcast. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Draft Data Security Survey for Review. It’s been a weird week over here, as all of our posts were nuts and bolts for various projects. I got some great feedback on this draft survey, with a few more comments I need to post, but it could also use more review if any of you have the time. Mike Rothman: FireStarter: Get Ready for Oracle’s New WAF. Oracle has a plan. But it’s a secret. Speculating about it is fun. David Mortman: FireStarter: Get Ready for Oracle’s New WAF. Welcome, Oracle, to the first WAFs club. Adrian Lane: One of our meatier Quant Posts: Configure. Other Securosis Posts Incite 6/9/2010: Creating Excitement. Draft Data Security Survey for Review. Friday Summary: June 4, 2010. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Why sensible people reject the truth. While it isn’t security specific, this article from New Scientist discusses some of the fascinating reasons people frequently reject science and facts which conflict with their personal beliefs. As security professionals our challenges are often more about understaning people than technology. Mike Rothman: Not so much an “E” ticket. Magical ideas about how TSA can be more Mouse-like from Shrdlu. David Mortman: Google Changed Reputation and Privacy Forever. Adrian Lane: Raffael Marty wrote a really good post on Maturity Scale for Log Management and Analysis. Project Quant Posts DB Quant: Secure Metrics, Part 4, Shield. DB Quant: Secure Metrics, Part 3, Restrict Access. DB Quant: Secure Metrics, Part 2, Configure. DB Quant: Secure Metrics, Part 1, Patch. NSO Quant: Monitor Process Map. DB Quant: Discovery Metrics, Part 4, Access and Authorization. Research Reports and Presentations White Paper: Endpoint Security Fundamentals. Understanding and Selecting a Database Encryption or Tokenization Solution. Low Hanging Fruit: Quick Wins with Data Loss Prevention. Top News and Posts Microsoft, Apple Ship Security Updates via Brian Krebs. Mass SQL Injection Attack from our friends over at Threatpost. Good advice: Three things to harden OpenSSH on Linux. Is correlation killing the SIEM market?. Windows Help Centre Vuln and some commentary on disclosure. Digital River sues over data breach. IT lesson from BP disaster. AT&T leaked iPad Owner Data. This one correctly points out that it’s an AT&T breach, rather than pretending it was an Apple problem to scare up traffic. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected, Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. Usually when a comment starts with “This is a terrific idea …” it gets deleted as blog spam, but not this week, as the best comment goes to DMcElligott, in response to Rich’s Draft Data Security Survey for Review. This is a terrific idea. I am very curious about the results you see from this. My suggestions: In the regulation questions

Is it me or has the term “insider threat” disappeared from security marketing vernacular? Clearly insiders are still doing their thing. Check out a recent example of insider fraud at Bank of America. The perpetrator was a phone technical support rep, who would steal account records when someone called for help. Awesome. Of course, the guy got caught. Evidently trying to sell private sensitive information to an undercover FBI agent is risky. It is good to see law enforcement getting ahead of some issues, but I suspect for every one of these happy endings (since no customers actually lost anything) there are hundreds who get away with it. It’s a good idea to closely monitor your personal banking and credit accounts, and make sure you have an identity theft response plan. Unfortunately it’s not if, but when it happens to you. Let’s put our corporate security hats back on and remember the reality of our situation. Some attacks cannot be defended against – not proactively, anyway. This crime was committed by a trusted employee with access to sensitive customer data. BofA could not do business without giving folks access to sensitive data. So locking down the data isn’t an answer. It doesn’t seem he used a USB stick or any other technical device to exfiltrate the data, so there isn’t a specific technical control that would have made a difference. No product can defend against an insider with access and a notepad. The good news is that insiders with notepads don’t scale very well, but that gets back to risk management and spending wisely to protect the most valuable assets from the most likely attack vectors. So even though the industry isn’t really talking about insider threats much anymore (we’ve moved on to more relevant topics like cloud security), fraud from insiders is still happening and always will. Always remember there is no 100% security, so revisit that incident response plan often. Share:

Reporting and Forensics are the principal products of a SIEM system. We have pushed, prodded, and poked at the data to get it into a manageable format, so now we need to put it to use. Reports and forensic analysis are the features most users work with on a day to day basis. Collection, normalization, correlation and all the other things we do are just to get us to the point where we can conduct forensics and report on our findings. These features play a big part in customer satisfaction, so while we’ll dig in to describe how the technology works, we will also discuss what to look for when making buying decisions. Reporting For those of us who have been in the industry for a long time, the term ‘reporting’ brings back bad memories. It evokes hundreds of pages of printouts on tractor feed paper, with thousands of entries, each row looking exactly the same as the last. It brings to mind hours of scanning these lines, yellow highlighter in hand, marking unusual entries. It brings to mind the tailoring of reports to include new data, excluding unneeded columns, importing files into print services, and hoping nothing got messed up which might require restarting from the beginning. Those days are fortunately long gone, as SIEM and Log Management have evolved their capabilities to automate a lot of this work, providing graphical representations that allow viewing data in novel ways. Reporting is a key capability because this process was just plain hard work. To evaluate reporting features included in SIEM/LM, we need to understand what it is, and the stages of a reporting process. You will notice from the description above that there are several different steps to the production of reports, and depending on your role, you may see reporting as basically one of these subtasks. The term ‘reporting’ is a colloquialism used to encompass a group of activities: selecting, formatting, moving, and reviewing data are all parts of the reporting process. So what is reporting? At its simplest, reporting is just selecting a subset of the data we previously captured for review, focused analysis, or a permanent record (‘artifact’) of activity. Its primary use is to put data into an understandable form, so we can analyze activity and substantiate controls without having to comb through lots of irrelevant stuff. The report comprises the simplified view needed to facilitate review or, as we will discuss later, forensic analysis. We also should not be constrained by the traditional definition of a report, which is a stack of papers (or in modern days a PDF). Our definition of reporting can embrace views within an interface that facilitate analysis and investigation. The second common use is to capture and record events that demonstrates completion of an assigned task. These reports are historic records kept for verification. Trouble-ticket work orders and regulatory reports are common examples, where a report is created and ‘signed’ by both the producer of the report and an auditor. These snapshots of events may be kept within, or stored separately from, the SIEM/LM system. There are a couple basic aspects to reporting that we that we want to pay close attention to when evaluating SIEM/LM reporting capabilities: What reports are included with the standard product? How easy is it to manage and automate reports? How easy is it to create new, ad-hoc reports? What export and integration options are available? For many standard tasks and compliance needs, pre-built reports are provided by the vendor to lower costs and speed up product deployment. At minimum, vendors provide canned reports for PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA. We know that compliance is the reason many of you are reading this series, and will be the reason you invest in SIEM. Reports embody the tangible benefit to auditors, operations, and security staff. Just keep in mind that 2000 built-in reports is not necessarily better than 100, despite vendor claims. Most end users typically use 10-15 reports on an ongoing basis, and those must be automated and customized to the user’s requirements. Most end users want to feel unique, so they like to customize the reports – even if the built-in reports are fine. But there is a real need for ad-hoc reports in forensic analysis and implementation of new rules. Most policies take time to refine, to be sure that we collect only the data we need, and that what we collect is complete and accurate. So the reporting engine needs to make this process easy, or the user experience suffers dramatically. Finally, the data within the reports is often shared across different audiences and applications. The ability to export raw data for use with third party-reporting and analysis tools is important, and demands careful consideration during selection. People say end users buy interface and reports, and that is true for the most part. We call that broad idea _user experience_m and although many security professionals minimize the focus on reporting during the evaluation process, it can be a critical mistake. Reports are how you will show value from the SIEM/LM platform, so make sure the engine can support the information you need to show. Forensics It was just this past January that I read an “analyst” report on SIEM, where the author felt forensic analysis was policy driven. The report claimed that you could automate forensic analysis and do away with costly forensic investigations. Yes, you could have critical data at your fingertips by setting up policies in advance! I nearly snorted beer out my nose! Believe me: if forensic analysis was that freaking easy, we would detect events in real time and stop them from happening! If we know in advance what to look for, there is no reason to wait until afterwards to perform the analysis – instead we would alert on it. And this is really the difference between alerting on data and forensic analysis of the same data. We need to correlate data from multiple sources and have a

Some businesses are great at creating excitement. Take Apple, for instance. They create demand for their new (and upgraded) products, which creates a feeding frenzy when the public can finally buy the newest shiny object. 2 million iPads in 60 days is astounding. I suspect they’ll move a bunch of iPhone 4 units on June 24 as well (I know I’ll be upgrading mine and the Boss’). They’ve created a cult around their products, and it generates unbelievable excitement whenever there is a new toy to try. Last week I was in the Apple store dropping my trusty MacBook Pro off for service. The place was buzzing, and the rest of the mall was pretty much dead. This was 3 PM on a Thursday, but you’d think it was Christmas Eve from looking at the faces of the folks in the store. Everything about the Apple consumer experience is exciting. You may not like them, you may call me a fanboy, but in the end you can’t argue with the results. Excitement sells. If you have kids, you know all about how Disney creates the same feeling of excitement. Whether it’s seeing a new movie or going to the theme parks, this is another company that does it right. We recently took the kids down to Disneyworld, and it sure didn’t seem like the economy was crap inside the park. Each day it was packed and everyone was enjoying the happiest place on Earth, including my family. One night we stayed at a Disney property. It’s not enough to send a packet of information and confirmations a few months ahead of the trip. By the time you are ready to go, the excitement has faded. So Disney sends an email reminding you of the great time you are about to have a few days before you check in. They give you lots of details about your resort, with fancy pictures of people having a great time. The message is that you will be those people in a few days. All your problems will be gone, because you are praying in the House of the Mouse. Brilliant. I do a lot of business travel and I can tell you I’m not excited when I get to Topeka at 1am after being delayed for 3 hours at O’Hare. No one is. But it’s not like any of the business-oriented hotels do anything to engage their customers. I’m lucky if I get a snarl from the front desk attendant as I’m assigned some room near the elevator overlooking the sewage treatment facility next door. It’s a friggin’ bed and a place to shower. That’s it. It just seems to me these big ‘hospitality’ companies could do better. They can do more to engage their customers. They can do more to create a memorable experience. I expect so little that anything they do is upside. I believe most business travelers are like me. So whatever business you are in, think about how you can surprise your customers in a positive fashion (yes, those pesky users who keep screwing everything up are your customers) and create excitement about what you are doing. I know, we do security. It’s not very exciting when it’s going well. But wouldn’t it be great if a user was actually happy to see you, instead thinking, “Oh, crap, here comes Dr. No again, to tell me not to surf pr0n on the corporate network.”? Think about it. And expect more from yourself and everyone else you do business with. – Mike. Photo credits: “Magic Music Mayhem 3 (Explored)” originally uploaded by Express Monorail Incite 4 U Microsoft cannot fix stupid – The sage Rob Graham is at it again, weighing in on Google’s alleged dictum to eradicate Microsoft’s OS from all their desktops, because it’s too hard to secure. Rob makes a number of good points in the post, relative to how much Microsoft invests in security and the reality that Windows 7 and IE 8 are the most secure offerings out there. But ultimately it doesn’t matter because it’s human error that is responsible for most of the successful attacks. And if we block one path the attackers find another – they are good that way. So what to do? Do what we’ve always done. Try to eliminate the low hanging fruit that makes the bad guy’s job too easy, and make sure you have a good containment and response strategy for when something bad does happen. And it will, whatever OS you use. – MR Fight the good fight – Apparently “Symantec believes security firms should eradicate ‘false positives’ ”. I imagine that this would be pretty high on their list. Somewhere between “Rid the world of computer viruses” and “Wipe out all spam”. And I love their idea of monitoring social network sites such as Facebook and online fora to identify false positives, working tirelessly to eliminate the threat of, what was it again? Yeah, misdiagnosis. In fact, I want to help Symantec. I filled out my job application today because I want that job. Believe me, I could hunt Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all day, looking for those false positives and misdiagnosis thingies. Well, until the spam bots flood these sites with false reports of false positives. Then I’d have to bring the fight to the sports page for false positive detection, or maybe check out those critical celebrity false positives. It sounds like tough work, but hey, it’s a noble cause. Keep up the good fight, guys! – AL Good intentions – I always struggle with “policy drift”; the tendency to start from a compliant state but lose that over time due to distractions, pressure, and complacency. For example, I’m pretty bad at keeping my info in our CRM tool up to date. That’s okay, because so are Mike and Adrian. As Mathias Thurman writes over at Computerworld, this can be a killer for something crucial like patch management. Mathias describes his difficulties in keeping

We have written a lot about Oracle’s acquisition of Secerno: the key points of the acquisition, the Secerno technology, and some of the business benefits Oracle gets with the Secerno purchase. We did so mainly because Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) is a technology that Rich and I are intimately familiar with, and this acquisition shakes up the entire market. But we suspect there is more. Rich and I have a feeling that this purchase signals Oracle’s mid-term security strategy, and the Secerno platforms will comprise the key component. We don’t have any inside knowledge, but there are too many signals to go unnoticed so we are making a prediction, and our analysis goes something like this: Quick recap: Oracle acquired a Database Activity Monitoring vendor, and immediately marketed the product as a database firewall, rather than a Database Activity Monitoring product. What Oracle can do with this technology, in the short term, is: “White list” database queries. Provide “virtual patching” of the Oracle database. Monitor activity across most major relational database types. Tune policies based on monitored traffic. Block unwanted activity. Offer a method of analysis with few false positives. Does any of this sound familiar? What if I changed the phrase “white list queries” to “white list applications”? If I changed “Oracle database” to “Oracle applications”? What if I changed “block database threats” to “block application threats”? Does this sound like a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to you? Place Secerno in front of an application, add some capabilities to examine web app traffic, and it would not take much to create a Web Application Firewall to complement the “database firewall”. They can tackle SQL injection now, and provide very rudimentary IDS. It would be trivial for Oracle to add application white listing, HTML inspection, and XML/SOAP validation. Down the road you could throw in basic XSS protections and can call it WAF. Secerno DAM, plus WAF, plus the assessment capabilities already built into Oracle Management Packs, gives you a poor man’s version of Imperva. Dude, you’re getting a WAF! We won’t see much for a while yet, but when we do, it will likely begin with Oracle selling pre-tuned versions of Secerno for Oracle Applications. After a while we will see a couple new analysis options, and shortly thereafter we will be told this is not WAF, it’s better than WAF. How could these other vendors possibly know the applications as well as Oracle? How could they possibly protect them as accurately or efficiently? These WAF vendors don’t have access to the Oracle applications code, so how could they possibly deliver something as effective? We are not trying to be negative here, but we all know how Oracle markets, especially in security: Oracle is secure – you don’t need X. All vendors of X are irresponsible and beneath consideration. Oracle has purchased vendor Y in market X because Oracle cares about the security of its customers. Oracle is the leading provider of X. Buying anything other than Oracle’s X is irresponsible because other vendors use undocumented APIs and/or inferior techniques. Product X is now part of the new Oracle Suite and costs 50% more than before, but includes 100% more stuff that you don’t really need but we couldn’t sell stand-alone. OK, so we went negative. Send your hate mail to Rich. I’ll field the hate mail from the technologists out there who are screaming mad, knowing that there is a big difference between WAF policies and traffic analysis and what Secerno does. Yes and no, but it’s irrelevant from a marketing standpoint. For those who remember Dell’s “Dude” commercials from the early 2000s, they made buying a computer easy and approachable. Oracle will do the same thing with security, making the choice simple to understand, and covering all their Oracle assets. They’d be crazy not to. Market this as a full-featured WAF, blocking malicious threats with “zero false positives”, for everything from Siebel to 11G. True or not, that’s a powerful story, and it comes from the vendor who sold you half the stuff in your data center. It will win the hearts of the security “Check the box” crowd in the short term, and may win the minds of security professionals in the long term. Do you see it? Does it make sense? Tell me I am wrong! Share:

Hey everyone, As mentioned the other day, I’m currently putting together a big data security survey to better understand what data security technologies you are using, and how effective they are. I’ve gotten some excellent feedback in the comments (and a couple of emails), and have put together a draft survey for final review before we roll this out. A couple things to keep in mind if you have the time to take a look: I plan on trimming this down more, but I wanted to err on the side of including too many questions/options rather than too little. I could really use help figuring out what to cut. Everyone who contributes will be credited in the final report. After a brief bit of exclusivity (45 days) for our sponsor, all the anonymized raw data will be released to the community so you can perform your own analysis. This will be in spreadsheet format, just the same as I get it from SurveyMonkey. The draft survey is up at SurveyMonkey for review, because it is a bit too hard to replicate here on the site. To be honest, I almost feel like I’m cheating when I develop these on the site with all the public review, since the end result is way better than what I would have come up with on my own. Hopefully giving back the raw data is enough to compensate all of you for the effort. Share:

Endpoint Security is a pretty broad topic. Most folks associate it with traditional anti-virus or even the newfangled endpoint security suites. In our opinion, looking at the issue just from the perspective of the endpoint agent is myopic. To us, endpoint security is as much a program as anything else. In this paper we discuss endpoint security from a fundamental blocking and tackling perspective. We start with identifying the exposures and prioritizing remediation, then discuss specific security controls (both process and product), and also cover the compliance and incident response aspects. It’s a pretty comprehensive paper, which means it’s not short. But if you are trying to understand how to comprehensively protect your endpoint devices, this paper will provide a great perspective and allow you to put all your defenses into context. We assembled this document from the Endpoint Security Fundamentals series posted to the blog in early April, all compiled together, professionally edited, and prettified. Special thanks to Lumension Security for licensing the report. You can download the paper directly (PDF), or visit the landing page, where you can leave comments or criticism, and track revisions. Share: