Research

This week we had a special guest on the podcast, Adrian Lane from IPLocks and the Information Centric Security blog. We spend some time talking about the latest security news, then dive deep for a bit into information-centric security, one of our favorite topics. Adrian and I are firm believers, along with a few others, that we need a bit of change in the tradecraft of security to focus more on the information. But if you read this blog, you’ve heard me rant on the topic before. The episode is available here at netsecpodcast.com. Share:

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a free webcast through SANS on Understanding and Selecting a Database Activity Monitoring Solution. Here’s the description: Thanks to increasing compliance requirements and growing security threats, enterprises must adopt new strategies and techniques to protect their databases. Security and database administrators are charged with protecting these essential corporate assets, but are challenged to improve security and auditing in the least intrusive way possible. Database Activity Monitoring is emerging as a powerful tool to ensure compliance while detecting, and sometimes preventing, database attacks and internal abuse. In this webcast independent consultant Rich Mogull will review the inner workings of Database Activity Monitoring, highlight key features, and present a three step selection process. You can sign up for it here. I’ll be talking for about half the webcast, followed by 2 minute overviews from the sponsors, and closing with about 10 minutes of Q&A. It’s sponsored by Guardium, Imperva, Secerno, Sentrigo, and Tizor, which is over half the DAM market. If you want to learn about this technology, you don’t want to miss it. Share:

It appears people are recovering data off old iPhones. Whoops- looks like you can pull data out of memory using forensics tools, just like any other platform. While your Mac includes the ability to overwrite old data when formatting your hard drive to prevent recovery (very cool that this is included in a consumer operating system), there is no equivalent mechanism to clear off that “ancient” original iPhone when you trade up to the 3G version next month. For those of you who aren’t just convincing your spousees to take your “old” iPhone off your hands to justify that new toy, Securosis presents a simple process to minimize the chances of recovery. It’s not perfect, but it’s easy and should offer enough protection for those of you forced to eBay your once-precious-but-now-obsolete device: Restore the iPhone from within iTunes. On the “Info” tab, un-check all options so you don’t synchronize calendars, email, bookmarks, and contacts. On the Photos, Podcasts, and Video tabs, uncheck “Sync …”. Create 3 big playlists at large as the storage capacity of your iPhone. On the Music tab, select the first of your 3 playlists to sync. Make sure the storage bar at the bottom looks full after syncing. Sync your iPhone, change to the next playlist, sync again, and repeat one last time. This will hopefully overwrite any of the free space on your phone, helping prevent recovery of any of those love letters and bad jokes lingering from old emails. I won’t have a chance to test this anytime soon, and odds are high some fragments will survive depending on how the iPhone allocates at the file system level, but this should be more than sufficient to prevent casual recovery of sensitive stuff if you’d like to hock your “old” phone. Share:

One of the most under-appreciated aspects of DLP solutions is content discovery- scanning stored data to identify sensitive content, classify information, and (in some cases) even protect the data. Major DLP tools have long evolved past just scanning network traffic for credit card and Social Security Numbers. Today I’m releasing a new whitepaper on the topic: DLP Content Discovery: Best Practices for Stored Data Discovery and Protection. The paper covers features, best practices for deployment, and example use cases to give you an idea of how it works. It’s my usual independent content, much of which started here as blog posts. Thanks to Symantec (Vontu) for Sponsoring and Chris Pepper for editing. Share:

I loved Mike Rothman’s title to his take on the Cisco IOS rootkit (original article here). What about “everything is vulnerable” didn’t sink in? Okay, technically a rootkit isn’t a vulnerability, but we’ll forgive Mike since I know he knows the difference, and he writes his Daily Incite first thing in the morning. To simplify, here are the Two Laws of Rootkits: You can create a rootkit for anything that runs software. Everything runs software. (If you don’t get the sarcasm, I can’t help you). Share:

Blog War!! It’s been a while since Alan and I got into it; I think we both appreciate a little healthy debate. As friends, we don’t really have to worry about offending each other or taking things out of context. Unless, of course, it will get us a laugh. In this case I think Alan is more confused than wrong. In Alan’s latest post he seems to think I’m a bit naive and off base in my criticism of GRC. Now most of you probably think the title of this post refers to the famous Monty Python bit, but that’s only one of our many popular culture dead parrot options. I’m also amused by the blind kid with the dead parakeet with its head taped back on in Dumb and Dumber. Yes, I’m just that disturbed. Pretty bird and all. Now Alan does agree that the audit/compliance focus is an unfortunate reality that distracts from real security, but he thinks GRC tools offer at least a partial solution to this problem. GRC is a needed tool in todays security practitioner’ss tool kit. They are being placed in the position to ensure compliance and they need the ability to do so. They also need help getting the budget approved for the tools they need to do the job. We can rant all we want about compliance for compliance sake being asinine, but the fact is that is the world we live in right now and rather than spitting into the wind, let’s figure out how to make it work best for us. Alan’s falling into a trap a bunch of vendors seem unable to avoid. They confuse “GRC” with compliance, and are accidentally jumping on a bandwagon they don’t really understand. In the comments on Alan’s post, Hoff offers some clarity while defending his man crush (that’s me): 3) The products we are referencing (and I know you didn’t reference my blog entry because you probably didn’t see it – it was written the same day Gunnar wrote his) aren’t simply compliance tools being re-badged as GRC – these are monster frankensuites of audit-focused compliance framework repositories being marketed as completely new products. GRC isn’t about managing risk, it’s about giving people the perception that managing compliance means something special. There is a distinct difference between a dedicated GRC tool and a security tool calling itself GRC. I’m not a fan of the dedicated tools, and I think re-branding a security tool as GRC isn’t smart. Not because I think it’s taking advantage of the end user, but because I don’t think it will result in the desired increase in revenue for the vendor, and will eventually become problematic once the backlash hits. I spend a lot of time working with vendors, and I advise all of them to tread very carefully around GRC. A few are being driven dangerously deep into restructuring the product for GRC in the hopes of accessing the C-level, and I haven’t seen it work yet. While dashboards and reports are the tip of the iceberg and the shiny baubles that are used by the GRC vendors to get the attention at the C-level, I think that the bulk of the work takes place below the water. It is making sure that in fact the enterprise is in compliance. Making sure that everyone has the latest patch level, has AV installed and that data is protected from leakage is the real work. Testing and ensuring this is the real job of GRC, the reports and dashboard is just the way you can show it working. Rich I think you are the one being short sighted if you think these products are just about the reports. Without actually doing the analysis and investigation the reports are meaningless. In my mind is much like SIM reports. Without actionability and correlation, how much value are the SIM reports? That’s what our security tools are supposed to do in the first place. I believe that’s what StillSecure products do. That’s not GRC, it’s just good security. If a security product can’t ensure it does its job, it’s a piece of garbage and we shouldn’t buy something additional from the vendor to prove what we already bought is working. If you are a vendor or an end user, don’t fall into the GRC trap. As a user you’ll waste your money more often than not. As a vendor you risk alienating your customers and losing revenue. If you have to add GRC to your marketing, go ahead. If you add more reports and dashboards to get the auditors off the practitioners’ backs and help them communicate with management, that’s great. If you rebrand your product and change its entire direction, you’re in trouble. Oh yeah, don’t forget to read Hoff’s post on this. Share:

Engadget is reporting some stats that households are increasingly dropping their landline phone service for mobiles only. For safety reasons, I highly recommend against this. … In the latter half of 2007, it was discovered that 16-percent of domiciles didn’t even have a landline Mobile phones are great… until you need to call 9-1-1 (or anyone else in an emergency). They just aren’t reliable. Also make sure you have at least one old, corded phone in the house. Phone lines carry their own power and may still work in a power outage. But you won’t know that if all you have are cordless phones plugged into an outlet near the phone jack. Share:

Last night I had this recurring dream I seem to have a few times a year. It involves a plane crash, but not one that I’m on. The dream always changes, but in every case I’m out and about someplace, I look up and see a struggling plane, it crashes, and I rush over to help. The dream almost always end before I do anything, and since I’m no longer a field medic portions of it usually involve me figuring out how I can help. Must be my overblown, currently unused hero complex or something. Never doubt the bounds of my ego. This has absolutely nothing to do with what I want to talk about today; I just think it’s weird. I swear I posted on this before, but I can’t find it anywhere. During a dinner with one of the Database Activity Monitoring vendors (the best DAM name in the industry) I mentioned their market size was equal to, or slightly larger than, the pure-play DLP market (that’s where we toss out peripheral products that only use DLP as a feature). I assumed this was common knowledge, but their jaws dropped. We ran through some back of the envelope calculations, and placed DLP at about $70M in 2007, with DAM right in the same range. My estimates might be off by up to $20M, but that’s basically a rounding error when we’re talking total market revenues. Here are a few caveats. My estimates don’t include a lot of peripheral vendors, and I slice down as best I can to estimate DLP vs. DAM specific sales. For example, Orchestria launched a new DLP product in 2007, but I only include a fraction of their revenue in the market rollup since most of the revenue is still coming from their compliance product. Same for Verdasys, Proofpoint, Imperva (also has web application firewalls), and other vendors either with multiple product lines, or where DLP or DAM is a feature of something else. I work with most of the major DLP and DAM vendors, and while some share their revenues under NDA, some don’t, and these are mostly private companies. I’m also certain a couple of them are lying to me. So there you have it. DLP is heavily hyped, but DAM is essentially the same size without as much hype. I believe this is because DAM, in some cases, directly addresses a compliance requirement, while DLP isn’t usually required (although can often really help). Share:

Hot on the heels of my GRC is Dead post, an associate sent me a private rant on a past experience where the investors drove his company down a similar rathole. Here’s the thing, kids; venture capitalists aren’t there to help you build a long-term business. Their entire goal is to achieve specific returns in specific time periods by driving your company into an exit (IPO or sale). You become a slave to your investors, many of whom aren’t as business savvy as you might think, and most of whom don’t understand your particular market. My friend is allowing me to post this since he can’t. Keep in mind that some of the biggest “GRC” pushers out there are large companies without VCs (Oracle, SAP, IBM), which thus are running under different dynamics. The Three Magic Words (or: Why GRC won’t die until the companies do) I read Mogull’s post on GRC yesterday, and I found myself nodding in agreement with all of it. The basic thrust of the article: “GRC is now code for “selling stuff to the C-level”. It has little to do with real governance, risk, and compliance; and everything to do with selling under-performing products at inflated prices. When a vendor says “GRC” they are saying, “Here’s our product to finally get us into the Board Room and the CEO’s office”. The problem is, there isn”t a market for GRC.” This is exactly what GRC is about. But why? Why would our vendor community spend all of their time trying so hard to get into the Board Room and the CEO’s office when there’s an entire market out there of businesses to whom we could sell products? Statistics say that 99% of businesses in the USA have less than 1000 employees: that’s a HUGE market for security software and services that are reasonably priced and deliver value. Why are there almost no vendors looking to that market? And why are many of the ones who do (e.g., UTM vendors) mocked and ridiculed? Three magical words: “Average Deal Size”. I learned these magic words when I was a relative newbie in information security, working for a vulnerability management vendor whose aim it was to sell appliances into all parts of the enterprise. They believed that vulnerability management was the kind of tool that needed to be embedded into every subnet within the entire organization, and that a huge infrastructure would be built up to manage vulnerabilities. When looking at who they wanted to be when they grew up, the names that were mentioned were SAP and PeopleSoft. That the CEO should have vulnerability reports on his desk every week. And that the CEO should be reporting vulnerability metrics to the Board at the quarterly meeting. (No, I’m not exaggerating. This is what they believed.) Unfortunately, no customer seemed to care that much about vulnerabilities. Even in the FUD-laden heyday of worms and viruses (Slammer, Blaster and Nimda, Oh My!), nobody wanted to drop vulnerability management tools on every subnet and embed vulnerability management deep into their business process. It was added cost without incremental benefit. And no CEO really cared about seeing the reports. Most CISOs didn’t even want to see the reports. At the same time, another company was eating our lunch by offering to scan from the outside, on the web. They were basically giving the service away, selling little scans at $5K for anybody who wanted them. And they were rolling in cash compared to us. So, being the go-getter that I was, I put together a plan to create a competitive business within our company. Even with ridiculously conservative estimates, we were going to double revenue within a year (because it’s not hard to double an infinitesimally small number). And I took it to senior management, who summarily rejected it. I didn’t understand, and I fought hard, but their answer was firm: “No way.” I was confused and dejected. This seemed stupid – it didn’t make any business sense. The VP of sales saw this and took me aside after the meeting. He explained it to me, and it was the first time I had heard the three magic words. He would open my eyes to one of the things that makes startups do things that appear absolutely idiotic. He explained that the reason they wouldn’t compete with the other vendor was that it would lower our “average deal size”. That they would rather have a single $100K deal than 100 $2K deals, even if it was only half of the revenue. It didn’t make sense to me (it still doesn’t), so I asked him why. “Because that’s one of the big things that venture capitalists care about when they’re valuing your company,” he said. “And our board is made up of our venture capitalists.” The lights went on at that moment. Fast forward to today. The push toward GRC isn’t because it makes business sense for any of the vendors (i.e., will increase revenue or reduce costs), but entirely because the vendors in the space are worshipping the gods of VC-driven boards who are using average deal size as the metric. It’s why you see companies that are making good progress in mid-market or the mid-range of the small enterprise suddenly declare that their target is the C-level of the “Global 2000” companies. The problem with this is that most 100-person companies are entirely ill-suited to live in that environment. Large enterprises demand (to use Moore’s term) the “whole product”. A full support staff, complementary products, training, and serious hand-holding resources that a 100-person, $10M company just doesn’t have. And, having worked in startups for the majority of the last 10 years, I can say that it kills more than it benefits. The burdens of supporting large, enterprise customers are burdens that, for the most part, only large, enterprise vendors are built to support. It always surprises me when a successful company (e.g., a small consulting company) that is ideally suited to

If you didn’t catch the news today, Tenable is changing the Nessus license and enabling the real-time signature/plugin feed for the free version. Martin and I managed to snag Ron Gula for a short interview we posted over at NetSecPodcast.com. Overall I think it’s a very positive license change and it shouldn’t hurt you unless you were using the free version for commercial purposes. Share: