Rich Mogul over at Securosis (N.B. I’m a contributing analyst there) has a great post on how, due to human error, some of his AWS credentials got nabbed by some miscreants and abused. We here at the New School love it when folks share how they were compromised and what they did about it. It […]
BSides LV 2012 tickets sold out in under 30 hours last week. I have acquired five tickets to give away. More details later, but the tickets will go to the person or people who have the best story of how they applied the principles of the New School in a real life situation. Start planning […]
Yesterday Adam responded to Alex’s question on what people thought about IanG’s claim that threat modeling fails in practice and I wanted to reiterate what I said on twitter about it: It’s a tool! No one claimed it was a silver bullet! Threat modeling is yet another input into an over all risk analysis. And […]
Calling something in the cloud a DMZ is just weird. Realistically, everything is a DMZ. After all, you are sharing data center space, and if your provider is using virtualization, hardware with all of their other customers. As such, each and every network segment you have is (or should be) isolated and have only a […]
There’s been a lot of noise of late because Oracle just released their latest round of patches and there are a total of 78 of them. There’s no doubt that that is a lot of patches. But in and of itself the number of patches is a terrible metric for how secure a product is. […]
From an operations and security perspective, continuous deployment is either the best idea since sliced bread or the worst idea since organic spray pancakes in a can. It’s all of matter of execution. Continuos deployment is the logical extension of the Agile development methodology. Adam recently linked to an study that showed that a 25% […]
There’s been a lot of pushback against using Risk Management in Information Security because we don’t have enough information to make a good decision. Yet every security professional makes decisions despite a lack of information. If we didn’t we’d never get anything done. Hell we’d never get out of bed in the morning. There’s a […]
There have already been a ton of posts out there about the Verizon DBIR Supplement that came out yesterday, so I’m not going to dive into the details, but I wanted to highlight this quick discussion from twitter yesterday that really sums of the value of the supplement and similar reports: georgevhulme: I’m glad we […]
I also posted about this on Emergent Chaos, but since our readership doesn’t fully overlap, I’m commenting on it here as well. Chis Soghoian, has just posted some of his new research into government electronic surveillance here in the US. The numbers are truly astounding (Sprint for instance provided geo-location data on customers eight million […]
Great post today over on SecureThinking about a customer who used a very limited signature set for their IDS. Truth of the matter was that our customer knew exactly what he was doing. He only wanted to see a handful of signatures that were generic and could indicate that “something” was amiss that REALLY needed […]
Threatlevel (aka 27B/6) reported yesterday that Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s information assurance director testified to the Senate Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on the issue of computer based attacks. If network administrators simply instituted proper configuration policies and conducted good network monitoring, about 80 percent of commonly known cyber attacks could […]
I spent yesterday in a workshop learning about and practicing scenario planning. It’s a really great tool for planning for (as opposed to predicting) the future. It feels like it’s a great addition to the risk assessment/management process. Check it out.
Mini MetriCon 4.5 will be a one-day event, Monday, March 1, 2010, in San Francisco, California. Through the cooperation of RSA, the workshop will be held at the University of San Francisco, within walking distance of the Moscone Center, the location of the RSA Conference, to be held during the same week. Mini MetriCon attendees […]
Josh Corman had an awesome post over on Fudsec on Friday. It’s so awesomely appropriate to this blog, that I’m sharing it with you. My only complaint is that I wish that I had written instead. Go read it right now.
Rob Lemos has a new article up on the MIT Technology Review, about some researchers from UC Santa Barbara who spent several months studying the Mebroot Botnet. They found some fascinating stuff and I’m looking forward to reading the paper when it’s finally published. While the vast majority of infected machines were Windows based (64% […]
So awhile back, I posted the following to twitter: Thought of the Day: We don’t need to share raw data if we can share meta-data generated using uniform analytical methodologies. Adam, disagreed: @mortman You can’t test & refine models without raw data, & you can’t ask people with the same orientation to bring diverse perspectives. […]
The Telegraph reports: More than half of all Britons have been injured by biscuits ranging from scalding from hot tea or coffee while dunking or breaking a tooth eating during a morning tea break, a survey has revealed. Who knew that cookies could be so dangerous? So forget worrying about AV or even seat belts, […]
Todays New York Times has an interesting article “A Lawsuit Tries to Get at Hackers Through the Banks They Attack” about the folks over at Unspam who are suing under the Can-Spam Act in an attempt to get the names of miscreants who have been attacking banks. More interestingly, they are hoping to force the […]
There’s been lots of discussion here and elsewhere about what’s wrong with GRC as a market and that discussion is pretty spot on. However, last week, I was chatting with Alex and it suddenly hit me that while GRC doesn’t work, the very concept is even more broken then we had previously thought. I briefly […]
Following up on my previous post, here’s Part 2, “The Factors that Drive Probable Use”. This is the meat of our model. Follow up posts will dig deeper into Parts 1 and 2. At Black Hat we’ll be applying this model to the vulnerabilities that are going to be released at the show. But before […]
I wanted to throw it out here as an example of how you would the model from my earlier post in real life. So let’s take the recently released Internet Explorer security vulnerability and see how it fits. Now this is a pretty brain-dead example and hardly requires a special tool, but I think it […]
Not much to add, but a good article in Business Week on Lessons from the Data Breach at Heartland. Well worth reading…
Alex and I will be on a panel, A Black Hat Vulnerability Risk Assessment, at this year’s Black Hat. We’ll be discussing the need to perform a risk assessment of vulnerabilities as you become aware of them in a deeper context then just looking at the CVSS scores. Things to consider are what compensating controls […]
There was an interesting segement on NPR this morning, “Economy Got You Down? Many Blame Rating Firms” that covered amongst other things the risk model that Standard and Poors used to rate bonds and in specific mortgage backed ones. There are a few choice quotes in the story about how the organizations approached the models […]
The folks over at Voltage have released a really cool interactive map of breaches from around the world. Tools like this show how important having data is, just imagine how much more impressive and useful something like this could be if more people were willing to share data about breaches or other information security issues […]
Last night, the fine folks at Verizon posted the 2009 version of the DBIR. I haven’t had time to do a full deep dive yet, but I thought I’d share my initial notes in the meantime. Stuff in italics is from the DBIR, regular text is me: 81 percent of organizations subject to PCI DSS […]
Okay so for a long time now, I’ve been blogging as Arthur. It all started as an excuse to blog without the company I worked for at the time having to worry about anything I said being a reflection on them. Almost three years ago they were acquired by Oracle and I have long since […]