Practical Malware Analysis Book Promotion

I'm very pleased to share news of an awesome new book titled Practical Malware Analysis by Michael Sikorski and Andrew Honig. The authors will present a Webinar on their book on Wednesday 29 February at 2 pm eastern. I was pleased to write the foreword, which ends with these words:

If the malware authors are ready to provide the samples, the authors of the book you’re reading are here to provide the skills. Practical Malware Analysis is the sort of book I think every malware analyst should keep handy. If you’re a beginner, you’re going to read the introductory, hands-on material you need to enter the fight. If you’re an intermediate practitioner, it will take you to the next level. If you’re an advanced engineer, you’ll find those extra gems to push you even higher—and you’ll be able to say “read this fine manual” when asked questions by those whom you mentor.

Practical Malware Analysis is really two books in one—first, it’s a text showing readers how to analyze modern malware. You could have bought the book for that reason alone and benefited greatly from its instruction. However, the authors decided to go the extra mile and essentially write a second book. This additional tome could have been called Applied Malware Analysis, and it consists of the exercises, short answers, and detailed investigations presented at the end of each chapter and in Appendix C. The authors also wrote all the malware they use for examples, ensuring a rich yet safe environment for learning.

Therefore, rather than despair at the apparent asymmetries facing digital defenders, be glad that the malware in question takes the form it currently does. Armed with books like Practical Malware Analysis, you’ll have the edge you need to better detect and respond to intrusions in your enterprise or that of your clients. The authors are experts in these realms, and you will find advice extracted from the front lines, not theorized in an isolated research lab. Enjoy reading this book and know that every piece of malware you reverse-engineer and scrutinize raises the opponent’s costs by exposing his dark arts to the sunlight of knowledge.

To announce the book, the publisher is running this promotion: Use discount code REVERSEIT to get 40% off Practical Malware Analysis. One week only! Free ebook with all print book purchases.

The authors also started a new blog at practicalmalwareanalysis.com.

Tweet

I Want to Detect and Respond to Intruders But I Don't Know Where to Start!

"I want to detect and respond to intruders but I don't know where to start!" This is a common question. Maybe you have a new security role in an organization, or a new service or business in your current organization, or some other situation where you want to find and stop attackers. However, you have no idea where to begin. Do you have the data you need? If not, what should you add? What do intrusions look like in the data you collect?

These questions can be tough to answer from a purely theoretical perspective. I propose the following approach.

First, conduct a tabletop exercise where you simulate adversary actions. At each stage of the imagined attack, consider what evidence an intruder might create while taking actions against your systems. For example, if you are trying to determine how to detect and respond to an attack against a Web server, you're almost certainly going to need Web server logs. If you don't currently have access to those logs, you've just identified a gap that needs to be addressed. I recommend this sort of tabletop exercise first because you will likely identify deficiencies at low cost. Addressing them might be expensive though.

Second, conduct a technical exercise where a third party simulates adversary actions. This is not exactly a pen test but it is the sort of work a red team conducts. Ask the red team to carry out the attacks you previously imagined to determine if you can detect and respond to their activity. This should be a controlled action, not an "anything goes" event. You will see whether the evidence and processes you identified in the first step help you detect and respond to the red team activity. This step is more expensive than the previous because you are paying for red team attention, and again fixes could be expensive.

Third, you may consider re-engaging the red team to carry out a less restrictive, more imaginative adversary simulation. In this exercise the red team isn't bound by the script you devised previously. See if your improved data and processes are sufficient. If not, work with the red team to devise better detection and response so that you can handle their attacks.

At this point you should have the data and processes to deal with the majority of real-world attacks. Of course some intruders are smart and creative, but you have a chance against them now given the work you just performed.

Tweet

Impressions: Network Warrior, 2nd Ed

Five years ago I reviewed the first edition of Network Warrior by Gary A. Donahue. Thank to O'Reilly I can post my "impressions" of the second edition of this great book. Although I read almost all of it, I am unable to post another review because Amazon.com has my previous review attached to the new edition.

In brief, Network Warrior, 2nd Ed is the book to read if you are a network administrator trying to get to the next level. All of my praise from the previous review apply to the new book. The book is really that good, primarily because it combines very clear explanations with healthy doses of real-world experience. Thanks to Mr Donahue for taking the time to update his book!

Tweet

Impressions: Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference

Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis have written another awesome addition to the Microsoft Press catalog, Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. Per my policy, because I did not read the whole book I am only posting "impressions" here and not a full Amazon.com review.

In brief this book will tell you more about the awesome Sysinternals tools than you might have thought possible. One topic that caught my attention was using Process Monitor to summarize network activity (p 139). This reminded me of Event Tracing for Windows and Network Tracing in Windows 7. I remain interested in this capability because it can be handy for incident responders to collect network traffic on endpoints without installing new software, relying instead on native OS capabilities.

I suggest keeping a copy of this book in your team library if you run a CIRT. Thorough knowledge of the Sysinternals tools is a great benefit to anyone trying to identify compromised Windows computers.

Tweet

Impressions: The Tangled Web

Six years ago I reviewed Michal Zalewski's first book, Silence on the Wire. Michal is a security researcher who has consistently created high-quality content for a very long time, so I was pleased to receive a review copy of his newest book The Tangled Web.

I did not read the whole book, hence I'm posting only my "impressions" here. I recommend reading this book if you want to know a lot, and I mean a lot, about how screwed up Web browsers, protocols, and related technologies truly are. Because many points of the book are tied to specific browser versions, I suspect its shelf life to degrade a little more rapidly than some other technical titles. Still, I am shocked by the amount of research and documentation Michal performed to create The Tangled Web.

As always, Michal's content is highly readable, very detailed, and well-sourced. It's a great example for other technical authors. Great work Michal!

Tweet

The Toughest Question in Digital Security

The toughest question in digital security is "who cares?"

The recent Tweet by hogfly (@4n6ir) made me ponder this question. He points to an Aviation Week story by David Fulghum, Bill Sweetman, and Amy Butler titled China's Role In JSF's Spiraling Costs. It says in part:

How much of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s spiraling cost in recent years can be traced to China’s cybertheft of technology and the subsequent need to reduce the fifth-generation aircraft’s vulnerability to detection and electronic attack?

That is a central question that budget planners are asking, and their queries appear to have validity. Moreover, senior Pentagon and industry officials say other classified weapon programs are suffering from the same problem. Before the intrusions were discovered nearly three years ago, Chinese hackers actually sat in on what were supposed to have been secure, online program-progress conferences, the officials say.

The full extent of the connection is still being assessed, but there is consensus that escalating costs, reduced annual purchases and production stretch-outs are a reflection to some degree of the need for redesign of critical equipment. Examples include specialized communications and antenna arrays for stealth aircraft, as well as significant rewriting of software to protect systems vulnerable to hacking.

It is only recently that U.S. officials have started talking openly about how data losses are driving up the cost of military programs and creating operational vulnerabilities, although claims of a large impact on the Lockheed Martin JSF are drawing mixed responses from senior leaders. All the same, no one is saying there has been no impact.

While claiming ignorance of details about effects on the stealth strike aircraft program, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, says that Internet technology has “led to egregious pilfering of intellectual capital and property. The F-35 was clearly a target,” he confirms.

The point of this article is to question the impact, in business and operational terms, of the cyberwar China continues to prosecute against the West.

The toughest question in digital security is "who cares" because it is usually extremely difficult to determine the impact of an intrusion. Consider the steps required to define the business and operational impact of the theft of intellectual property (as one example -- there are many others).

1. The victim must learn that an intrusion occurred.
2. The victim must determine exactly what IP was stolen.
3. The victim must understand the adversary's capability and intention to exploit the stolen IP.
4. The victim must recognize when the adversary exploits the stolen IP by using it in an operational context.
5. The victim must determine what countermeasures or changes in courses of actions are possible to mitigate the adversary's exploitation of the stolen IP.
6. The victim must synthesize most or all of the previous points into an assessment of the business and operational cost of the IP theft.

Steps 1 and 2 are largely technical, but 3-6 are more business-focused. From what I have seen, everyone who is a victim in the ongoing cyberwar struggles to conduct "battle damage assessment" (BDA) for digital intrusions. Articles like the one I cited are examples showing how difficult it is to determine if anyone should care about China's exploitation of Western IP.

Tweet

Best Book Bejtlich Read in 2011

It's time to name the winner of the Best Book Bejtlich Read award for 2011!

I've been reading and reviewing digital security books seriously since 2000. This is the 6th time I've formally announced a winner; see my bestbook label for previous winners.

Compared to 2010 (31 books), 2011 saw a decrease to 22 books. Remember all reading is neither equal nor fast. When I review a book, I am sure to read it and not just skim it. For 10 books last year, I chose not to read them but to instead post impressions. Posts called "impressions" provide my sense of the book but I do not publish them in my Amazon.com reviews.

My ratings for 2011 can be summarized as follows:

• 5 stars: 10 books


• 4 stars: 7 books


• 3 stars: 4 books


• 2 stars: 1 book


• 1 stars: 0 books

Please remember that I try to avoid reading bad books. If I read a book and I give it a lower rating (generally 3 or less stars), it's because I had higher hopes.

Here's my overall ranking of the five star reviews; this means all of the following are excellent books. The links point to my reviews.

• 10. pfSense by Jim Pingle; Reed Media Services.


• 9. Beginning Visual C++ 2010 by Ivor Horton; Wrox


• 8. Windows System Programming, 4th Ed by Johnson M. Hart; Addison-Wesley.


• 7. Beginning C, 4th Ed by Ivor Horton; Apress


• 6. Robust Control System Networks by Ralph Langner; Momentum Press.


• 5. Managed Code Rootkits by Erez Metula; Syngress.


• 4. Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and William L. Simon; Little, Brown and Company.


• 3. America the Vulnerable by Joel Brenner; Penguin Press HC.


• 2. Windows Internals, 5th Ed by Mark Russinovich, David A. Solomon, and Alex Ionescu; Microsoft Press.

And, the winner of the Best Book Bejtlich Read in 2011 award is...

• Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Ed by Jon Erickson; No Starch. My review said in part:
  
  Jon Erickson's Hacking, 2nd Ed (H2E) is one of the most remarkable books in the group I just read. H2E is in some senses amazing because the author takes the reader on a journey through programming, exploitation, shellcode, and so forth, yet helps the reader climb each mountain. While the material is sufficiently technical to scare some readers away, those that remain will definitely learn more about the craft.

Looking at publishers, for the first year I can remember no publisher won more than one title. No Starch breaks the string of 3 straight previous BBBR victories held by Syngress.

Thank you to all publishers who sent me books in 2011. I have plenty more to read in 2012.

Congratulations to all the authors who wrote great books in 2011, and who are publishing titles in 2012!

Tweet

Telling a Security Story with Charts

The image at left appeared in the 31 December 2011 edition of The Economist magazine in the article Economics focus -- How to get a date: The year when the Chinese economy will truly eclipse America’s is in sight. It depicts 15 measurements of the US and Chinese economies, with historical and projected data. There is a version available at this page with more statistics comparing the two nations.

The Economist presents these charts for the following reason:

In the spring of 2011 the Pew Global Attitudes Survey asked thousands of people worldwide which country they thought was the leading economic power. Half of the Chinese polled reckoned that America remains number one, twice as many as said “China”. Americans are no longer sure: 43% of US respondents answered “China”; only 38% thought America was still the top dog. The answer depends on which measure you pick. (emphasis added)

The reason I like these charts is that they remind me of how many security practitioners think about "being secure." Managers likely often ask security staff "Are we secure?" The truth is there is no single number, so anyone selling you a "risk" number is wasting your time (and probably your money). However, it would be much more useful to display a chart like that created by the Economist. The security staff could choose a dozen or more simple metrics to paint a picture, and let the viewer interpret the answer using his or her own emphasis and bias.

Another reason I like the Economist chart is that the magazine built it using specified assumptions of future activity, listed in the article. If you disagree with these assumptions you can visit the second link I posted to devise your own charts. Although not shown here, what would be even more useful is showing these charts as a time series, with snapshots for January, then February, and so on. This "small multiples" approach (promoted by Tufte) capitalizes on the skill of the human eye and brain to observe and observe differences in similar objects.

If you had to pick a dozen or so indicators of security for a chart, what would you depict? The two I consider non-negotiable are 1) incidents per unit time and 2) time to containment for incidents.

Tweet

Happy 9th Birthday TaoSecurity Blog

Today, 8 January 2012, is the 9th birthday of TaoSecurity Blog. I wrote my first post on 8 January 2003 while working as an incident response consultant for Foundstone. 2843 posts later, I am still blogging. Looking at all 9 years of blogging, I averaged 315 per year, but in the age of Twitter (2009-2011) I averaged only 171 blog posts per year.

I plan to continue blogging, but I expect around the same number as last year -- somewhere in the 60 to 100 post range. I spend a lot more time expressing my views to the press and market researchers and analysts, so I'm often less inclined to do more of that in my free time through this blog. I plan to devote any decent chunks of free time to more traditional writing. I love to use Twitter for quick commentary. Thanks for joining me these 9 years -- I hope to have a 10 year post in 2013!

If you're a security blogger, and you like this blog, please consider voting for me via the 2012 Social Security Bloggers Awards. I'm nominated for "Most Educational Security Blog" and the Hall of Fame. Thank you again!

Don't forget -- today is Elvis Presley's birthday. Coincidence? You decide.

The image shows Elvis training with Ed Parker, founder of American Kenpo. As I like to tell my students, Elvis' stance is so wide it would take him a week to react to an attack. Then again, he's Elvis.

I studied Kenpo in San Antonio, TX but I'm going to try Tai Chi again, something I first practiced about 16 years ago in Billerica, MA during grad school.

Tweet

Mandiant Webinar Wednesday; Help Us Break a Record!

I'm back for the last Mandiant Webinar of the year, titled State of the Hack: It's The End of The Year As We Know It - 2011. And you know what? We feel fine! That's right, join Kris Harms and me Wednesday at 2 pm eastern as we discuss our reactions to noteworthy security stories from 2011.

Register now and help Kris and me beat the attendee count from last month's record-setting Webinar.

If you have questions about and during the Webinar, you can always send them via Twitter to @mandiant and use the hashtag m_soh.

Tweet

Tripwire Names Bejtlich #1 of "Top 25 Influencers in Security"

I've been listed in other "top whatever" security lists a few times in my career, but appearing in Tripwire's Top 25 Influencers in Security You Should Be Following today is pretty cool! Tripwire is one of those technologies and companies that everyone should know. It's almost like the "Xerox" of security because so many people equate the idea of change monitoring with Tripwire. So, I was happy to see my twitter.com/taosecurity feed and the taosecurity.blogspot.com blog make their cut.

David Spark asked for my "security tip for 2012," which I listed as:

Improve your incident detection and response program by answering two critical questions:

1. How many systems have been compromised in any given time period; and

2. How much time elapsed between incident identification and containment for each system?

Use the answers to improve and guide your overall security program.

Those of you on the securitymetrics mailing list, and a few other places, have heard me speaking about this topic. I'll probably blog about it in the future, but suffice it to say that those are the key issues you should address in 2012 in my opinion.

Tweet

Become a Hunter

Earlier this year SearchSecurity and TechTarget published a July-August 2011 issue (.pdf) with a focus on targeted threats. Prior to joining Mandiant as CSO I wrote an article for that issue called "Become a Hunter":

IT’S NATURAL FOR members of a technology-centric industry to see technology as the solution to security problems. In a field dominated by engineers, one can often perceive engineering methods as the answer to threats that try to steal, manipulate, or degrade information resources. Unfortunately, threats do not behave like forces of nature. No equation can govern a threat’s behavior, and threats routinely innovate in order to evade and disrupt defensive measures.

Security and IT managers are slowly realizing that technology-centric defense is too easily defeated by threats of all types. Some modern defensive tools and techniques are effective against a subset of threats, but security pros in the trenches consider
the “self-defending network” concept to be marketing at best and counter-productive at worst. If technology and engineering aren’t the answer to security’s woes, then what is?

Download and read my article starting on page 19 for the answer! July-August 2011 issue (.pdf)
Tweet