New Security Organizations One Year After Attacks on Root Name Servers

A couple new security organizations have been created in the last month. First, the US-CERT was announced last month. I see a lot of talk about "information sharing," but I'm not sure how that's different from what the CERT at Carnegie Mellon does. This article mentions how the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security is

"taking the lead on a cybersituation awareness project that can conduct near-real-time analysis of incident data nationwide... The division is currently working with SRI International, Symantec and Computer Associates International Inc. to develop an automated capability that would enable data to be shared immediately with various private-sector-run Information Sharing and Analysis Centers. The research and development effort includes plans to build a nonproprietary system that would allow any organization in the nation, regardless of IT infrastructure, to feed data into the incident analysis system.

'We will be deploying this in the federal sector starting at the US-CERT first so we can see in real time what is happening across the nation,' McDonald said."

Sallie McDonald is "the DHS's senior executive responsible for outreach and awareness efforts."

Not to be outdone, the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) announced today the creation of the Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (OARC), focused on the defense of the Internet's domain name servers. This is a response to last year's attacks on the root name servers. I found a site dedicated to news on the Internet infrastructure, with articles on DNS, ICANN, and other topics.

Speaking of DNS, one year ago today the root name servers were attacked. CAIDA offers good descriptions and graphs of what happened.

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more