Where in the World is Winn Schwartau?

If you've been around the information security block a few times, you're bound to remember Winn Schwartau. I finally got a chance to meet Winn at the GFIRST conference earlier this week. He was kind enough to pass me copies of a few of his books, like Time-Based Security. In the book, Winn tries to steer readers away from their "fortress mentality" and towards a model of security centered on attack duration.

I like the idea of rating a security system by the amount of time it takes an intruder to compromise it. That system is used to rate safes, as defined by Underwriters' Laboratories, Inc. (and explained here, here, here, and here). A time-based model acknowledges that any system can be compromised, as long as an intruder is willing to dedicate the resources to the project. It is easy to know how long it takes a script kiddie to compromise a target with an unpatched, public vulnerability for which there is a reliable exploit. It is more difficult to know how long it takes a professional intruder to compromise a target with no known vulnerabilities. Still, estimates can be made, and those estimates can help direct monitoring and access control defense-in-depth strategies.

Winn is now running The Security Awareness Company, which provides (wait for it) Security Awarness materials and training. His team also operates the Security Awareness Blog. I saw some of his company's products, which included posters for Florida-based financial giant Raymond James. Keep Winn in mind if you're trying to make your company's users security-conscious.

Update: Here are a few links to discussions of time-based security.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Isn't there also a point at which the time required and resources to be dedicated make intrusion an unproductive venture? Once systems have been protected to the point where they become unattractive targets, and lesser-protected systems are infinitely more accessible, are they less likely to be selected as targets? What is the old joke, "I don't have to outrun the bear..."?
9:44 PM
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
7:16 PM
Anonymous said…
http://securityawareness.blogspot.com/ does not have any posts and the author seems to be somebody called Tony Bradley. Either the blog just got owned or you linked to the wrong blog :-)
4:03 PM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Varun,

Well, my post was three years old. I guess the blog is gone now.
4:21 PM
Post a Comment

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 technical or pol
Read more