SANS Replaces Several Threat References in Top 20

Last week I posted comments about several misuses of the word "threat" in the latest SANS twenty most critical Internet security vulnerabilities. After receiving an email from Alan Paller, I returned to the SANS site and saw many of my recommended changes were made. For example, you can now "Jump To Index of Top 20 Vulnerabilities", instead of "threats." I appreciate SANS taking my suggestions to heart.

Update: It's becoming clear where the confusion regarding "threat" vs "vulnerability" originates for the SANS Top 20. One of you pointed me towards the article Mac OS X Under Scrutiny. See how many misuses of the term threat you can find. Here's a freebie:

"SANS's Dhamankar stressed that the intent was not to call the Mac OS X operating system a threat, but to give Mac users a wake up call."

Comments

Anonymous said…
I definitely agree with your admonishment to use information security vocabulary correctly. I constantly run into marketing at work throwing around "threat" when they shouldn't.

Now if only they would make each vulnerability actually correspond to a single vulnerability (or at least a handful).

For example, they list "N1. Cisco IOS and non-IOS Products" -- isn't that ALL Cisco products. For this one I do concede that they go on to only list a handful of CVE names as examples, but surely they can come up with a better title.

This is more like a bunch of vulnerabilities put into 20 categories. "C10. Other Cross-platform Applications" is much worse. With a title like that, it should logically cover thousands of vulnerabilities.
6:55 PM
Anonymous said…
I still remember when they first announced the GSEC certification, it was just the Hacker FAQ word for word, including the typos too, how sad......
5:10 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