Favorite Speaker Quotes from SANS Incident Detection Summit

Taking another look at my notes, I found a bunch of quotes from speakers that I thought you might like to hear.

  • "If you think you're not using a MSSP, you already are. It's called anti-virus." Can anyone claim that, from the CIRTs and MSSPs panel?

  • Seth Hall said "Bro is a programming language with a -i switch to sniff traffic."

  • Seth Hall said "You're going to lose." Matt Olney agreed and expanded on that by saying "Hopefully you're going to lose in a way you recognize."

  • Matt Olney also said "Give your analyst a chance." ["All we are sayyy-ing..."]

  • Matt Jonkman said "Don't be afraid of blocking." It's not 2004 anymore. Matt emphasized the utility of reputation when triggering signatures, for example firing an alert when an Amazon.com-style URL request is sent to a non-Amazon.com server.

  • Ron Shaffer said "Bad guys are following the rules of your network to accomplish their mission."

  • Steve Sturges said "Snort 3.0 is a research project."

  • Gunter Ollmann said "Threats have a declining interest in persistence. Just exploit the browser and disappear when closed. Users are expected to repeat risky behavior, and become compromised again anyway."


Thanks again to all of our speakers!

Comments

Anonymous said…
"If you think you're not using a MSSP, you already are. It's called anti-virus." Can anyone claim that, from the CIRTs and MSSPs panel?

That'd be mine!

Gunter Ollmann said "Threats have a declining interest in persistence. Just exploit the browser and disappear when closed. Users are expected to repeat risky behavior, and become compromised again anyway."

Gunter had a lot of good information to contribute. With all due respect, though, I disagree with this point for targeted attacks. Persistence is always desired and rarely missing as an attribute of such attacks in my experience. However, adversaries are learning to function more effectively in environments where persistence may not be possible due to architectural decisions such as decreased user rights.
11:30 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 technica...
Read more