Please Support OpenNSM Group

Do you believe in finding and removing intruders on the network before they cause damage? Do you want to support like-minded people? If you answered "yes," I'd like to tell you about a group that shares your views and needs your help.

In August 2014, Jon Schipp started the Open (-Source) Network Security Monitoring Group (OpenNSM). Jon is a security engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his announcement on the project's mailing list, Jon wrote:

The idea for this group came from a suggestion in Richard Bejtlich's most recent book, where he mentions it would be nice to see NSM groups spawn up all over much like other software user groups and for the same reasons.

Network security monitoring is the collection, analysis, and escalation of indications and warnings to detect and respond to intrusions. It is an operational campaign supporting a strategy of identifying and removing intruders before they accomplish their mission, thereby implementing a policy of minimizing loss due to intrusions. At the tactical and tool level, NSM relies on instrumenting the network and applying hunting and matching to find intruders.

Long-time blog readers know that I have developed and advocated NSM since the late 1990s, when I learned the practice at the Air Force Computer Emergency Response Team (AFCERT).

I am really pleased to see this group holding weekly meetings, which are available live or as recordings at YouTube.

The group is seeking funding and sponsorship to build a NSM laboratory and conduct research projects. They want to give students and active members hands-on experience with NSM tools and tactics to conduct defensive operations. They outline their plans for funding in this Google document.

I decided to support this group first as an individual, so I just donated $100 to the cause. If you are a like-minded individual, or perhaps represent an organization or company, please consider donating via GoFundMe to support this OpenNSM group and their project. You can also follow them @opennsm and Facebook, and check out their notes at code at GitHub. Thank you!

Comments

Unknown said…
Again, thanks for the post Richard. It's already brought in a few more donations. One correction on the blog post though, we meet weekly rather than monthly.
2:27 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