TaoSecurity Blog

On this day in 2004, Addison-Wesley/Pearson published my first book, The Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Beyond Intrusion Detection . This post from 2017 explains the differences between my first four books and why I wrote Tao .  Today, I'm always thrilled when I hear that someone found my books useful.  I am done writing books on security, but I believe the core tactics and strategies in all my books are still relevant. I'm not sure that's a good thing, though. I would have liked to not need the tactics and strategies in my book anymore. "The Cloud," along with so many other developments and approaches, was supposed to have saved us by now. Consider this statement from a report describing CISA’s red team against a fed agency:  “[A]ttempts to capture forensic data via packet captures occurred directly on the compromised Solaris and Windows hosts, where the red team observed the data being collected and therefore had the opportunity to disrupt collection, tam

When I was a sophomore in high school, from 1987 to 1988, my friend Paul and I had Commodore C64 computers. There was a new graphical user interface called GEOS that had transformed the way we interacted with our computers. We used the C64 to play games but also write papers for school. One day Paul called me. He was clearly troubled. He had somehow dragged his newly completed term paper into the trash bin instead of the printer. If I recall correctly, back then they were right next to each other (although the screen shot above shows them separate).  Paul asked if I knew any tricks that could retrieve his paper. There was no undelete function in GEOS. I subscribed to a magazine called Compute's Gazette, for Commodore owners. I remembered seeing an article in the magazine that included code for undeleting files dropped in the GEOS "Waste Basket." All I had to do was type it in by hand, save it to a 5 1/4 inch floppy, drive to Paul's house, and see if the program would

  In the fall of 1998 I joined the AFCERT. I became acquainted with the amazing book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols  by W. Richard Stevens. About a year later I exchanged emails with Mr. Stevens. Here is the last exchange, as forwarded from my AFCERT email address to my home email. From "Capt Richard Bejtlich - Real Time Chief" Mon Sep  6 18:27:35 1999 X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                  Received: from kinda.csap.af.mil (kinda.csap.af.mil [192.203.2.250])           by mw4.texas.net (2.4/2.4) with SMTP   id RAA22116 for <bejtlich@texas.net>; Mon, 6 Sep 1999 17:27:38 -0500 (CDT) Received: by kinda.csap.af.mil (Smail3.1.29.1 #7) id m11O7Ee-000NcwC; Mon, 6 Sep 99 17:27 CDT Received: from walt.ip.af.mil(192.168.1.142) by kinda via smap (V1.3) id sma014865; Mon Sep  6 17:27:36 1999 Received: from kinda.csap.af.mil by walt.ip.af.mil with smtp (Smail3.1.29.1 #6) id m11O7Ed-000VruC; Mon, 6 Sep 99 2

This is unusual. I found this "skills and interest radar" diagram I created in July 2005. It looks like my attempt to capture and prioritize technical interests. At the time I was about to start consulting on my own, IIRC.

  I wrote this on 7 December 2018 but never published it until today. The following are the "key network questions" which "would answer many key questions about [a] network, without having to access a third party log repository. This data is derived from mining Zeek log data as it is created, rather than storing and querying Zeek logs in a third party repository." This is how I was thinking about Zeek data in the second half of 2018. 1. What networking technologies are in use, over user-specified intervals?    1. Enumerate non-IP protocols (IPv6, unusual Ethertypes)    2. Enumerate IPv4 and IPv6 protocols (TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc.)    3. What is the local IP network topology/addressing scheme? 2. What systems are providing core services to the network, over user-specified intervals?    1. DHCP    2. DNS    3. NTP    4. Domain Controller    5. File sharing    6. Default gateway (via DHCP inspection, other?)    7. Web and cloud services 3. What tunnel mechanisms are in us

Cybersecurity is a social and policy problem, not a scientific or technical problem. Cybersecurity is also a wicked problem. In a landmark 1973 article, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning , urban planners Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber described wicked problems in these terms: “The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, because of the nature of these problems. They are ‘wicked’ problems, whereas science has developed to deal with ‘tame’ problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about ‘optimal solutions’ to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no ‘solutions’ in the sense of definitive and objective answers.” Other wicke

I want to make a note of the numbers of words and pages in my core security writings. The Tao of Network Security Monitoring / 236k words / 833 pages Extrusion Detection / 113k words / 417 pages The Practice of Network Security Monitoring / 97k words / 380 pages The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Vol 1 / 84k words / 357 pages The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Vol 2 / 96k words / 429 pages The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Vol 3 / 89k words / 485 pages The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Vol 4 / 96k words / 429 pages The total is 811k words and 3,330 pages.