TaoSecurity Blog

I just read a story titled  Can a CISO Serve Jail Time? Having been Chief Security Officer (CSO) of Mandiant prior to the FireEye acquisition, I thought I would share my thoughts on this question. In brief, being a CISO or CSO is a tough job. Attempts to criminalize CSOs would destroy the profession. Security is one of the few roles where global, distributed opponents routinely conduct criminal acts against business operations. Depending on the enterprise, the offenders could be nation state adversaries largely beyond the reach of any party, to include the nation state hosting the enterprise. Even criminal adversaries can remain largely untouchable. I cannot think of another business function that suffers similar disadvantages. If a commercial competitor took actions against a business using predatory pricing, or via other illegal business measures, the state would investigate and possibly prosecute the offending competitor. For actions across national boundaries, one might ...

I just read  The Cybersecurity Canon: The Practice of Network Security Monitoring at the Palo Alto Networks blog . Rick Howard, their CSO, wrote the post, which marks the inclusion of my fourth book in Palo Alto's Cybersecurity Canon . According to the company's description, the Canon is: a list of must-read books where the content is timeless, genuinely represents an aspect of the community that is true and precise and that, if not read, leaves a hole in a cybersecurity professional’s education that will make the practitioner incomplete. The Canon candidates include both fiction and nonfiction, and for a book to make it into the canon, must accurately depict the history of the cybercrime community, characterize key places or significant milestones in the community, or precisely describe technical details that do not exaggerate the craft. It looks like my book is only the second technical book to be included. The first appears to be the CERT Guide to Insider Threats...

Last week I read an article titled   People too trusting when it comes to their cybersecurity, experts say  by Roy Wenzl of The Wichita Eagle. The following caught my eye and prompted this post: [Connor] Brewer is a 19-year-old sophomore at Butler Community College, a self-described loner and tech geek... Today he’s what technologists call a white-hat hacker, hacking legally for companies that pay to find their own security holes.  When Bill Young, Butler’s chief information security officer, went looking for a white-hat hacker, he hired Brewer, though Brewer has yet to complete his associate’s degree at Butler... Butler’s security system comes under attack several times a week, Young said... Brewer and others like him are hired by companies to deliberately attack a company’s security network. These companies pay bounties if the white hackers find security holes. “Pen testing,” they call it, for “penetration testing.” Young has repeatedly assigned Brewer to ...

Last week I was pleased to deliver the keynote at the first Security Onion Conference in Augusta, GA, organized and hosted by Doug Burks. This was probably my favorite security event of the year, attended by many fans of Security Onion and the network security monitoring (NSM) community. Doug asked me to present the history of NSM. To convey some of the milestones in the development of this operational methodology, I developed these slides  (pdf). They are all images, screen captures, and the like, but I promised to post them. For example, the image at left is the first slide from a Webinar that Bamm Visscher and I delivered on 4 December 2002, where we presented the formal definition of NSM the first time. We defined network security monitoring as the collection, analysis, and escalation of indications and warnings to detect and respond to intrusions. You may recognize similarities with the intelligence cycle and John Boyd's Observe - Orient - Decide Act (OODA) loop. Tha...

I'm pleased to announce that I will be teaching  one class  at Black Hat Trainings 2014 in Potomac, MD, near DC, on 8-9 December 2014. The class is  Network Security Monitoring 101 . I taught this class in Las Vegas in July 2013 and 2014, and Seattle in December 2013. I posted  Feedback from Network Security Monitoring 101 Classes  last year as a sample of the student commentary I received. This class is the perfect jumpstart for anyone who wants to begin a network security monitoring program at their organization. You may enter with no NSM knowledge, but when you leave you'll be able to understand, deploy, and use NSM to detect and respond to intruders, using open source software and repurposed hardware. The first discounted registration deadline is 11:59 pm EDT October 31st. The second discounted registration deadline (more expensive than the first but cheaper than later) ends 11:59 pm EST December 5th. You can  register here . I recentl...

I just finished reading  The Icarus Syndrome: The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the U.S. Air Force by Carl Builder. He published this book in 1994 and I wish I had read it 20 years ago as a new Air Force second lieutenant. Builder makes many interesting points in the book, but in this brief post I'd like to emphasize one of his concluding points: the importance of a mission statement. Builder offers the following when critiquing the Air Force's mission statement, or lack thereof, around the time of his study: [Previous] Air Force of Staff, General John P. McConnell, reportedly endorsed the now-familiar slogan      The mission of the Air Force is to fly and fight.  Sometime later, the next Chief, General John D. Ryan, took pains to put it more gruffly:      The job of the Air Force is to fly and to fight, and don't you ever forget it. (p 266) I remember hearing "Fly, Fight, Win" in the 1990s as well. Builder...

Twenty years ago today, on 1 June 1994, 1024 of us graduated from the United States Air Force Academy , commissioned as brand new second lieutenants. As of September 2012, over 600 members of the class of 1994 were still in uniform. I expect that number is roughly the same today. Reaching the 20 year mark entitles my classmates still in uniform to retire with lifetime benefits, should they choose to do so. I expect some will, but based on patterns from earlier classes I do not expect a massive exodus. The economy is still in rough shape, and transitioning from the military to the private sector after a lifetime in uniform is a jarring experience. I remember 1994 being a fairly optimistic year, but the personnel situation was precarious for those who wanted to fly. After graduation we found ourselves in the middle of a drawdown, with no undergraduate pilot training (UPT) slots available. One jody (marching song) of the time went as follows: Oh there are no fighter pilots in the A...