Last Thursday I thought I was dying.
Not a joke. Not an exaggeration. As in “approaching room temperature”.
I was just outside D.C. having breakfast with Mike before going to teach the CCSK instructors class. In the middle of a sentence I felt… something. Starting from my chest I felt a rush to my head. An incredibly intense feeling on the edge of losing consciousness. Literally out of nowhere, while sitting. I paused, told Mike I felt dizzy, and then the second wave hit. I said, “I think I’m…
Given the evolution of both the technology and the attacks, it’s time to revisit your specific requirements and use cases – both current and evolving. You also need to be brutally honest about what your existing product or service does and does not do, as well as your team’s ability to support and maintain it. This is essential – you need a fresh look at the environment to understand what you need today and tomorrow, and what kind of resources and expertise you can bring to bear, unconstrained…
In our first post on Fact-based Network Security, we talked about the need to make decisions based on data, as opposed to instinct. Then we went in search of the context to know what’s important, because in order to prioritize effectively you need to know what presents the most value to your organization. Now let’s dig a little deeper into the next step, which is determining the operational metrics on which to base decisions.
The Boss constantly reminds me I have no middle ground. On/Off. Black/White. No dimmer. No gray (besides on my head). Moderation is non-existent, which is why I never tried hard drugs. I knew myself well enough (even at a young age) to know it wouldn’t end well. Sure I’d be the best presenter in the crack den, but that would have impeded my plans for world domination.
I awoke at 2:30am to a 90-degree bedroom. Getting up to discover why the air conditioning was not working, I found a dog pooped on my couch. Neatly in the corner – perhaps hoping I would not notice. Depositing the aforementioned ‘present’ in the garbage can, I almost stepped on both a bark scorpion and a millipede – eyeing one another suspiciously – just outside the garage door. After a while, air conditioning on and couch thoroughly scrubbed, I returned to bed only to find my wife had laid…
It’s hard to believe, but over the past 24 hours I’ve had 3 separate briefings with companies innovating in the area of anti-malware. Just ask them. Each started the discussion with the self-evident point that the existing malware detection model is broken. Then they each proceeded to describe (at a high level) how what they are doing isn’t anti-virus per se, but something different. Something that detects the new malware we are seeing. They didn’t want to replace the anti-malware engine. They…
One of the great things about running around teaching classes is all the feedback and questions we get from people actively working on all sorts of different initiatives. With the CCSK (cloud security) class, we find that a ton of people are grappling with these issues in active projects and different things in various stages of deep planning.
Our motivation for launching the Security Management 2.0 research project lies in the general dissatisfaction with SIEM implementations – which in some cases have not delivered the expected value. The issues typically result from failure to scale, poor ease of use, excessive effort for care and feeding, or just customer execution failure. Granted some of the discontent is clearly navel-gazing – parsing and analyzing log files as part of your daily job is boring, mundane, and error-prone work…
Here’s to the neighbors.
I live in a rural area with a pretty low population density and 1.5 acre lot minimum. My closest neighbor is 60 feet away – most are over 300 feet or more. The area is really quiet. Usually all you can hear are birds. You can see the Milky Way at night. On any given day I may see javelina, coyotes, horny toads, road runners, vultures, hawks, barn owls, cottontails, jackrabbits, ground squirrels, mice, scorpions, one of a half-dozen varieties of snake, and a dozen…
Mike and I are launching our next blog series today, one we know is pretty timely from the conversations with have with organizations almost every day. The reality is that many organizations have spent millions and years trying to get productivity out of their SIEM – with mediocre results. Combined with a number of the large players being acquired by mega IT companies and taking their eyes off the ball a bit, most customers need to start asking themselves some key questions.