Securosis Blog

We covered SIEM and Log Management deployment architectures in depth to underscore how different models are used to deal with scalability and data management issues. In some cases these deployment choices are driven by the underlying data handling mechanism within the product. In other words each platform stores and manages data differently – these decisions have significant impact on product scalability, data management, and reporting & forensics capabilities. Here we discuss the different…

Believe it or not, we are down to our final metrics post! We’re going to close things out today with change management – something that isn’t specific to security, but comes with security implications.

Friday Summary: June 25, 2010

Adrian Lane · June 25, 2010

Thursday was totally shot. I wasted the entire day standing around. Eight hours and twenty nine minutes standing in line. I got in line at 5:50 AM and did not get back in my car until 3:00.

Are Secure Web Apps Possible?

Mike Rothman · June 24, 2010

We security folks are a tough crowd, and we have trouble understanding why stuff that is obvious to us isn’t so obvious to everyone else. We wonder why app developers can’t understand how to develop a secure application. Why can’t they grok SDL or run a damn scanner against the application before it goes live? Q/A? Ha. Obviously that’s for losers. And those sentiments aren’t totally misplaced. There is a tremendous amount of apathy regarding software security, and the incentives for developers…

Incite 6/23/2010: Competitive Fire

Mike Rothman · June 23, 2010

I’ve always been pretty competitive. For instance, back in high school my friends and I would make boasts about how we’d have more of this or that, and steal the other’s wife, etc. Yes, it was silly high school ego run rampant, but I thought life was a zero sum game back then. Win/win was not in my vocabulary. I win, you lose, that’s it.

The Open Source Database Security Project

Adrian Lane · June 23, 2010

I am thinking about writing a guide to secure open source databases, including verification queries. Do you all think that would be useful?

This morning Trustwave announced their acquisition of Breach Security, the web application firewall vendor.

Trustwave’s been on an acquisition streak for a while now, picking up companies such as Mirage (NAC), Vericept (DLP), BitArmor (encryption), and Intellitactics (log management/SIEM). Notice any trends? All these products have a strong PCI angles, none of the companies were seeing strong sales (Trustwave doesn’t do acquisitions for large multiples of sales), and all were more mid-market…

We have covered the major features and capabilities of SIEM and Log Management tools, so now let’s discuss architecture and deployment models. Each architecture addresses a specific issue, such as coverage for remote devices, scaling across hundreds of thousands of devices, real-time analysis, or handling millions of events per second. Each has advantages and disadvantages in analysis performance, reporting performance, scalability, storage, and cost.

This FireStarter is more of a real conversation starter than a definitive statement designed to rile everyone up.

Over the past couple months I’ve talked with a few organizations – some of them quite large – deploying full disk encryption for laptops but skipping the pre-boot environment.

Return of the Security Start-up?

Mike Rothman · June 21, 2010

As Rich described on Friday, he, Adrian, and I were sequestered at the end of last week working on our evil plans for world domination. But we did take some time for meetings, and we met up with a small company, the proverbial “last company standing” in a relatively mature market. All their competitors have been acquired and every deal they see involves competing with a multi-billion dollar public company.