Updated: 06/30/2010
One of the most daunting tasks in information security is protecting sensitive data in (often complex and distributed) enterprise applications. Even the most hardened security professionals enters these projects with at least a modicum of trepidation. Coordinating effective information protection across application, database, storage, and server teams is challenging under the best of circumstances – and much tougher when also facing the common blend of legacy systems and…
We’ve already discussed the basic features of a SIEM/Log Management platform, including collection, aggregation and normalization, correlation and alerting, reporting and forensics, and deployment architectures. But these posts cover the core functions, and are part of what each products in the space will bring to the table.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.