The good old days: Monitoring employees on company-owned PCs, accessing the company data center across corporate networks. You knew where everything was, and who was using it. And the company owned it all, so you could pretty much dictate where and how you performed security monitoring. With cloud and mobile? Not so much.
SLmageddon V12. Polar Vortices. Ebola. APT123. We live in an era when every week it seems some massive new vulnerability, exploit, or attack is going to take down society. This week Rich, Mike, and Adrian tackle the endless progression of bad news; and how to maintain focus when everyone wants you to save the children.
Thus ends the busiest four weeks I have had since joining Securosis. A few conferences – AWS Re:Invent was awesome – a few client on-site days, meeting with some end customers, and about a half dozen webcasts, have together left me gasping for air. We all need a little R&R here and the holidays are approaching, so Firestarters and blog posts will be a bit sporadic. Technically it is still Friday, so here goes today’s (slightly late) summary.
Securing enterprise applications is hard work. These are complex platforms, with lots of features and interfaces, reliant on database support, and often deployed across multiple machines. They leverage both code provided by the vendor, as well as hundreds – if not thousands – of supporting code modules produced specifically for the customer’s needs. This make every environment a bit different, and acceptable application behavior unique to every company. This is problematic because during our…
Interruption is death for a writer. At least it is for me. I need to get into a flow state, where I’m locked in and banging words out. With my travel schedule and the number of calls I make even when not traveling, finding enough space to get into flow has been challenging. Very challenging. And it gets frustrating. Very frustrating.
I think the financial equivalent of jumping shark is Wall Street creating an ETF based on your theme.
If so, cybersecurity has arrived.
Our goal for this series is not to cover the breadth and depth of an entire enterprise application security program – most of you have that covered already. Instead it is to identify the critical gaps at most firms and offer recommendations for how to close them. We have covered use cases and pointed out gaps; now it’s time to offer recommendations for how to address the deficiencies. You will notice many of the gaps noted in the previous section are byproducts of either a) attackers exposing…
This is a corporate news post, so skip it if all you want is our usual snarky security analysis.
For the first time since starting Securosis we are increasing our prices. Yes, it has been over seven years without any change in pricing for our services. The new prices are only a modest bump, and also streamlined to remove the uncertainty of travel expenses on engagements. Call it ego, but we think we are a heck of a bargain.
In the introduction to our series on Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud we went through all the disruptive forces which are increasingly complicating security monitoring. These include the accelerating move to cloud computing and expanding access via mobile devices. Those new models require much greater automation, and significantly less visibility and control over the physical layer of the technology stack. So you need to think about monitoring a bit differently.
We continue to investigate the practical use of Threat Intelligence (TI) within your security program. After tackling how to Leverage Threat Intel in Security Monitoring, we now turn our attention to Incident Response and Management. In this paper we go deep into how your existing incident response and management processes can (and should) integrate adversary analysis and other threat intelligence sources, to help narrow down the scope of your investigations.