Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the "strategic" model of terrorism, and it's basically an economic model. It posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. It's assumed, for example, that people join Hamas to achieve a Palestinian state; that people join the PKK to attain a Kurdish national homeland; and that people join al-Qaida to, among other things, get the United States out of the Persian Gulf.

If you believe this model, the way to fight terrorism is to change that equation, and that's what most experts advocate. Governments tend to minimize the political gains of terrorism through a no-concessions policy; the international community tends to recommend reducing the political grievances of terrorists via appeasement, in hopes of getting them to renounce violence. Both advocate policies to provide effective nonviolent alternatives, like free elections.

Historically, none of these solutions has worked with any regularity. Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, has studied dozens of terrorist groups from all over the world. He argues that the model is wrong. In a paper published this year in International Security that -- sadly -- doesn't have the title "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists," he discusses, well, seven habits of highly ineffective terrorists. These seven tendencies are seen in terrorist organizations all over the world, and they directly contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers:

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn't have the right paperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally different political platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don't even seem to care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don't have a lot of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist.

All of this explains the seven habits. It's not that they're ineffective; it's that they have a different goal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve the group's existence and cohesion.

This kind of analysis isn't just theoretical; it has practical implications for counterterrorism. Not only can we now better understand who is likely to become a terrorist, we can engage in strategies specifically designed to weaken the social bonds within terrorist organizations. Driving a wedge between group members -- commuting prison sentences in exchange for actionable intelligence, planting more double agents within terrorist groups -- will go a long way to weakening the social bonds within those groups.

We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

• Network Level Monitoring and Management,
  
• Cyber Security: Network Intrusion Detection,
  
• Enterprise Monitoring and Management,
• Modeling and Simulation of Collaborative Business Processes,
• Business Policy Monitoring, and
• Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems.

In each of the CEP application examples above, the amount of event information available to software developers can be staggering; however, despite all the available information, the capability to sense-and-respond to threats and opportunities is crude, at best.

Folks who work in network and security management, for example, are bombarded with event information.  However, this deluge of event information is, for the most part, “noise” that is difficult to understand.   In network management one of the most difficult things to accomplish is to find the root cause of an outage or performance problem.   This is why researchers at Stanford were funded to focused on research topics such as (above), the Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems.

These are the classes of asymmetric event processing problems that define complex event processing, or CEP.   Processing events by mediating events, routing events, or running a rule-set against events and making a processing decision are all perfectly valid event processing applications.   However, the core reason to have “complex event processing” is to solve event processing problems where there exists a significant asymmetry between the deluge of “event noise”  (Professor Luckham called this phenomena the “event cloud”) and detecting business-relevant, actionable complex events in an climate of uncertainty and noise.

In my next post on this topic I will briefly the review motivation behind my 1999 ACM paper, Intrusion Detection Systems and Multisensor Data Fusion, where we were working on solving complex distributed security challenges based on real-world experiences with the problems of asymmetric processing capabiilities.  I will discuss why we evolved from an early rule-based expert system model to a more advanced inference model that was not dependent solely on rule-based thinking.   I will also explain why other researchers and developers experienced in complex event detection applications have come to the same conclusion.

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the "strategic" model of terrorism, and it's basically an economic model. It posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. It's assumed, for example, that people join Hamas to achieve a Palestinian state; that people join the PKK to attain a Kurdish national homeland; and that people join al-Qaida to, among other things, get the United States out of the Persian Gulf.

If you believe this model, the way to fight terrorism is to change that equation, and that's what most experts advocate. Governments tend to minimize the political gains of terrorism through a no-concessions policy; the international community tends to recommend reducing the political grievances of terrorists via appeasement, in hopes of getting them to renounce violence. Both advocate policies to provide effective nonviolent alternatives, like free elections.

Historically, none of these solutions has worked with any regularity. Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, has studied dozens of terrorist groups from all over the world. He argues that the model is wrong. In a paper (.pdf) published this year in International Security that -- sadly -- doesn't have the title "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists," he discusses, well, seven habits of highly ineffective terrorists. These seven tendencies are seen in terrorist organizations all over the world, and they directly contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers:

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn't have the right paperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally different political platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don't even seem to care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don't have a lot of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist.

All of this explains the seven habits. It's not that they're ineffective; it's that they have a different goal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve the group's existence and cohesion.

This kind of analysis isn't just theoretical; it has practical implications for counterterrorism. Not only can we now better understand who is likely to become a terrorist, we can engage in strategies specifically designed to weaken the social bonds within terrorist organizations. Driving a wedge between group members -- commuting prison sentences in exchange for actionable intelligence, planting more double agents within terrorist groups -- will go a long way to weakening the social bonds within those groups.

We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.

---

Bruce Schneier is Chief Security Technology Officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

I’d love to have another blog even more specific - “Ok, that Assurance is Evidence Of What, Exactly?

Today he has a great article called:

What’s the matter with Risk Management?

And “in short, it’s everything.” It pretty much sums up why I had to grow to re-evaluate how our industry does risk, risk management, approaches controls & vulnerability and find a new way.   A couple of things jump out at me in reading Chris’ article:

1.)  Just because that Deming cycle sucks and is full of unknowns doesn’t mean “risk” doesn’t exist, nor that it isn’t of primary importance. Nor does it mean that in the absence of model & methodology, we won’t be “doing” risk analysis anyway - just in an ad hoc method and completely from “the gut”.

Our industry calls these unstructured risk analysis “Best Practices”, as it’s an easy and convenient way of sweeping the unknowns under the rug of bureaucracy and enforcing it via peer pressure.

2.)  What this “suckiness” does mean is that your model and methodology aren’t helping you. As Chris intimates, there is too much uncertainty in the inputs for his model (they are, in the language of Bayesians - too subjective to be useful priors).

Take for example how we might be approaching the “controls” part of our analysis.  Chris writes:

“2. What are the controls that we have to employ?
800-53, ISO 27001, PCI, etc.

Still kinda good, but we basically know that ISO is relatively voluntary and NIST supplies a control catalog and not policies. So here we have to take the control catalog, and mash our policies into it.”

I wouldn’t call this “kinda good” at all :)  These control catalogs only provide a hierarchy within which to look for evidence of  our ability to resist an attacker.  They are incapable of making any claim about the effectiveness of the controls when they are operated at 100% efficiency, or more importantly, what % efficiency our specific organization operates at.

Let’s use Chris Hayes’ Initech as our fictional example.

Initech has a control (a back door on a loading dock).  Now the locks on the door are 100% capable of locking the door.  This is different than saying that they are capable of frustrating all but the top 5% of lockpicking burgalars.  It is also diffferent than saying that in a sample of several “walk around audits” the doors are left open 20% of the time (they are not in compliance with policy 100% of the time).  Even worse, that 80% of the time the door is not propped open?  Yeah, tailgating is a known issue.

So we have several different variables here that we need to account for (and it’s just a door).  But the analogy stands that most “risk management” methodologies are “We have a door, yes/no?” And most GRC platforms, when asked for their “opinion” will simply say “door is needed” or, even worse, “a door policy is needed”.

3.)  Criticality and the Source of Value is all messed up in these Risk Management models.

Chris writes:

Someone wants me to tell them which boxes are more critical than others. This is mainly because of budgetary or operational reasons. To which I usually say “All of them, it is a system after all”.

This literally made me laugh out loud.  And this sort of “rate the firewall as Risk = 500 but rate the actual business application as Risk = 157″ thing is also endemic.  Now Chris is very smart here.  He correctly identifies that the value is tied to the business process the systems support, and not to a specific box.  Oh, we scan at the specific box level - but because of the nature of systemic failures - all the boxes in the process are inexorably interrelated.

One of the reasons I really like FAIR is that the losses are quantified (or qualified) based not on some amorphous value of the box or the process itself, but losses are linked to the actions that the threat will take. Take systems in a highly regulated industries as an example.  Usually the most probable losses aren’t due to system compromise per se, but in the disclosure the compromise causes (regulators are a threat source, after all).  But many “risk management” methodologies will say “online banking is worth $2 billion, the value of the systems is therefore $2 billion”.  And suddenly we’re telling executive management that there’s a 60% probability that they’ll lose $2 billion.

4.)  If the primary source of prior information for your “risk management” methodology is a vulnerability scanner - you’re doing it wrong.  Chris writes:

So we ran a scan and now we have a report. A snapshot in time to make all decisions. Where did these vulnerability ratings come from? Do I even know if my system is at risk? What if I spend my time on vulnerabilities that have no threat?

So first, my thoughts are that actual “vulnerability” must be a comparison of the force a threat can apply, and our ability to resist that force (this is a probability statement, btw).

Changing your thinking about vulnerability now helps us understand the problem in several new ways.  First, you can start to divorce yourself from the scanner.  After all, the scanner is simply providing you with current state information that is usually just relevant variance from policy. It doesn’t really tell you about real “weakness in a system” because the system is an interrelated mess of people, processes and IT assets.

5.)  Finally, most “risk management” approaches just *don’t* do a good job of helping us understand the how’s and why’s of managing risk. In the past, I’ve referred to these standards as really being “issue management” because they are at their heart, an act of discovery - a formal process around gathering prior information.  They are not, in and of themselves, capable of linking the issues discovered to the root cause.  And these root causes?  Yeah, they’re the things that create “risk”.  Not a threat, not a vulnerability, not the existence of an asset - the amount of risk that we have stems from our capability to manage it.

So Chris, I completely agree - but I wouldn’t give up yet.  There actually are a few of us who are focused on what you suggest:

Where to go from here: A fundamental revamp of how to deal with Risk. Where risk professionals focus on the treating the sickness and not the symptoms, and come up with some new success/actionable metrics.

Chris, there’s nothing I want to do more than that.

Making IT work as One

How does my company stay efficient while we’re using technologies around interoperability? How can innovation help my business?

Top business needs:

• Reduce cost
• Manage complexity
• Mitigate risk

Mixed IT environments are a reality for almost all organizations. Different environments, architectural strategies, desktop profiles, etc. There are benefits to having mixed source environments, although homogenous environments are ideal. On average 46,000 hours in an organization are spent on Sarbanes-Oxley standards.

Some considerations to make IT work as one:

• Strategy
• Solutions
• Ecosystem

Strategy

Actionable strategy is key. The emergence of three silos (applications, systems and infrastructure, and operations) are now moved into one. There is a lot of pressure to make these pieces come together.

Solutions

You need focused solutions to solve problems today while keeping an eye to the future. There are three main needs: the data center, end-user computing, and identity and security. This is also what is the most important to the market right now. The end goal is the agility of the data center.

Data Center Challenges

• Create an agile IT infrastructure
• Address power and space constraints
• Deliver performance, security and availability
• Manage hardware, software and labor costs
• Meet service level agreements

Data Center Solutions

• Workload management - green IT and server efficiency, unified physical and virtual environment
• Virtualization and Consolidation - business continuity and disaster recovery
• Enterprise Servers

End-User Computing Solutions

• Collaboration
• Enterprise desktops - Novell uses Linux and Open Office, interesting to note
• Endpoint management

Identity and Security Challenges

• Minimize risk, uncertainty and policy violations
• Provide timely and secure access to information
• Ensure, document and prove information security
• Reduce the cost of proving compliance
• Reduce the cost and complexity of governance

Identity and Security Solutions

• Identity and Access Management - user provisioning, role management, access management
• Compliance Management - Audit, Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), IT controls automation, Security, Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Ecosystem

The ecosystem is powerful. Companies should challenge partners for innovation and interoperability.

Community Innovation - open source and open standards

IT Landscape - Mixed IT Environments

• Consulting, systems integration vendors
• Application vendors
• Systems software vendors (Novell)
• Hardware, network vendors

How does your ecosystem help your company? How do your partners help? What is their role in the industry to help you? How are all the vendors in the industry helping you?

For the third year in a row, the government’s overall FISMA grade improved. But don’t get too excited; the grade only improved from a C- to a C this year. (And D+ in 2005).

But there’s a lot to hide in an “average grade”. Turns out that the reality is a split between overachievers and underachievers.

The agencies/departments with a grade of A-, A or A+:

• Department of Justice
• US AID
• EPA
• NSF
• SSA
• HUD
• OPM (I would hope so)

And, sadly the ones that got an F:

• Department of the Interior
• Department of Treasury
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Department of Agriculture

FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) became a federal law back in 2002 as part of the E-Government Act. Six years later, there has been improvement, but there’s still clearly a long way to go.

So what’s the disconnect? Speaking from a vendor perspective, we’ve had first-hand experience with the lack of actionable, concrete guidelines around FISMA – for processes, monitoring and check-list assessment items. We even contacted NIST directly to get more guidance on how their very broad guidelines should be translated to actual features and reporting in something like our monitoring solution. The end goal, after all, is to help our government customers not only meet the FISMA requirements but also to be seen/assessed as meeting those requirements. As we do for other compliance/governance requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley, the more that EM7 can automate and report on, the better.

But that leads to the second issue here. How accurate is the FISMA scorecard? SC Magazine writes, “Many have seen organizations get an A when they believe they should have received an F, and vice versa” and some experts “blame this on the lack of a standardized evaluation, as well as censorship among auditors.” There’s talk about language ambiguities and opinions that the scorecard is not “one size fits all” – that small agencies face different IT security challenges than the big guys.

So what’s right about FISMA? We can point to a heightened awareness about the importance of security and the “security picture” in each federal agency. Certainly, from our own survey at FOSE, we saw the difference just from last year to this one:

• 91% surveyed said FISMA was important (up from 66% last year)
• Over 50% had solutions installed to help with FISMA (up from only 14% last year)

Based on these numbers, we’re not surprised to see the FISMA average grade go up, but we expected it to be even higher. So what will it take to get the government on the honor roll? From Rep. Tom Davis, “We need to seriously consider incentives for agency success and funding penalties and personnel reforms for agencies that don’t measure up…We need a bill with teeth, and we need agencies to understand the goal is to keep information safe, not to check a statutory box.”

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