COBIT rivals ITIL from The IT Skeptic

“Everyone is tiptoeing around the fact that COBIT offers a significant competitive body of knowledge (BOK) to ITIL. Sure ITIL goes into more depth in places, but to say COBIT sits over the top is to grossly understate the overlap. COBIT extends a long way down into the “how” and it does it with an intellectual rigour that ITIL lacks.”

Interesting stuff that.  A detailed mapping might help some folks.  Either way, the good news for those keen on understanding risk management is that governance metrics, done right, allow us to understand a part of that “capability to manage risk” we’re always looking for.   Assurance, verification and the acquisition and interpretation of knowledge is king.   Speaking of which….

How To Tell When “Nothing Happens” by Pete Lindstrom

“…problem is that, it isn’t really true that “nothing happens” when you employ some specific security control to prevent an exploit. Not only that, but even when it is difficult to collect data on what didn’t happen, one can devise experiments to tell how frequently that nothing occurred.”

Good analysis is all about the uncertainty.   Speaking of accounting for uncertainty…

Assets Good Until Reached For by Gunnar Peterson

“If you have a 100,000 dekstops or 100,000 servers it hard to manage. You will need to automate and to do that you need to abstract, but you should also realize that its a drawing on a whiteboard not reality. You need abstraction assurance.”

And there’s the trick.  We might call “abstraction assurance” an analog to “confidence” or “uncertainty” in certain priors (metrics) or posteriors (calculated values based on those metrics).  The stronger that abstraction assurance is, the less uncertainty we have in our knowledge and the better our ability to create wisdom from that knowledge (you know, make decisions).

Epstein, Snow and Flake: Three Views of Software Security by Adam Shostack

Adam’s focus is on software security, but the discussion here can be abstracted out into the broader realm of risk management quite nicely.

Two-thirds of firms hit by cybercrime from Security Focus

The US DoJ says that in 2005 (there’s some timely data) 2/3 of their surveyed firms detected at least one cybercrime.  “Cybercrime” is “classified … into cyber attacks, cyber theft, and other incidents.”  Pretty general.  Also from the report:  “Computer viruses made up more than half of all cyber attacks.”

(That sound you hear is me tapping my forehead lightly on large iron object)

Lessons Learned from “Personal” Risk Management By: Christopher Daugherty

“This process is what I call “personal risk management.”  All of us have done it and will continue to do so.  Why is it, then, many companies have ignored following similar principles with the on-going health of the business?  This is a debate with many different answers so I ask you to select the best answer for your employer:

a) Have not ignored as this keeps me awake at night!

b) Please restate the problem, I cannot hear well with my head buried in the sand.

c) We passed our SOX audit so we checked this off the list!

d) We are informed of the challenge but we have a business to run and profits to make

e) Is this what internal audit and risk management has been telling us?”

I was reading the Security Bloggers Network feed this morning. I had missed a day or so and had a lot of articles to go through. I was also thinking of what could be the next topic suggested for members to blog about as part of our cross-promotion with Black Hat.  Than I realized there really was not any need.  The topic was obvious, DNS. I didn't do an actual count of how many times it was mentioned (as Mr Bump did with NAC vendors mentioned in the Information Week NAC survey), but there had to be at least a dozen and half, if not more articles on the great DNS leak of 2008. 

Dan Kaminsky's research was exemplary, but his naivete about people keeping the exploit under thier hat was not.  While Thomas Matasano apologized for his mistake, frankly from the moment Havlar Flake begain speculating on it, it was just a matter of time. 

Anyway, the cat is out of that bag, but something tells me that Dan K's presentation will still be a standing room only crowd in just a few weeks in Vegas.  But beyond that there are still a bunch of good topics to be discovered at Black Hat.  Not to mention lots of social activities brewing for both BH and DefCon.  I amreally looking forward to it. I would hope that no one is feeling the air out of the ballon on this one!

I was reading the Security Bloggers Network feed this morning. I had missed a day or so and had a lot of articles to go through. I was also thinking of what could be the next topic suggested for members to blog about as part of our cross-promotion with Black Hat.  Than I realized there really was not any need.  The topic was obvious, DNS. I didn't do an actual count of how many times it was mentioned (as Mr Bump did with NAC vendors mentioned in the Information Week NAC survey), but there had to be at least a dozen and half, if not more articles on the great DNS leak of 2008. 

Dan Kaminsky's research was exemplary, but his naivete about people keeping the exploit under thier hat was not.  While Thomas Matasano apologized for his mistake, frankly from the moment Havlar Flake begain speculating on it, it was just a matter of time. 

Anyway, the cat is out of that bag, but something tells me that Dan K's presentation will still be a standing room only crowd in just a few weeks in Vegas.  But beyond that there are still a bunch of good topics to be discovered at Black Hat.  Not to mention lots of social activities brewing for both BH and DefCon.  I amreally looking forward to it. I would hope that no one is feeling the air out of the ballon on this one!

What’s more interesting to me, now that I’ve digested the big secret, is how this whole situation has played out in the security community.

The security community has been polarized for the past two weeks, not so much over the technical details being withheld, but about Dan’s plea that people not speculate about the vulnerability. As many pointed out, the “bad guys” won’t stop trying to figure it out just because the “good guys” keep quiet. To be honest, my own lack of public speculation wasn’t because I agreed with the philosophy; I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out the vulnerability myself.

People implied — or stated outright — that Dan just didn’t want anyone stealing his thunder. Considering the timing of the release and the subsequent BlackHat talk, it’s obvious why such accusations were made. Personally, I think it’s a little of each. I believe the coordinated patch effort was undertaken with the best of intentions, but I also think Dan relished some of the glory and media attention as well. It’s hard to blame him for that; if you were in his shoes, wouldn’t you want some recognition too?

By many accounts, dealing with the DNS vulnerability from the operational side has been an exercise in frustration. Plenty of IT people wanted to patch but couldn’t get approval without being able to justify the operational risk. “Because Dan said so” is apparently not a convincing enough argument. Some wondered why the people who were responsible for creating the problem should be blindly trusted to implement an appropriate fix?

Ultimately, vulnerability disclosure is a minefield. No matter how you choose to disclose, somebody will always disagree.

P.S. If you didn’t figure out the title of the post by now, Nate was one of the unlucky few to draw the same timeslot at BlackHat as Dan Kaminsky.

What’s more interesting to me, now that I’ve digested the big secret, is how this whole situation has played out in the security community.

The security community has been polarized for the past two weeks, not so much over the technical details being withheld, but about Dan’s plea that people not speculate about the vulnerability. As many pointed out, the “bad guys” won’t stop trying to figure it out just because the “good guys” keep quiet. To be honest, my own lack of public speculation wasn’t because I agreed with the philosophy; I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out the vulnerability myself.

People implied — or stated outright — that Dan just didn’t want anyone stealing his thunder. Considering the timing of the release and the subsequent BlackHat talk, it’s obvious why such accusations were made. Personally, I think it’s a little of each. I believe the coordinated patch effort was undertaken with the best of intentions, but I also think Dan relished some of the glory and media attention as well. It’s hard to blame him for that; if you were in his shoes, wouldn’t you want some recognition too?

By many accounts, dealing with the DNS vulnerability from the operational side has been an exercise in frustration. Plenty of IT people wanted to patch but couldn’t get approval without being able to justify the operational risk. “Because Dan said so” is apparently not a convincing enough argument. Some wondered why the people who were responsible for creating the problem should be blindly trusted to implement an appropriate fix?

Ultimately, vulnerability disclosure is a minefield. No matter how you choose to disclose, somebody will always disagree.

P.S. If you didn’t figure out the title of the post by now, Nate was one of the unlucky few to draw the same timeslot at BlackHat as Dan Kaminsky.