Dear Implementers:
What could be the KPIs by which I, being Management Representative,
can show complete picture in a compiled brief/short report? Your
response would be highly awaited.

Which I think is a great question!  Talk about no-nonsense.  None of this “high-falutin” nonsense about ISO adoption providing ‘piece of mind’ and ‘common language’ or ’strategic currency’.  No this is straight from the hip - tell me right now how I can communicate the value of an ISO implementation to non-security management.

I’m not sure I’ve got a good answer.  Do you?  You guys (loyal, cool, readers) are really bright and many of you CxSO’s in your own organizations.  Leave comments and in our next post  I’ll publish the best and brightest (as well as some of my own thoughts).

As promised, we recorded all of the day’s presentations and we’ve published them on TechNet:

Keynote Address by Scott Charney, Corporate VP, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing

Threat Modeling at EMC and Microsoft by Danny Dhillon of EMC and Adam Shostack of the Microsoft SDL team (of course)

Mitigations Unplugged by Matt Miller, Microsoft Security Science team

Concurrency Attacks on Web Applications by Scott Stender and Alex Vidergar of iSEC Partners

Fuzzed Enough? When it’s OK to Put the Shears Down by Jason Shirk, Dave Weinstein and Lars Opstad, Microsoft Security Science team

Real World Code Review – Using the Right Tools in the Right Place at the Right Time by Vinnie Liu of Stach & Liu

In addition to the presentations, we also recorded some short interviews (about 10 minutes long) with each of the speakers. If you’re just looking for a quick summary of a particular talk, these interviews are the place to start:

Threat Modeling at EMC, Danny Dhillon

Threat Modeling at Microsoft, Adam Shostack

Mitigations Unplugged, Matt Miller

Concurrency Attacks on Web Applications, Scott Stender and Alex Vidergar

Fuzzed Enough? Jason Shirk and Dave Weinstein

Real World Code Review, Vinnie Liu

I hope at least 96% of online readers will be able to directly apply this material to their products, just like the show attendees. Please post back and let us know, either way. And let us know what you’d like to see for next year. We have big plans to build on our success and make SDL Sessions 2.0 even bigger and better than the first.

First, here is what my early endorsement for the book said (can be found on the inside cover of the book):

“Amazingly useful (and fun to read!) book that does justice to this  somewhat esoteric subject - and this is coming from a long-time  visualization skeptic! What is most impressive that  this book is  actually 'hands-on-useful," not conceptual, with examples usable by  readers in their daily jobs. Chapter 8 on insiders is my favorite!”

What else do I think of the book, apart from the fact that it is awesome? :-)

First, I have to admit that I used to argue with Raffy about usefulness of visualization. I was burned by having to look at bad “visualization” tools and would take an ugly, meaningful table over an ugly, meaningless picture any day now. Thus, I was a visualization skeptic. Buy you know what? The book does justice to visualization really well, and it explains when to use it and when not to use it.

The book gives just the right amount of visualization theory, which is not onerous to read at all (unlike some other books), as well as other visualization basics. The fun starts at Chapter 4, where he covers  the process from data to useful pictures. This actually explains why some visualization are useful and some are not; if you just jam data into a graphing program, there is a good chance that it would not be too useful. If you follow the ideas from Ch4, it is more likely to be useful.

Ch5 and 6 cover network data analysis: logs, packets, flows. This is what most people usually try to visualize; this book goes beyond “worms and scans” into nice visuals of email traffic, wireless and even vulnerability data (I found the latter slightly confusing). Ch7 covers “compliance”, which, in this case, covers all sorts of fun things, from risk assessment to database log visualization.  As I said, Ch8 is my favorite: I agree that insider tracking MAY be the area where visualization tools and approaches beat others. In Ch9, the book covers a few visualization tools; obviously, including the author’s AfterGlow.

So, to summarize, get the book if you have any connection to security AND data analysis. In fact, it is very likely that if you are doing security, you’d have to do data analysis at some point and so will benefit from reading the book. And, yes, it does come with a CD full of visualization tools (DAVIX).

BTW, I am posting it at Amazon as well.

So, my dear readers, imagine how amazed I was to find myself being truly inspired by my CEO,  for the first time in my working life! Philippe’s “no-B.S.” approach definitely works for me. I listened to his speech at a company meeting last week and – I am serious! – that was the most interesting, visionary AND inspiring speech that I’ve heard in a long time. It was clear what we’ve been doing, what worked, what didn’t and what we need to be doing and why it will work.

I already learned more than a few things from him just by listening to him  speak or conduct a meeting (or by watching him beat up a job candidate…). For example,  one CAN be “positive, but not marketing-ish,” even if situation is difficult. If one has an issue, one has to face it with no sugarcoating rather than ’play’ positive and pretend the issue is not there. One can have BOTH a driving vision AND be attentive to customers. One CAN release something when it is ready, not a year before :-) Etc, etc.

Finally, while some choose to lay people off, we at Qualys  ARE HIRING!  Come join us and help build the SaaS security platform that actually works! Specifically, we are looking for TAMs (kind like an SE, but better :-)), PMs and a lot of engineers.

First up is a code review quiz, “Test Your Security IQ”. Put your C/C++/C# security skills to the challenge by reviewing ten tricky code snippets that Michael and I devised. As an added incentive, I’ll post public congratulations here in the SDL blog to the first person who reverses the insecure hash found somewhere in the exam (not to give too much of a hint).

Next up, we have “Agile SDL: Streamline Security Practices for Agile Development”. I’ve been talking about web application security issues in the SDL blog (and in the September issue of MSDN magazine, if you missed it). However, while it’s essential to make sure that web-specific issues are covered in the SDL, it’s equally important to make sure that web development teams – and other Agile development teams – can use the SDL effectively, and the classic, phased SDL approach is not always a good fit for these teams. This MSDN article is the first public look at the new SDL/Agile methodology that we’ve been working on for the last year. This process is currently in beta with some internal Microsoft product teams and online services. We’d love to get some external feedback on it before we release it to the entire company, so please send us your thoughts.

Finally, be sure to check out Michael’s Security Briefs column “Threat Models Improve Your Security Process”. Regular readers of this blog know how important threat modeling is to secure development. This article describes methods of using threat modeling not just to identify security vulnerabilities outright, but how to use it to make other SDL activities such as fuzzing and reducing attack surface more effective.

Three articles are more than enough for one team for one month! But be on the lookout for more articles from the usual SDL suspects in the near future. As always, keep watching this space for details.

That’s the question the Consumerist asked readers today, with a story about a Florida grand-dad whose gardener is supposedly fleecing him for over $10k / month, allegedly to help an ailing friend:

Shaun says his 80+-year old grandfather, Steve, is being scammed out of over $10,000 a month. It seems Steve recently hired a female gardener who introduced him to a “wealthy friend,” and now he’s loaning them money to pay for groceries, cable, home upkeep, and, get this, bodyguards to protect her from an ex-husband and son who to want to kill her. When the family tries to intervene, Steve says the family is trying to put him in a nursing home and steal his money. Shaun is at a loss. How can he help his grandfather, who doesn’t want to be helped?

Another question that might be relevant in the IT Security community is, are the elderly more prone to these scams, and if so why? In the tech world it’s widely assumed that the older generation just has a harder time learning and grasping how to use technology so may not understand what is risky and what isn’t.

But perhaps there’s a deeper problem, either with some form of dementia and paranoia in the older years, or just a purer vulnerability associated with being alienated from the new, cutting edge and modern world as we age, or some kind of unwillingness to be suspicious because of the need to have caring people around you?

*Please note: This offer is only for new registrations, we cannot re-price current registrations."

UPDATE: THE OFFER BELOW HAVE BEEN TAKEN AS OF 5:00PM Oct 30th.

For those rare people who read all the way to here :-), I can also give our 1 (one!) FREE CSI pass; please email me for it as it will be given on "a first come, first served" basis and can only be used by my loyal blog readers :-)

UPDATE:  @MYRCURIAL from the great site Liquidmatrix says that I need to post the following warning:

YOU MAY NOT WANT TO PROCESS THIS PRIOR TO YOUR 11TH CUP OF COFFEE

==================================

Carrying on from yesterday’s post a bit, I’m happy to admit that Chris’ poem is right: we don’t have nearly the information we need now when we’re supposed to have “control” over our assets, putting things in a hosted/asp/cloud/buzzword model ain’t going to help our quest for visibility. My intention was/is to show that you need visibility (in part one) and then today explain that unfortunately, that’s only half the picture.

Today’s follow-on is about the fact that whatever visibility we can contractually enforce (be it in the “cloud” or in our own perimeter) has to be informative (Amrit, this is why I was plugging you with those variance questions on Twitter yesterday).  That is, we can ask whatever IT department (ours, theirs, whomever) for all sorts of information, and maybe they’ll even give it to us.  But we’re not really ready to:

• Know what to ask for
• Use it to create wisdom

A really salient example of this from outside IT hit my browser this morning.  Now it’s not at all my intention to be political or endorse one candidate over another.  Those who know me know I’m fiercely independent.  But this morning there’s a headline on a well-read news website about how one candidate is now “+2″ over another in a Gallup poll of “likely voters”. The source is here.

That is a screen grab from Gallup’s website that shows the “+2″.   I have to ask - how informative is this information?  Part of the problem is that Gallup’s methods are hidden as some sort of “secret sauce” (their FAQ section doesn’t help much, either).  But regardless of the quality of the measurement, this “+2″ has no context - we don’t really know what this information means with regards to an actual election.  Nor is there any predictive element (I hate the using the word predictive, but it’s common nomenclature - so there you go).  We don’t have what we need from this Gallup poll to create wisdom about the ability of either candidate to be elected.

Allow me show you what I mean by way of contrast.  Take a look at Nate Silver’s work at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/.  Now I’ve been long familiar with Nate due to his work in baseball.  He’s been at these sorts of ‘predictive’ analytics around our shared passion: creating wisdom from baseball statistics.

What Nate is doing at 538 is applying that acumen from his baseball work to the political process.  He’s breaking down the vote not just on popularity among likely voters, but in the context of the electoral college, accounting for variance and uncertainty, running Monte Carlo simulations and taking into account all sorts of polling information.  The result is really quite amazing. Here’s just one graph he presents - it’s the most similar to the Gallup one above, but you should really visit the site to understand the difference in quality of information and to check out the predictive elements he creates.

NOT ALL INFORMATION IS CREATED EQUAL, AND NOT ALL  JUDGMENTS ARE CREATED EQUALLY

And take a look at the contrast, here:

On one hand you have Gallup giving us a “+2″ advantage to a particular candidate.  Now Gallup themselves draws no conclusion but, as digested, how many readers do you think take this as evidence that the election is *really* close?

On the other hand, 538’s predictions show a 348/189 electoral college split, and one candidate winning 96% of the time in simulated elections.  That doesn’t seem close at all!

RISK MANAGEMENT

It is these predictive elements that we need in order to make better strategy and decisions.  I’ve been talking in the past about risk management’s inability to link current state to systemic causes, and this “context” is what predictive analytics provide.  We might have all sorts of visibility into our environment, and measurement of various amounts of variability that visibility gives us. But unless we have context to create wisdom, it’s all just, as Chris says, “machinations”.  We have to move beyond “+2″.

So Cloud/Grid/Utility/ASP/TimeShare/Whatever you want to call it - security will have to clean up our own mess first before we can do a good job with or without a perimeter.  Once we can start moving beyond “+2″ statements, then we can know what sort of visibility we require into an ability to Prevent, Detect, and Respond.