Read more: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc185712.aspx

Download now: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CD057D9D-86B9-4E35-9733-7ACB0B2A3CA1&displaylang=en

Take a few moments and give yourself a security checkup. If you have any comments or feedback on the tool, feel free to leave them here on my blog—I’ll make sure the right people see it.

From the download page:

The MSAT employs a holistic approach to measuring your security posture by covering topics across people, process, and technology. Findings are coupled with prescriptive guidance and recommended mitigation efforts, including links to more information for additional industry guidance. These resources may assist you in keeping you aware of specific tools and methods that can help change the security posture of your IT environment.

There are two assessments that define the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool:

• Business Risk Profile Assessment
• Defense in Depth Assessment (UPDATED)

The questions identified in the survey portion of the tool and the associated answers are derived from commonly accepted best practices around security, both general and specific. The questions and the recommendations that the tool offers are based on standards such as ISO 17799 and NIST-800.x, as well as recommendations and prescriptive guidance from Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group and additional security resources valued in the industry.

After completing an Assessment, you will gain access to a detailed report of your results. You may also compare your results with those of your peers (by industry and company size), provided that you upload your results anonymously to the secure MSAT Web server. When you upload your data the application will simultaneously retrieve the most recent data available. To be able to provide this comparative data, we need customers such as you to upload their information. All information is kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information whatsoever will be sent.

When I park my car in the garage, I lock it. Why? Well, although I would hate for someone to steal my snow shovel and hockey sticks, my car is much more valuable to me. Security is about managing risk, specifically protecting valuable assets like my car. I have a higher level of protection on my car than on my garage. In dollar terms, the contents of my garage are orders of magnitude less valuable than my car. I could spend a lot of money fortifying my garage, and that would add some security to my car while it is parked there, but it is not a cost-effective investment. First, my car is the asset of value, and second the garage - no matter how well protected it is - doesn't move. 

Car manufacturers know this, insurance companies know this, consumers know this. Even media publishers know, yet in the common enterprise, programmers and architects seem to roam in ignorance. Your average download of a Michael Bolton song carries a far higher level of security than valuable user data, like passwords, social security numbers, and credit card details. Why do we keep protecting critical data with point-to-point security solutions (like SSL) that protect the transmission channel, but leave the valuable assets being transported wide open everywhere else? This is a critical question that needs to be answered in order to successfully add an effective layer of security to an SOA.

While genetics is concerned with the observation of specific sections of DNA, genomics is about studying the entire genome of an organism, something that has only become practically possible in recent years. In forensic genetics, which is the technology behind the large national DNA databases being built in several countries including notably UK and USA (Wallace’s outstanding article lucidly exposes many significant issues), investigators compare scene-of-crime samples with database samples by checking if they match, but only on a very small number of specific locations in the genome (e.g. 13 locations according to the CODIS rules). In our paper we explore what might change when forensic analysis moves from genetics to genomics over the next few decades. This is a problem that can only be meaningfully approached from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint and indeed our combined backgrounds cover computer security, bioinformatics and law.

(Image from Wikimedia commons, in turn from NIST.)

Sequencing the first human genome (2003) cost 2.7 billion dollars and took 13 years. The US’s National Human Genome Research Institute has offered over 20 M$ worth of grants towards the goal of driving the cost of whole-genome sequencing down to a thousand dollars. This will enable personalized genomic medicine (e.g. predicting genetic risk of contracting specific diseases) but will also open up a number of ethical and privacy-related problems. Eugenetic abortions, genomic pre-screening as precondition for healthcare (or even just dating…), (mis)use of genomic data for purposes other than that for which it was collected and so forth. In various jurisdictions there exists legislation (such as the recent GINA in the US) that attempts to protect citizens from some of the possible abuses; but how strongly is it enforced? And is it enough? In the forensic context, is the DNA analysis procedure as infallible as we are led to believe? There are many subtleties associated with the interpretation of statistical results; when even professional statisticians disagree, how are the poor jurors expected to reach a fair verdict? Another subtle issue is kin privacy: if the scene-of-crime sample, compared with everyone in the database, partially matches Alice, this may be used as a hint to investigate all her relatives, who aren’t even in the database; indeed, some 1980s murders were recently solved in this way. “This raises compelling policy questions about the balance between collective security and individual privacy” [Bieber, Brenner, Lazer, 2006]. Should a democracy allow such a “driftnet” approach of suspecting and investigating all the innocents in order to catch the guilty?

This is a paper of questions rather than one of solutions. We believe an informed public debate is needed before the expected transition from genetics to genomics takes place. We want to stimulate discussion and therefore we invite you to read the paper, make up your mind and support what you believe are the right answers.

IDG News has published a news report titled, “Researchers find vulnerability in Windows Vista“. The report says:

An Austrian security vendor has found a vulnerability in Windows Vista that it says could possibly allow an attacker to run unauthorized code on a PC.

The problem is rooted in the Device IO Control, which handles internal device communication. Researchers at Phion have found two different ways to cause a buffer overflow that could corrupt the memory of the operating system’s kernel.

In one of the scenarios, a person would already have to have administrative rights to the PC. In general, vulnerabilities that require that level of access somewhat undermine the risk since the attacker already has permission to use to the PC.

Somewhat undermine the risk? If you need admin rights to exercise a bug it is not a security issue since you could already run any code with whatever privilege you wanted. Microsoft is not issuing a patch, but creating a bug fix in a service pack, yet this is newsworthy? This story has no comment from anyone but the finder of the bug. Let’s see if other news outlets pick up on this one.

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.

1)  Gunnar has put up his speech as the Quality of Protection Keynote:  “The Economics of Finding and Fixing Vulnerabilities in Distributed Systems.” Don’t worry if that title doesn’t turn you on, his post is one of the best this year.  I wanted to make today’s blog post some reflection on what he says there, but I haven’t the time today and we’ll have to table that until next week.  Anyway, it’s excellent.

2)  Aleks Jakulin writes about The Future of Data Analysis.  I spoke with a CSO who is morphing into a CRO role and one of the things he plans on doing is hiring about  a half dozen data analysts.  If you think better use of Security Information is in your future, you’ll want to take a look at that blog.

3)  Brent Huston of the Ohio voting machine fame writes about an incident he just worked on and risk and rational security.

4)  Our friend Mike Rothman and our friends at Business Of Security/Cisco are doing a Pragmatic CSO thing.  Mike is always entertaining and practical (dare I say, pragmatic) so I think this should be a fun webex.  Hope you’ll sign up.

Namaste Risk Geeks!