by Bozho | Aug 18, 2020 | Aggregated, cybersecurity, Opinions, security
There are hundreds of different information security solutions out there and choosing which one to pick can be hard. Usually decisions are driven by recommendations, vendor familiarity, successful upsells, compliance needs, etc. I’d like to share my understanding of the security landscape by providing one-line descriptions of each of the different categories of products. Note that these categories are not strictly defined sometimes and they may overlap. They may have evolved over time and a certain category can include several products from legacy categories. The explanations will be slightly simplified. For a generalization and summary, skip the list and go to the next paragraph. This post aims to summarize a lot of Gertner and Forester reports, as well as product data sheets, combined with some real world observations and to bring this to a technical level, rather than broad business-focused capabilities. I’ll split them in several groups, though they may be overlapping. Monitoring and auditing SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) – collects logs from all possible sources (applications, OSs, network appliances) and raises alarms if there are anomalies IDS (Intrusion Detection System) – listening to network packets and finding malicious signatures or statistical anomalies. There are multiple ways to listen to the traffic: proxy, port mirroring, network tap, host-based interface listener. Deep packet inspection is sometimes involved, which requires sniffing TLS at the host or terminating it at a proxy in order to be able to inspect encrypted communication (especially for TLS 1.3), effectively doing an MITM “attack” on the organization users. IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) – basically a marketing upgrade of IDS with the added option to...
by Bozho | Aug 29, 2019 | Aggregated, cybersecurity, infosec, Opinions
A few months ago an essay titled “Cybersecurity is not very important” appeared. The essay is well written and interesting but I’d like to argue against its main point. And that is actually hard – the essay has many good points, and although it has a contrarian feel, it actually isn’t saying anything outrageous. But I still don’t agree with the conclusion. I suggest reading it (or skimming it) first before continuing here, although this article is generally self-sufficient. I agree with many things in the essay, most importantly that there is no 100% protection and it’s all about minimizing the risk. I also agree that cybersecurity is a complex set of measures that span not only the digital world, but he physical one as well. And I agree that even though after watching a few videos from DEF CON, BlackHat or CCC, one feels that everything is fundamentally broken and going to live in the mountains is the only sane strategy to survive an impending digital apocalypse, this is not the case – we have a somewhat okayish level of protection for the more important parts of the digital world. Certainly exploitable, but not trivially so. There are, though, a few main claims that I’d like to address: There has not been any catastrophic cybersecurity event – the author claims that the fact that there was no digital Pearl Harbor or 9/11 suggests that we’ve been investing just the right amount of effort in cybersecurity. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Catastrophic events like that cost human lives as an immediate result of a physical action. No...
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