The British Standards Institution recently published “Cloud Computing. A Practical Introduction to the Legal Issues”. I ordered an electronic copy yesterday (I did that here, for GBP 30) and after a first glance can say there’s lots of valuable information in it.
Merry christmas to everybody, have some peaceful and relaxing days
Enno
Continue readingGiven the upcoming public release of ISECOM‘s Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual (OSSTMM) version 3, I took the opportunity to have a closer look at it. While we at ERNW never adopted the OSSTMM for our own way of performing security assessments (mostly due to the fact that performing assessments is our main business since 2001 and our approach has been developed and constantly honed since then so that we’re simply used to doing it “our way”) I’ve followed parts of ISECOM’s work quite closely as some of the brightest minds in the security space are contributing to it and they come up with innovative ideas regularly.
So I was eager to get an early copy of it to spend some weekend time going through it (where I live we have about 40 cm of snow currently so there’s “plenty of occasions for a cosy reading session” ;-))
One can read the OSSTMM (at least) two ways: as a manual for performing security testing or as a “whole philosophy of approaching [information] security”. I did the latter and will comment on it in a two-part post, covering the things I liked first and taking a more critical perspective on some portions in the second. Here we go with the first, in an unordered manner:
Two days ago I gave the keynote at an industry event, reflecting on the changing role of traditional security controls in the age of virtualization and the cloud. As this was an updated version of the stuff distributed in the conference proceedings, some people have asked for it. Voilà, here we go.
have a good one,
Enno
Continue readingToday we dare to (mis-) use the blog for a shameless self promotion 😉
We’re happy to announce that ERNW will contribute to a government sponsored research project called ASMONIA (which stands for the German title of the project that is Angriffsanalyse und Schutzkonzepte für MObilfunkbasierte Netzinfrastrukturen unterstützt durch kooperativen InformationsAustausch [Attack analysis and Security concepts for MObile Network infrastructures, supported by collaborative Information exchAnge]. those readers familiar with that kind of projects will have an idea of the importance of such acronyms ;-).
During the keynote of the Intel Developer Forum, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini explained their motivation for the acquisition of McAfee. Basically, Intel wants to provide a possibility to shift computer security from a known bad model to something that is a known good model.
Coming back to some of our recent blog posts, we think that a reliable and working approach to implement application whitelisting would increase security in corporate environments — especially when thinking of the latest vulnerabilities with exploit code in the wild that could not be catched up by any AV solution. As covered by this article, the possibility that such an approach succeeds depends heavily on the critical mass that would use it. The widespread x86 architecture therefore is the perfect plattform for accomplishing a widely used known good model. Presuming the possibility for flexibel and secure operation, Intel’s efforts could be the chance to shift the paradigm of corporate security from a reactive to a preventive model.
Continue readingRecently I noticed this news titled “New email worm on the move”. At roughly the same time I received an email from a senior security responsible from a large customer asking for mitigation advice as they got “hit pretty hard” (by this exact piece of malware).
Given I’m mainly an infrastructure and architecture guy usually I’m not too involved in malware protection stuff (besides my continuous ranting that – from an architectural point of view – endpoint based antivirus has a bad security benefit vs. capex/opex ratio). So I’m by no means an expert in this field. Still I keep scratching my head when I read the associated announcements (like this, this or this) from major “antivirus”, “malware protection” or “endpoint security” vendors – to save typing, in the remainder of the post I call them SNAKE vendors (where “SNAKE” stands for “Smart Nimble APT Kombat Execution”… or sth equally ingenious of the valued reader’s choice… 😉
Interesting research from Stuart Schechter et.al. here.
They evaluated the effect that the removal or modification of online banking sites’ security features had on the users’ behavior (as for entering or withholding their passwords). Maybe for some of you not too surprising it turned out that the vast majority of users entered their passwords even if obviously alarming clues were present on the websites.
This, again, shows how important it is to understand how users behave, what their motives and incentives are and how to build environments that help them acting securely. This even more applies to corporate space. At times, bringing an industrial/organizational psychologist in might be a much better investment than writing yet-another-ignored-piece-of-policy.
Welcome to insinuator.net, the semi-official blog of ERNW GmbH.
You may ask: Why yet another infosec blog? Aren’t there already just too many around? Well, possibly. But that opulence is part of blogging in general, isn’t it? 😉
Given we are trying to contribute to “public space & opinion” in a number of ways anyway [e.g. by our presentations or our newsletter] it seemed just too logical – and we’ve been asked by various people as well – to add another element to global blogosphere. Voilà, here we go!
What can you, dear reader, expect? Of course all kinds of shameless self-references, maybe occasionally a little bit of insight or even wisdom (yes, you’re right: modesty is not amongst our key virtues, at times) and – hopefully – some entertainment.