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Every year we seem to have a new buzz term in security. As someone who lives in the security product marketing world I’ve seen trends come and go. Terminology that was once mandatory in every piece of collateral suddenly becomes stale and cringe-worthy (APT is becoming one of these). We’ve had a bunch of buzzwords and phrases; some were pretty good and some were really terrible. I should know I helped propagate some of these buzzwords.
I like Star Trek. I’ve always wanted to be Captain Kirk (had to pick one…Picard is great too) sitting in that chair on the bridge of the Enterprise with seemingly endless resources at my disposal with a mission to protect the universe. I’m not giving up, but that’s probably not going to happen. However, I do get a bit of the same thrill as I have the opportunity to work in the Critical Incident Response Center lab we have set up at RSA for research and demonstration purposes.
As part of routine security research, the RSA Advanced Threat Intelligence Team identified a new hacking attack this week that uses a technique that we’ve termed “Watering Hole”. In the new attack we’ve identified, which we are calling “VOHO”, the methodology relies on “trojanizing” legitimate websites specific to a geographic area which the attacker believes will be visited by end users who belong to the organization they wish to penetrate. This results in a wholesale compromise of multiple hosts inside a corporate network as the end-users go about their daily business, much like a lion will lie in wait to ambush prey at a watering hole.
Shady Rat, Aurora, Poison Ivy, ZeuS, SpyEye, Ice IX, Stuxnet and Flame. This strange combination of terms may have no immediate relation to the layman, but for those involved in computer security and incident response, they speak of events that have sparked press coverage, executive interest and late nights.
I had the opportunity recently to speak about “Advanced Security” at the Evanta CISO Executive Summit event in Houston. Just before going onstage for my presentation, I had a great conversation with David Frazier (Director of IT for Halliburton) about the approaches he’s taken not only in security strategy, but in discussing security with the [...]
Over the past few weeks, there have been several reports about the ways in which cybercriminals are making it harder to detect fraud by concealing what they’re doing as evidenced by a new kind of man-in-the-middle attack on Facebook users.
A few months ago I had a conversation with a security professional working in a major US defense contractor. It was right after the attack on RSA. “Welcome to the club”, he said, “we’ve been hit by these APTs for years”.
So Ok, you think you know security. Riddle me this one… What does Jennifer Lopez and computer hackers who’ve attacked America’s defense establishment have in common? If you answered both are featured in this September’s issue of Vanity Fair magazine, you’d be right, and a true member of the all knowing security club.
In January 2010, at the turn of the decade, I wrote the following lines in my blog: “It will be an interesting decade from a cybercrime perspective. Employees are one of the weakest links in corporate security… The current defenses cannot suffice, and the industry must think of a new defense doctrine.” A lot of folks in the security space raised an eyebrow.
On the flight home from this year’s Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, I reflected on some of the highlights of the trip. I look forward to this show every year due to the high level of customer engagement and great conversations. In looking for overall themes from the event I noticed, not surprisingly, a lot of emphasis around advanced persistent threats.
