Knowledge Management (KM) isn’t a topic I remember being presented at a FIRST conference before, but Rebecca Taylor (video) made a good case for its relevance. Security and incident response use and produce a lot of information – a Knowledge Management approach could help us use it better. Most teams quickly recognise the benefits of […]
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Making CSIRTs (even) better
Incident Response Teams are, as the name indicates, responsive. Often they will try to provide whatever services their constituency asks for, or seems to need. However over time that can result in a mismatch between what the team offers and what its resources, capabilities and authority can actually deliver. That leads frustration, both among disappointed […]
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Ransomware: an emotional experience
Tony Kirtley’s FIRST conference talk (video) explored how the Kubler-Ross model of grieving can help understand the emotional effects of a ransomware attack, both to avoid negative consequences and, where possible, to use natural emotions to support positive responses: Denial: in a ransomware attack, denial should be short-lived, as the nature of the problem will […]
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Trust or Mutual Benefit?
The theme of this year’s FIRST conference is “Strength Together”. Since I first attended the conference in 1999, we’ve always said the basis for working together was “trust”. However that’s a notoriously slippery word – lawyers, computer scientists and psychologists mean very different things from common language – and I wonder whether security and incident […]
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Security Poverty: a problem for everyone
Wendy Nather’s keynote at the FIRST conference (video) considered the security poverty line, and why it should concern those above it at least as much as those below. To secure our systems and data requires resources (tools and people); expertise to apply those effectively; and capability, including sufficient influence to overcome blocking situations or logistics. […]
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Incident response in the cloud
My first reaction to Mehmet Surmeli’s FIRST Conference presentation on Incident Response in the Cloud (video) was “here we go again”. So much seemed awfully familiar from my early days of on-premises incident investigations more than twenty years ago: incomplete logs, tools not designed for security, opaque corners of the target infrastructure, even the dreaded […]
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How to Phish, and how to stop it
Wout Debaenst’s FIRST talk (video) described the preparatory steps an adversary must take before conducting a targeted phishing campaign, and the opportunities each of these presents for defenders to detect and prevent the attack before it happens. The talk was supposed to be accompanied by live demos, but these were sufficiently realistic that the hosting […]
My post about automating incident response prompted a fascinating chat with a long-standing friend-colleague who knows far more about Incident Response technology than I ever did. With many thanks to Aaron Kaplan (AK), here’s a summary of our discussion… Developments in automated defence AK: Using Machine Learning (“AI”) in cyber-defence will be a gradual journey. […]
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Effective Threat Hunting
Threat hunting is perhaps the least mechanical of security activities: according to Joe Slowik’s FIRST presentation (video) the whole point is to find things that made it past our automated defences. But that doesn’t mean it should rely entirely on human intuition. Our hunting will be much more effective if we think first about which […]
Following my Networkshop talk on logfiles, I was asked at what point logfiles can be treated as “anonymous” under data protection law. Since the GDPR covers all kinds of re-identification, as well as data that can “single out” an individual even without knowing their name, that’s a good CompSci/law question: the work of Paul Ohm […]