Posts relating to meetings of the TERENA/GEANT CSIRT Task Force
The recent rash of ransomware incidents has been linked to the availability of crypto-currencies – as a way that victims can pay ransoms to anonymous attackers – so Trend Micro reviewed the economic models for ransomware and, among many other aspects, whether changes in the crypto-currency world might have knock-on effects. Their conclusions are mixed: […]
In a world where data storage is almost unlimited and algorithms promise to interrogate data to answer any question, it’s tempting for security teams to simply follow a “log everything, for ever” approach. At this week’s CSIRT Task Force in Malaga, Xavier Mertens suggested that traditional approaches are still preferable. With the speed of modern […]
Incident response teams often share information when investigating incidents. Some patterns may only become apparent when data from different networks are compared; other teams may have skills – such as analysing malware – to understand data in ways we cannot. Since much of this information includes IP or email addresses – information classed as Personal […]
Tilmann Haak’s presentation at this week’s TF-CSIRT/FIRST meeting was on incorporating security requirements into software development processes using agile methods, but his key points seem relevant to any style of software or system development: Make sure security features are treated as first-class user requirement, of equal status with the functional requirements provided by others. We’ve […]
The recent TF-CSIRT meeting in Zurich included a talk by the Swiss telecoms regulator (like ours, called Ofcom, though their ‘F’ stands for Federal!) on the law covering websites in the .ch domain that distribute malware, normally as the result of a compromise. Under this law a designated authority can order the temporary or permanent […]
At last week’s TF-CSIRT meeting, Gavin Reid from Cisco suggested that we may have been over-optimistic about how much technology can do to detect and prevent incidents. Automated incident prevention systems can be effective at detecting and preventing automated attacks but are less effective against targeted attacks that use human intelligence rather than brute force. […]
Darknets are well known as a place to look for Internet threats, but a presentation by RESTENA and CIRCL at this week’s TF-CSIRT meeting suggested they may also show up other kinds of problems. Darknets are parts of the IP address space that are routed but not used, so there should be no legitimate packets […]
An interesting presentation by Giles Hogben of ENISA at TERENA’s CSIRT Task Force meeting in Heraklion last week, looking at security issues when moving to the public cloud computing model.There have been several papers on technical issues such as possible leakage of information between different virtual machines running on the same physical hardware (for example […]
At a meeting of TERENA’s CSIRT Task Force last week, I presented an updated version of my paper on Privacy and Incident Response. Responding effectively to incidents is essential to protect the privacy and other rights of individuals and organisations that use the Internet: compromises, phishing, etc. clearly infringe those rights. However incident response may […]
An interesting talk by Ken van Wyk on threats to mobile devices at the FIRST/TF-CSIRT meeting last week. While it’s tempting to treat smartphones just as small-screen laptops (let’s face it, users do!) there are significant differences in the threats to which the two types of devices are exposed. These need to be recognised in […]