Wednesday is Last Day for Discounted SANS Registration

In my off time I'm still busy organizing the SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2009, taking place in Washington, DC on 9-10 Dec 09. The agenda page should be updated soon to feature all of the speakers and panel participants. Wednesday is the last day to register at the discounted rate.

I wrote the following to provide more information on the Summit and explain its purpose.

All of us want to spend our limited information technology and security funds on the people, products, and processes that make a difference. Does it make sense to commit money to projects when we don’t know their impact? I’m not talking about fuzzy “return on investment” (ROI) calculations or fabricated “risk” ratings. Don’t we all want to know how to find intruders, right now, and then concentrate on improvements that will make it more difficult for bad guys to disclose, degrade, or deny our data?

To answer this question, I’ve teamed with SANS to organize a unique event -- the SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2009, on 9-10 December 2009 in Washington, DC. My goal for this two-day, vendor-neutral, practitioner-focused Summit is to provide security operators with real-life guidance on how to discover intruders in the enterprise. This isn’t a conference on a specific commercial tool, or a series of death-by-slide presentations, or lectures by people disconnected from reality. I’ve reached out to the people I know on the front lines, who find intruders on a regular, daily basis. If you don’t think good guys know how to find bad guys, spend two days with people who go toe-to-toe with the worst intruders on the planet.

We’ll discuss topics like the following:

• How do Computer Incident Response Teams and Managed Security Service Providers detect intrusions?


• What network-centric and host-centric indicators yield the best results, and how do you collect and analyze them?


• What open source tools are the best-kept secrets in the security community, and how can you put them to work immediately in your organization?


• What sources of security intelligence data produce actionable indicators?


• How can emerging disciplines such as proactive live response and volatile analysis find advanced persistent threats?

Here is a sample of the dozens of subject matter experts who will pack the schedule:

• Michael Cloppert, senior technical member of Lockheed Martin's enterprise Computer Incident Response Team and frequent SANS Forensics blogger.
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• Michael Rash, Senior Security Architect for G2, Inc., author of Linux Firewalls and the psad, fwsnort, and fwknop security projects.


• Matt Richard, Malicious Code Operations Lead for the Raytheon corporate Computer Emergency Response (RayCERT) Special Technologies and Analysis Team (STAT) program.


• Martin Roesch, founder of Sourcefire and developer of Snort.


• Bamm Visscher, Lead Information Security Incident Handler for the General Electric CIRT, and author of the open source Sguil suite.

Ron Gula is scheduled to do one keynote and I'm working on the second. We'll have guest moderators for some panels too, such as Mike Cloppert and Rocky DeStefano.

I look forward to seeing you at the conference!

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Review of Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0 Posted

Amazon.com just posted my three star review of Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0 by Rich Cannings, Himanshu Dwivedi, Zane Lackey, et al. From the review:

I have to agree with the other 3-star reviews of Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0 (HEW2). This book just does not stand up to the competition, such as The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (TWAHH) or Web Security Testing Cook (WSTC). I knew this book was in trouble when I was already reading snippets mentioning JavaScript arrays in the introduction. That set the tone for the book: compressed, probably rushed, mixing material of differing levels of difficulty. For example, p 8 mentions using prepared statements as a defense against SQL injection. However, only a paragraph on the topic appears, with no code samples (unlike TWAHH).

Note: McGraw-Hill Osborne provided me a free review copy.

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Review of Web Security Testing Cookbook Posted

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of Web Security Testing Cookbook by Paco Hope and Ben Walther. From the review:

I just wrote five star reviews of The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (TWAHH) and SQL Injection Attacks and Defense (SIAAD). Is there really a need for another Web security book like Web Security Testing Cookbook (WSTC)? The answer is an emphatic yes. While TWAHH and SIAAD include offensive and defensive material helpful for developers, those books are more or less aimed at assessment professionals. WSTC, on the other hand, is directed squarely at Web developers. In fact, WSTC is specifically written for those who incorporate unit testing into their software development lifecycle. I believe anyone developing Web applications would benefit from reading WSTC.

Note: O'Reilly provided me a free review copy.

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Review of SQL Injection Attacks and Defense Posted

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of SQL Injection Attacks and Defense by Justin Clarke, et al. From the review:

I just finished reviewing The Web Application Hacker's Handbook, calling it a "Serious candidate for Best Book Bejtlich Read
2009." SQL Injection Attacks and Defense (SIAAD) is another serious contender for BBBR09. In fact, I recommend reading TWAHH first because it is a more comprehensive overview of Web application security. Next, read SIAAD as the definitive treatise on SQL injection. Syngress does not have a good track record when it comes to books with multiple authors -- SIAAD has ten! -- but SIAAD is clearly a winner.

SIAAD is another serious contender for Best Book Bejtlich Read 2009.

Note: Syngress provided me a free review copy.

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Review of The Web Application Hacker's Handbook Posted

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of The Web Application Hacker's Handbook by Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto. From the review:

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (TWAHH) is an excellent book. I read several books on Web application security recently, and this is my favorite. The text is very well-written, clear, and thorough. While the book is not suitable for beginners, it is accessible and easy to read for those even without Web development or assessment experience.

TWAHH is a serious candidate for Best Book Bejtlich Read 2009.

Note: Wiley provided me a free review copy.

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"Protect the Data" from the Evil Maid

I recently posted "Protect the Data" from Whom?. I wrote:

[P]rivate citizens (and most organizations who are not nation-state actors) do not have a chance to win against a sufficiently motivated and resourced high-end threat.

Joanna Rutkowska provides a great example of the importance of knowing the adversary in her post Evil Maid goes after TrueCrypt!, a follow-up to her January post Why do I miss Microsoft BitLocker?

Her post describes how she and Alex Tereshkin implemented a physical attack against laptops with TrueCrypt full disk encryption. They implemented the attack (called "Evil Maid") as a bootable USB image that an intruder would use to boot a target laptop. Evil Maid hooks the TrueCrypt function that asks the user for a passphrase on boot, then stores the passphrase for later physical retrieval.

The scenario is this:

1. User leaves laptop alone in hotel room.


2. Attacker enters room, boots laptop with Evil Maid, and compromises TrueCrypt loader. Attacker leaves.


3. User returns to hotel room, boots laptop, enters TrueCrypt passphrase. Game over.


4. User leaves laptop alone in hotel room again.


5. Attacker enters room again, boots laptop with Evil Maid again, and retrieves passphrase.

Joanna recommends implementing a product that supports Trusted Platform Module (TPM), like Microsoft BitLocker. A detection-oriented workaround is to calculate hashes of selected disk sectors and partitions and decide that mismatches indicate an intrusion has occurred. That approach still misses BIOS-based attacks but it's the best one can do without TPM support.

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Report on Chinese Government Sponsored Cyber Activities

Today's Wall Street Journal features the following story:

China Expands Cyberspying in U.S., Report Says by Siobhan Gorman.

I've reprinted an excerpt below and highlighted interested aspects. I can vouch for the quality of the Northrop Grumman team that wrote this report and for their experience in this arena.

Congressional Advisory Panel in Washington Cites Apparent Campaign by Beijing to Steal Information From American Firms

WASHINGTON -- The Chinese government is ratcheting up its cyberspying operations against the U.S., a congressional advisory panel found, citing an example of a carefully orchestrated campaign against one U.S. company that appears to have been sponsored by Beijing.

The unnamed company was just one of several successfully penetrated by a campaign of cyberespionage, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to be released Thursday. Chinese espionage operations are "straining the U.S. capacity to respond," the report concludes.

The bipartisan commission, formed by Congress in 2000 to investigate the security implications of growing trade with China, is made up largely of former U.S. government officials in the national security field.

The commission contracted analysts at defense giant Northrop Grumman Corp. to write the report. The analysts wouldn't name the company described in the case study, describing it only as "a firm involved in high-technology development."

The report didn't provide a damage assessment and didn't say specifically who was behind the attack against the U.S. company. But it said the company's internal analysis indicated the attack originated in or came through China.

The report concluded the attack was likely supported, if not orchestrated, by the Chinese government, because of the "professional quality" of the operation and the technical nature of the stolen information, which is not easily sold by rival companies or criminal groups. The operation also targeted specific data and processed "extremely large volumes" of stolen information, the report said.

"The case study is absolutely clearly controlled and directed with a specific purpose to get at defense technology in a related group of companies," said Larry Wortzel, vice chairman of the commission and a former U.S. Army attaché in China. "There's no doubt that that's state-controlled."

Attacks like that cited in the report hew closely to a blueprint frequently used by Chinese cyberspies, who in total steal $40 billion to $50 billion in intellectual property from U.S. organizations each year, according to U.S. intelligence agency estimates provided by a person familiar with them.

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