Thoughts, Musings, and Other Items from the Worlds of Infosec, ICS, and Beyond

The Impermanence of Things and Attribution

I had the pleasure to engage some really smart people on the subject of threat attribution and naming conventions via Twitter recently. I think the linked thread is useful as an example not only of some of the issues the cyber security community still has around terminology and definitions, but also a really great example of how to disagree in a civil and constructive way on a topic that usually spirals quickly into unpleasant discussion. Read more…

By Joe, ago

Perception is Reality

Nate Beach-Westmoreland wrote a Tweet recently that piqued my interest, as it aligned very closely to one of my major concerns in a former IR position: how does one ensure that sensitive data isn’t manipulated? Typically, cyber defense focuses on two key impacts: the loss or theft of sensitive (or otherwise valuable) information, or the inability to access such information (via ransomware or a destructive wiper). Less often discussed – but in certain environments potentially Read more…

By Joe, ago

Sources and Methods to the Madness

The term “sources and methods” brings passionate, sometimes pained reactions within the information security community. On the one hand, there are those engaged in traditional intelligence operations for whom “sources and methods” are vital resources, to be maintained and preserved at almost any cost to ensure continuous collection. Contrary to this, those engaged in operations and active, day-to-day defense, find “sources and methods” to be immaterial if they prevent or inhibit sharing information that could Read more…

By Joe, ago

Nations, Nationalism, and Network Security

Rather significant news broke out on 13 June with the EU taking initial steps toward a potential ban on Kaspersky software on EU-controlled networks. The specific language used, as translated by The Register: Calls on the EU to perform a comprehensive review of software, IT and communications equipment and infrastructure used in the institutions in order to exclude potentially dangerous programmes and devices, and to ban the ones that have been confirmed as malicious, such Read more…

By Joe, ago

Threat Intelligence and Audience Awareness

I find it uncontroversial to claim that content creators – whether in writing, music, or other – at some level must be aware of the needs and capabilities of their audience. While certain types of expression, such as the truly artistic, provide greater leeway in moving against (while trying to push forward) audience taste and understanding, most others are built for a reason: to inform, to entertain, to describe. When the audience or intended target Read more…

By Joe, ago

Naming, Necessity, and Activity Group Attribution

The idea of naming or labeling items has a fraught intellectual history. Broadly speaking, we, from an intellectual history standpoint, moved from an Aristotelian approach where names and identifications of objects and such fundamentally mean something based on concrete descriptions, to a perspective rooted in Kantian transcendental idealism where names are merely a collection of observations built into a description divorced from the “thing in itself.” Enter Saul Kripke, who argued that names instead represent Read more…

By Joe, ago

Indicators and ICS Network Defense

A previous post on indicators and network defense generated quite a bit of attention, as well as some requests for follow-up items. One item in particular was very interesting to me: comparing an actionable, effective threat intelligence report not relying on indicators with a “bad” example. I think this idea is interesting, but somewhat dangerous simply because I don’t want to be the person to crap on another’s work, which is almost certainly how such Read more…

By Joe, ago

The Disappearing IT-IoT Divide

Note: This originally appeared as part of ISACA GWDC’s IoT Security Conference in April, 2018. Original link to content here. Executive Summary Nominally IT-focused threats such as the recent series of wormable, disruptive malware variants from WannaCry through OlympicDestroyer will increasingly impact Internet-of-Things environments. The combination of rapid, automated propagation with multiple capabilities for accessing vulnerable systems – whether through exploit or credential capture – provide adversaries with multiple routes to spread through a target Read more…

By Joe, ago

Indicators and Network Defense

When I led incident response operations at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we subscribed to several ‘threat intelligence’ feeds: big commercial providers, secret-squirrel (theoretically) government only information, and other miscellaneous items. Almost without exception, if the feed did not provide reports that detailed how an attack or intrusion took place and oriented this within the broader scope of malicious activity, I took one simple action: I extracted whatever indicators existed in the report, retrieved samples, and Read more…

By Joe, ago

Deductive and Inductive Reasoning, and Information Security

The School of Athens is one of the most famous images of Renaissance painting, blending Classical historicism with an increasing appreciation for the intellectual history passed down from Greece to the Western world. The figures at the center of this image represent divergent views in how we reason about and understand the world: the elderly Plato, pointing up to the world of Forms from which all of reality springs, and Aristotle pointing to Earth (level, Read more…

By Joe, ago