Who needs coffee when you have the best of this week’s local security bloggers at your fingertips?
The featured blog post by Richard Bejtlich is sure to give you a jolt that’s espresso-worthy as he bashes the ISC’s take on incident response verses incident handling, and our favorite v-blogger Marcus J. Carey will have you seeing (and maybe even singing) the ‘grapevine’ in a whole new way.
#3 – Don’t Trust the Grapevine: In his typical style, Marcus J. Carey opened his v-blog post “Heard It Through The Grapevine” with a real-life object/scenario (in this case, Marvin Gaye), and told his audience how it applies to security. It turns out that Gaye’s “Grapevine” has some hidden truths for security professionals about how to best deal with vendors. Drawing from the famous “Grapevine” lines, “people say believe half of what you see, son, and none of what you hear,” Marcus says the same should go for vendors: While they might show you a shiny new program that works perfectly on their network or equipment, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work on yours. Our advice? Take the ‘bake sale’ approach; pick the top three technologies you’re considering, ask for demos, set those demos up, and see how they actually work on your network and your equipment. But don’t just believe “what you hear;” be sure to watch the post for yourself.
#2 – Ready, Set, Enumerate: In his post “Maltego Part II – Infrastructure Enumeration,” Chris Gates (on the Ethical Hacker Network) discusses Infrastructure Footprinting, which he says is “essential for identifying possible systems for remote attacks.” While Gates has a lot of great text about how to successful carry out Infrastructure Footprinting, it’s the detailed screenshots that accompany the text that make this article worth the read. While it’s always nice to have clear instructions on how to do something, pictures are always a definite plus (especially for those of us who are visual learners). But before you read Part II of Gate’s post, you might want to check out “Maltego Part I – Intro and Personal Recon” for background information.
#1 – ISC Smack Down: Okay, so it’s really more of a ‘bashing,’ or a ‘difference of opinion.’ But no matter what you call it, we like it; it’s nice to see strong opinions now and again. And in his post “Speaking of Incident Response,” Richard Bejtlich certainly has a difference of opinion when it comes to a recent article published by the ISC entitled “Incident Response vs. Incident Handling.” Bejtlich disagrees with the part of the ISC article that states “Incident Response is all of the technical components required in order to analyze and contain an incident,” and “Incident Handling is the logistics, communications, coordination, and planning functions needed in order to resolve an incident in a calm and efficient manner.” According to Bejtlich, “[t]hat’s not right, and never was.” While Bejtlich tried pointing this out to the ISC moderators, he didn’t get very far. If you’d like to learn more about the real definitions of Incident Response and Incident Handling, you can check out Bejtlich’s article here.
Well, all good things come to and end, and so does these posts. But no worries: We’ll be back next week to make sure that your Monday starts of with something a little more interesting than the pile of work in your inbox.
If you think that we missed a post that should have been in our top 3, be sure to leave a comment below or send us a tweet @grecs.
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It’s not too late! If you’re looking to get back to the heart of security basics, SANS has the perfect event for you in the form of their Application Security Workshop — What Works? workshop on April 29th. The workshop will cover the best ways to counter common attacks through general know-how, products, services, and configurations. If you’re interested, visit the SANS section of our Help Us Help You page to sign up for this workshop.
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