CSIRT
Cisco Security Response Team Opens Its Toolbox
Cisco’s network is a massively complex environment that requires extensive monitoring and remediation. In today’s world of advanced threats and attacks, the company that possesses and positions its tools to preemptively identify and mitigate threats is the one left standing when the dust…
February 2014 Threat Metrics
Web surfers in February 2014 experienced a median malware encounter rate of 1:341 requests, compared to a January 2014 median encounter rate of 1:375. This represents a 10% increase in risk of encountering web-delivered malware during the second month of the year. February 8, 9, and 16 were the high…
January 2014 Threat Metrics
January 2014 started with a bang, with one in every 191 web requests resulting in a web malware encounter. The Cisco Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) observed this same trend, witnessing a 200% increase in web malware encounters experienced by Cisco employees for the month. Overall,…
Operational Security Intelligence
Security intelligence, threat intelligence, cyber threat intelligence, or “intel” for short is a popular topic these days in the Infosec world. It seems everyone has a feed of “bad” IP addresses and hostnames they want to sell you, or share. This is an encouraging trend in that it indicates the secu…
Using a “Playbook” Model to Organize Your Information Security Monitoring Strategy
CSIRT, I have a project for you. We have a big network and we’re definitely getting hacked constantly. Your group needs to develop and implement security monitoring to get our malware and hacking problem under control. If you’ve been a security engineer for more than a few years,…
To SIEM or Not to SIEM? Part II
The Great Correlate Debate SIEMs have been pitched in the past as “correlation engines” and their special algorithms can take in volumes of logs and filter everything down to just the good stuff. In its most basic form, correlation is a mathematical, statistical, or logical relationship…
To SIEM or Not to SIEM? Part I
Security information and event management systems (SIEM, or sometimes SEIM) are intended to be the glue between an organization’s various security tools. Security and other event log sources export their alarms to a remote collection system like a SIEM, or display them locally for direct acces…
Getting a Handle on Your Data
When your incident response team gets access to a new log data source, chances are that the events may not only contain an entirely different type of data, but may also be formatted differently than any log data source you already have. Having a data collection and organization standard will ease ma…
Making Boring Logs Interesting
In the last week alone, two investigations I have been involved with have come to a standstill due to the lack of attribution logging data. One investigation was halted due to the lack of user activity logging within an application, the other from a lack of network-based activity logs. Convincing th…