SIEM
Getting to Know Tom Powledge, Vice President of Cisco Managed Security Services
After several months leading the managed security services portfolio at Cisco, I sat down with the social media team to discuss my path to Cisco, the evolution of the security market, and the future of security. [Note: This is an abridged version of the full interview.] Q: After nearly 20 years at S…
The Continuum Approach for Secure Mobility
A couple weeks ago, we spoke about the mobility journey and the phases that organizations take as they embrace the widely accepted mode of mobility—Beyond BYOD to Workspace Mobility (device-focus, application-focus and experience-focus). Whatever phase your organization is in, security is a top prio…
Security Realities of IoT (Internet of Things)
Are you a security professional or IT professional just resolving the security issues with BYOD (bring-your-own-device)? Watch out, BYOD was a precursor or warm up exercise to the tsunami just hitting your shores now. The SANS Institute just completed a survey on the security viewpoints on IoT, pred…
Beware: Insider Threats Getting Worse
Most recently ESG/Vormetric came out with a threat report that highlighted the increase in insider threats & the significance to augment perimeter and host-based security. The rationale behind the increase was that more people are accessing the network, increase cloud and network traffic are mak…
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…
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…
Big Security—Mining Mountains of Log Data to Find Bad Stuff
Your network, servers, and a horde of laptops have been hacked. You might suspect it, or you might think it’s not possible, but it’s happened already. What’s your next move? The dilemma of the “next move” is that you can only discover an attack either as it’s happ…