Who Watches the Watchers? Firewall Monitoring

Archive for April, 2015

Who Watches the Watchers? Firewall Monitoring

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Even in the face of being declared dead — often and repeatedly since 2004 — the firewall remains a viable security control. De-perimeterization simply leads to a specialization of controls between IT in the cloud and IT on the ground, with the firewall taking on new roles internally. Especially for payment processing, healthcare, and energy, the firewalled network is still a key element of today’s standards and regulations.

The trouble is, all firewalls share a weakness. It isn’t in the IP stack, firmware, or interfaces. No, the weakness is much more fundamental. All firewalls depend on proper configuration and are a single change away from a breach.

Barracuda Networks is well known for its Web Application Firewalls (WAF) which protect against attacks such as SQL injection and others listed in the OWASP Top 10. Back in 2011, however, a change process went awry and disabled Barracuda’s WAF protection for its own servers. Within hours, some tens of thousands of records were stolen via an injection vulnerability on a Barracuda website. All it took was a single misconfiguration.

FireMon Security Manager 8.0 Tools for firewall change management have sprung up to address these concerns. Centralizing the audit log for all changes on all firewalls is great for looking back, however, as Barracuda experienced, a breach can happen within hours. IT admins require real-time detection and notification on changes, which is one of the many features FireMon offers. It can model complex changes and provide a what-if analysis cross-referencing the firewalls with an organization’s policy and compliance obligations.

Firewalls will continue to be a foundational control for an organization’s internal IT. The control for the controller, the watcher for the watcher, is secure change management. This means change planning, detection, auditing, and alerting. Operationally, it also means tracking history and the ability to troubleshoot issues by comparing changes across time. For organizations running complex segmented networks, management tools like FireMon are invaluable for preventing breach by change.

Friday Books and Talks 04/24

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Best Practices Are Stupid
by Stephen M. Shapiro

What if almost everything you know about creating a culture of innovation is wrong? What if the way you are measuring innovation is choking it? What if your market research is asking all of the wrong questions? It’s time to innovate the way you innovate.

Hire people you don’t like. Bring in the right mix of people to unleash your team’s full potential. Asking for ideas is a bad idea. Define challenges more clearly. If you ask better questions, you will get better answers. Don’t think outside the box; find a better box. Instead of giving your employees a blank slate, provide them with well-defined parameters that will increase their creative output. Failure is always an option. Looking at innovation as a series of experiments allows you to redefine failure and learn from your results.

Nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.

 

 

Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible
by Daniel Burrus, John David Mann

Flash Foresight offers seven radical principles you need to transform your business today. From internationally renowned technology forecaster Daniel Burrus—a leading consultant to Google, Proctor & Gamble, IBM, and many other Fortune 500 firms—with John David Mann, co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Go-Giver, comes this systematic, easy-to-implement method for identifying new business opportunities and solving difficult problems in the twenty-first century marketplace.

 

 

How I use sonar to navigate the world
By Daniel Kish

Daniel Kish has been blind since he was 13 months old, but has learned to “see” using a form of echolocation. He clicks his tongue and sends out flashes of sound that bounce off surfaces in the environment and return to him, helping him to construct an understanding of the space around him. In a rousing talk, Kish demonstrates how this works and asks us to let go of our fear of the “dark unknown.”

Friday Books and Talks 04/17/2014

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
by Adam M. Grant

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But today, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. It turns out that at work, most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers. Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return.

Using his own pioneering research as Wharton’s youngest tenured professor, Adam Grant shows that these styles have a surprising impact on success. Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries. Give and Take highlights what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common. This landmark book opens up an approach to success that has the power to transform not just individuals and groups, but entire organizations and communities.

 

 

Anticipate: The Art of Leading by Looking Ahead
by Rob-Jan de Jong

Business schools, leadership gurus, and strategy guides agree – leaders must have a vision. But the sad truth is that most don’t…or at least not one that compels, inspires, and energizes their people. How can something so essential be practiced so little in real life? Vision may sound like a rare quality, unattainable by all except a select few – but nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone can expand their visionary capacity. You just need to learn how. In Anticipate, strategy and leadership expert Rob-Jan de Jong explains that to develop vision you must sharpen two key skills. The first is the ability to see things early – spotting the first hints of change on the horizon. The second is the power to connect the dots – turning those clues into a gripping story about the future of your organization and industry. Packed with stories and practices, Anticipate provides proven techniques for looking ahead and exploring many plausible futures – including the author’s trademarked Future Priming process, which helps distinguish signal from noise. You will discover how to: tap into your imagination and open yourself to the unconventional; become better at seeing things early; frame the big-picture view that provides direction for the future; communicate your vision in a way that engages others and provokes action. When you anticipate change before your competitors, you create enormous strategic advantage. That’s what visionaries do…and now so can you.

Comfortable professionalism

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

“I will show you some absolutely terrifying things, as we progress through today and tomorrow, and I will show you things you guys can do to make people very, very, very uncomfortable where you work.”

Every time I turn on my car, John Strand’s voice says the above quote. The clip is audio from a SANS course that my car has stuck on repeat. I have heard it thousands of times now.

“Make people very, very, very uncomfortable” came to mind when watching Chris Roberts (@Sidragon1) tweet about plane hacking Wednesday night and into Thursday morning. He tweeted about messing with a plane’s oxygen … while on a plane … on the day the FBI released a report on plane security hacks.

People were indeed very uncomfortable. And the story did not end comfortably for Chris, that day.

I appreciate John’s work and the SANS courses. I enjoy Chris’s work and his One World Lab research. Both are fine people, with intelligent ideas, and enjoyable presentations. But let’s put hacking aside for the moment.

I wonder if car mechanics get training on how to make drivers feel very uncomfortable. I wonder if medical students have conferences celebrating making patients feel uncomfortable. I wonder the same about virtually any professional services. Perhaps I am a fortunate exception, however, every service I use is staffed with folks who do the exact opposite.

The folks I hire go out of their way to put me at ease, answer any questions, share knowledge without pretense. It is what professionals do. It fosters trust. It is the mark of customer service. It defines their role as trusted advisor for my health, my car, my home, my family.

Returning to hacking and information security, there is no need to make folks uncomfortable. The terrifying things in IT are well publicized. We know. Things are broken. Criminals are misusing technology. We have a lot of work to do. Everyone gets it.

Let’s make the people we work with comfortable. Let’s look at absolutely practical things. Why? Because that is what professionals do. Let’s get some work done.

Friday Books and Talks 04/10/2014

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Working with Emotional Intelligence
by Daniel Goleman

Do you have what it takes to succeed in your career?

The secret of success is not what they taught you in school. What matters most is not IQ, not a business school degree, not even technical know-how or years of expertise. The single most important factor in job performance and advancement is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is actually a set of skills that anyone can acquire, and in this practical guide, Daniel Goleman identifies them, explains their importance, and shows how they can be fostered.

For leaders, emotional intelligence is almost 90 percent of what sets stars apart from the mediocre. As Goleman documents, it’s the essential ingredient for reaching and staying at the top in any field, even in high-tech careers. And organizations that learn to operate in emotionally intelligent ways are the companies that will remain vital and dynamic in the competitive marketplace of today—and the future.

Comprehensively researched, crisply written, and packed with fascinating case histories of triumphs, disasters, and dramatic turnarounds, Working with Emotional Intelligence may be the most important business book you’ll ever read.

Drawing on unparalleled access to business leaders around the world and studies in more than 500 organizations, Goleman documents an astonishing fact: in determining star performance in every field, emotional intelligence matters twice as much as IQ or technical expertise.

Readers also discover how emotional competence can be learned. Goleman analyzes five key sets of skills and vividly shows how they determine who is hired and who is fired in the top corporations in the world. He also provides guidelines for training in the “emotionally intelligent organization,” in chapters that no one, from manager to CEO, should miss.

Working with Emotional Intelligence could prove to be the most important reference for bottom-line business people in the first decades of the 21st century.

 

Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All
by Bernard T. Ferrari

Listening is harder than it looks- but it’s the difference between business success and failure.

Nothing causes bad decisions in organizations as often as poor listening. But Bernard Ferrari, adviser to some of the nation’s most influential executives, believes that such missteps can be avoided and that the skills and habits of good listening can be developed and mastered. He offers a step-by-step process that will help readers become active listeners, able to shape and focus any conversation.

Ferrari reveals how to turn a tin ear into a platinum ear. His practical insights include:

  • Good listening is hard work, not a passive activity
  • Good listening means asking questions, challenging all assumptions, and understanding the context of every interaction
  • Good listening results in a new clarity of focus, greater efficiency, and an increased likelihood of making better decisions
  • Good listening can be the difference between a long career and a short one

Friday Books and Talks 04/03/2014

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours
by Robert C. Pozen

In Extreme Productivity, author Robert Pozen reveals the secrets to workplace productivity and high performance. This book is for anyone feeling overwhelmed by an existing workload — facing myriad competing demands and multiple time-sensitive projects. Offering antidotes to a calendar full of boring meetings and a backlog of e-mails, Extreme Productivity explains how to determine your highest priorities and match them with how you actually spend your time.

 

The Pause Principle
by Kevin Cashman

The constant barrage of information can overwhelm a person’s decision-making ability. In The Pause Principle, Kevin Cashman makes the argument that today’s leaders need to take the necessary time to deeply pause before acting. Leaders must make an effort to create vision, understanding, clarity and agility. Cashman describes the need to pause to grow personal leadership, develop others, and foster a culture of innovation. By following the pause practices Cashman describes, executives will learn how to step back to lead forward.