So true

Verizon report says it all...

I'll let Richard from TaoSecurity sum it up:
http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2008/06/verizon-business-report-speaks-volumes.html

P0wned

MCP(Management Control Plane)
CP(Control Plane)
DP(Data Plane)

...should all be separate or as near as, especially in Tier1/2/3 ISP, INEX etc...

however why not try...with a global botnet to BGP announce your local SRC address for all DNS root servers sequentially while including BGP malformed/exploits with decreasing TTLs from the hopcount down to the first layer 3 hop. Lather. Rinse . Repeat. (including multipathed repsonses)

Hmmmm.....

Where does IT fit?

http://xkcd.com/435/

Nanobioinfotechnology

Nothing to see here yet, move along. Just thinking out loud about convergence.

How do you teach a child that fire is hot?

How do you teach management and the 'old guard' of IT about router root kits?

How do you teach Mom and Pop about 'drive-by pharming'? (mine excluded :)

How do you teach kiddies that 'bad people' exist and 'bad things' should not be looked at on the internet without prematurely shattering their innocence or attempting to remove their access to the internet?

Well. You don't. Manage to the edge and offer a managed service. Remove default permit.

Information Technology and Security

Architecture by any other name

Physics and space-time compression in cyberspace? What is the cost model, fundamental units and atomic entities in IT and are they static? Would buildings or other structures look or be designed differently if they were intended to run software that inherently changed their function and application, or if they had to resist sentient attackers and unforeseen loads? Viva la revolution!

Architecture definition from the Oxford English Dictionary in OSX.

architecture |ˈärkiˌtek ch ər|
noun
1 the art or practice of designing and constructing buildings.
• the style in which a building is designed or constructed, esp. with regard to a specific period, place, or culture : Victorian architecture.
2 the complex or carefully designed structure of something : the chemical architecture of the human brain.
• the conceptual structure and logical organization of a computer or computer-based system : a client/server architecture

It isn't great practice to argue by analogy, but when the terminology inherent in a concept, system or discipline heavily borrows and indeed fragments an existing well defined discipline, it is hard not to use the fundamentals of the original discipline as a starting point. This post will focus on the relationship between information technology architecture and traditional architecture (though may be applied to biotech and nanotech in the future once the ubiquity of IT is also reached in these fields).

When the grey goo starts spreading it will be too late to fire the "architect".

Two things to remember throughout this post a) the fact that traditional architects must be licensed in most countries and are held accountable and responsible for what they produce and how and b) materials science does not accelerate at the pace that information technology does.

Rather than re-invent the wheel let's look at the traditional field of the roles of architects and structural engineers: http://www.helium.com/items/1028268-senior-school-heard-terms

"1 - Architects are generally responsible for design of buildings used primarily for everyday use by people. Structural engineers are responsible for design of a wide range of structures, such as bridges and power plants, for which an architect is not usually involved.

2 - Architects are responsible for design of the building shape, layout and appearance. Structural engineers are responsible for design of the building elements (foundations, columns, beams) that support all other building elements.

3 - In general, the results of architecture are visible when the building is completed. In general, the results of engineering for buildings are not visible after construction.

4 - When the owner hires an architect, the architect manages the overall design process. For buildings, structural engineers most often works for the architect. In general, the architect defines parameters (criteria) that the structural engineer must use for design of the structural elements.

5 - The structural engineer uses relatively complex mathematics and computer software for design. The architect uses graphical techniques primarily, along with basic math. "

From: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise
"Having IT, business analysts, and subject matter experts involved is important and necessary, but none of those three groups understands information and knowledge at a sufficiently deep level to offer truly creative and innovative alternatives that make information and knowledge systems work across the whole enterprise."

And a comment from Trilochan Chhaya in response to a related post http://archnet.org/forum/view.jsp?message_id=201 :

"Information and Technology.........
Knowledge and Architecture.........
Information and Technology have existed for ages,and have challenged the Creativity of the Humans all the time.

Fortunately, it needs a creative thought to change Information to Knowledge and Technology to Architecture."

Let me get back to this one as I ran out of time. But if you are in any way IT inclined, you probably know where I am going already... and as an aside,

Combine "internet 0", with nanotech/nanofabrication... yes there is indeed "Plenty of Room at the Bottom"

Time to return to Wing Chun chop foooey

"Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived.
I see all this potential, and I see it squandered.
God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
We're the middle children of history, man.
No purpose or place.
We have no Great War.
No Great Depression.
Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.
We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars.
But we won't.
And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

Wonderful... the science of happiness

I inherited my love of radio from my Dad.



I find myself switching on ABC Radio National everyday before any other station. On Saturday the 17th May 2008 I stumbled upon this gem. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2008/2243006.htm

"The pursuit of happiness is a global obsession. But can science investigate its slippery, subjective nature? What are the metrics—self report, brain activity, or the good deeds we do? Five world leaders in the field join Natasha Mitchell in conversation—neuroscientist Richard Davidson, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace, psychologist Daniel Gilbert and philosopher David Chalmers."

Considering I missed the end of the segment, the concept of podcasting reinforces itself in the spreading of enlightenment via information and ideas. A segue perhaps to this:

"To create a social business which reduces all suffering by facilitating the access to and dissemination of enlightened information and ideas."

Note: It's coming.

Secur_it_y?

http://xkcd.com/424/

Something else is missing... need a pointer

Was thinking today... since school and university have come and gone(from my perspective), and family are in a different hemisphere; why is it so difficult to find or stumble across a mentor in this industry or even in this life? Is it just when you are younger that you feel like there are people around and above you who know what's going on, or have a plan? Once one becomes more self aware do we see everyone stumbling along together? One wonders what structure or guidance we as a society will need or will cling to to ensure cohesion, or what will emerge in the place of organised religions in the West?

Where are the few who espouse 'enlightened self-interest' and 'non-zero sum games' for the world? Why is it not immediately obvious in our leaders and politicians? What is broken and how can we fix it? ( I tend to start these days with http://www.ted.com/ or the http://www.worldchanging.com/book/ )

Unfortunately Information Technology is extremely lacking in individuals who can offer wisdom and guidance, presumably being such a young discipline/art itself?

Life is difficult to figure out in this generation of mass media with a constant bombardment of encoded information which mainly focuses on mass materialism and consumption. Is it any reason that graffiti and street art has tried to fill the gap left by the press, advertising and the media at large.

Everything has sped up. Most people are disembodied from themselves and society. What could you prescribe? Diet, exercise, preventative mental health, meditation, different types of education, emotional intelligence...etc?

If you would like to be a mentor please send a S.A.E. to PO BOX 564 :)

I probably need my own personal technical version of one of these guys: J Krishnamurti, Anthony DeMello, Eckhart Tolle, Matthieu Ricard... or maybe an aggregate avatar of all of them that follows you online or is a 3d hologram buddy in real life ;)


Note: The image above is of the 3d holographic shark who assists the kid in one of Discovery's 2057 programs. An episode that happens to focus on a city wide virus that gets in to everything including digital signage. Not on my shift I tells ya!

How much is enough?

Is IT Security/Technology Risk Management a discipline or an art, is it subjective or objective? ( Is information technology deterministic or just overly complex? )

Are IT systems and frameworks closed systems? What comparable frameworks or systems (through which value transits) must defend against sentient attackers who attempt to subvert, control or disable services?

Can organisations quantify the value of information in motion or at rest within their managed footprint? Can they independently verify/audit the flows and data objects present? Somehow the bad guys have a better appreciation for CPU, disk and BW and SERVICE than we have!

Does it come down to simple economics? How to incentivise and penalise?

Surely 'Critical Infrastructure' should be held to extremely high standards by an independent body of technical auditors?

Does it really come back to accountability? Do we/they/us/them need to get burned badly (which the miscreants don't want either!) before we are enlightened...

Can the little guys afford the head count of the big boys? (big boys who actually sometimes have *less* of a clue about their systems than the little guys in the first place!). Is it possible that sink-holing traffic centrally in the cloud will give us the visibility/control we have hoped for? Thin offices perhaps staffed with 'thin' people :)

For me it comes back to a simple paradigm. You can't manage what you can't measure. We need to return to atomic units via reductionist thought. This is what I hope shall come with cloud and utility computing. Can you or the cloud provider "afford" NON-integral CPU, DISK, FLOWS, BW, KILOWATTS... runaway code.. such that it now becomes a billing issue? Once IT shops in enterprises start properly implementing "charge-back" rather than a flat rate service we may see some changes.... this coupled with a metric/cost applicable to shared infrastructure such as network fabrics, DNS, NTP, control planes etc...

How can we secure a service when we can't even charge for a service?

Billing 2.0, Utility 2.0, Employment 2.0

"Toffler-esque", wondering about IT churn?

An interesting look at employee churn, and very apt in the IT arena, methinks:

"Employees – especially the most talented ones – are not “dating around” and moving from place to place in search of the Perfect Company at which they can grow old and retire at. They’ve already aced the first four rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy and are in search of self-actualization: the instinctual need of humans to make the most of their abilities and to strive to be the best they can."

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx

Thanks Wade. All we have to worry about now is the predictions of Malthus.

Phrase of the day...

Reading away in some offical blueprint documents for a client ..... came across the phrase "opportunistic use of automation"... tee hee.

Definition of opportunistic from my Mac's 'Dictionary and Thesaurus':

opportunistic |ˌäpərt(y)oōˈnistik|
adjective

exploiting chances offered by immediate circumstances without reference to a general plan or moral principle : the change was cynical and opportiunistic.

Internet Infrastructure Report from Arbor

Nearly forgot to read/listen to this this year. Sound ain't great, would have expected more from the guys, however the content is worth a listen or the report a read.

PDF below:
http://www.arbornetworks.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1034&Itemid=525

Screwing with perception.. quality

So basically time stops and challenges peoples perception of reality. Wonderful really.

Microsoft end to end rebuttle, trust me

From: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/endtoendtrust/default.mspx
http://tinyurl.com/53psbo "Establishing_End_to_End_Trust.pdf"
The word transitive is not used once though hinted at. Let me preface the below rant with the fact that I don't have the answer(s). As pointed out in the article on Page 7: "As noted below, there are historic, economic, social, and political forces that suggest a well-constructed regime is better than none at all, especially in light of the challenges we face on the Internet and the desire of people to be more secure in their daily lives"... and "We must create an environment where reasonable and effective trust decisions can be made." Agreed.

However: ( Christ their lingo could do with some updating and accuracy though... read on... !)

Apparently sloppy code, the pace of technology, a bloated, incestuous, self-serving IT industry lacking in basic engineering discipline (around tolerances and expected usage) coupled with complexity, default permit, cost of massive parallel attacks, jurisdictional immunity.. yadda, yadda has *nothing* to do with our current predicament.... it's *all* about end-to-end trust... hmm subjective or objective guys? I'm hoping end-to-end includes dependencies relating from transitive trust...

Apparently though "Experience shows that most cybercriminal schemes are successful because people, machines, software, and data are not well authenticated and this fact, combined with the lack of auditing and traceability, means that criminals will neither be deterred at the outset nor held accountable after the fact. Thus the answer must lie in better authentication that allows a fundamentally more trustworthy Internet and audit that introduces real accountability"

Page 4 "But staying the current course will not be sufficient; the real issue is that the current strategy does not address effectively the most important issue: a globally connected, anonymous, untraceable Internet with rich targets is a magnet for criminal activity—criminal activity that is undeterred due to a lack of accountability.".... hmmmm yeah but what about http://geer.tinho.net/ieee.geer.0606.pdf

Geer:"Everything about digital security
has time constants that are three or-
ders of magnitude different from the
time constants of physical security:
break into my computer in 500 mil-
liseconds but into my house in 5 to
10 minutes."

Geer:"Human-scale time and rate con-
stants underlie the law enforcement
model of security. The crime happens
and the wheels of detection, analysis,
pursuit, apprehension, jurisprudence,
and, perhaps, penal servitude then,
paraphrasing Longfellow, “grind
slowly, yet they grind exceeding
fine.” In other words, law enforce-
ment generally has all the time in
the world, and its opponent, the
criminal, thus must commit the
perfect crime to cleanly profit from
that crime."

Geer:"If the physics of digital space and
digital time mean we ally ourselves
with the intelligence world view
and not the law enforcement world
view, we have to ask ourselves two
things: is the price of digital sur-
veillance a bearable price for the
benefit of digital safety? And, if so,
what is the unit of digital surveil-
lance? What do we watch—people
or bits?"

Back to Microsoft:Establishing_End_to_End_Trust:..

Page 8: Mis-use of the word hacker "external hackers with access to their systems, in large part because a hacker ".. will they ever learn or at least work harder for a little respect? Apparently "device-to-device authentication" will foil the "hackers"... and scripting attacks facilitates "thus making anyone an “expert” hacker; and the amount of data that can be stolen is limited only by bandwidth. "(Page 10)

Page 8: "robust management tools" are predicated on trusted management tools and one would hope them to be robust to begin with :)

Page 8: "depending on the threat level" , define threat and what metric is employed to address the level?

Page 8: "flooding and probing attacks"... is probing an attack?

Page 8: "Autonomous defense would be possible if, for example, packets likely to be malicious (because they are reliably identified as coming from a dangerous source) could be dropped shortly after entering the network or at a computer’s interface to the network." erm, a self-defending network by virtue of a firewall?

Page 8: "Even the intractable insider threat could be more successfully addressed because better audit tools would make it easier to identify suspicious access patterns for employees in a timely manner." ok so this is anomaly detection now via trust?

Page 8: "The authentication of identity, device (and its state), software, and data could be used to generate trust measurements that could also be used to reduce risk to the ecosystem." don't get me started although 'trusting the state' is a good concept, trust measurements spins me out considering 'trust' is somewhat boolean or a nominal measurement :)

Page 8: Apparently "one of the reasons that large enterprises manage risk relatively well is that they have dedicated IT staff implementing risk management programs." hmmmmm.... so throw some people at the issue and get the job done 'relatively' well :)

Page 8: Here comes the NAP pitch "Yet there is no chief information officer for the public, and no mechanism for protecting the broader Internet by taking best practices from enterprises, such as Network Access Protection, and applying those practices to the public." What about FIRST, NSP-SEC, Arbor, Internet Motion Sensor, Network Telescopes and ISPs in general? Ummm... NIST? SANS? Sorry guys Net Neutraliy vs extreme ISP Hostility with NAP?.. the oul' internet would break methinks... erm... we don't all conform on the endpoints ladies and gents, good luck on that one... the internet is a superorganism that is evolving its immune system. Surveillance and telemetry is the first step.

Page 8: We can fix it all "With better authentication and audit, dynamic trust decisions could be made (based upon, for example, the state of a machine) and Internet service providers could use network access controls to limit the activities of “untrustworthy” machines until they were updated."

So Internet wide NAC/NAP is the answer, don't let the "bad guys" or "bad nodes" on in the first place and kick em' off if they're bad(tm)

Page 9: Hmm, "Second, absent the ability to identify and prove the source of misconduct, there can be no effective deterrent—no effective law enforcement response to cybercrime and no meaningful political response to address international issues relating to cyberabuse." true.

Page 10: "Because all software operates in an environment defined by hardware, it is critical to root trust in hardware." hmmmmmm "If machines did a machine-to-machine-based authentication rooted in TPM keys before allowing a network connection, then one could arguably exclude unapproved machines from accessing network resources. Using new cryptographic techniques, this can be done in privacy-compliant ways." hmmmm cold boot?

Page 14 states: "As the firewall continues to diminish in importance, it is important to focus on protecting data as opposed to simply protecting the machines that store such data." Not sure I'd use this phrase rather that the focus from all sides is moving up the stack, but by no means obviating the need for firewalling.

Page 15: "standardizing audit data formats and tools".. erm syslog? http://www.loganalysis.org/sections/standards/index.html

Page 15: "one can call or send mail to millions of victims, but the time and cost makes this infeasible. " ye think? yeah SPAM is really on the decline, NOT! Micrsofts Penny Black project made sense though... http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/

Ok at this point I give up or this will get too long..... the whole section on F.Audit Page 14/15 is purile and so far behind the times it's scary... they need to look outside of their Microsoft shaped box in Redmond.

No mention of the network.

As Ranum states on http://www.beastorbuddha.com/ "The Internet applications stack depends heavily on ARP and DNS and those protocols depend on a tamper-free network. It’s just silly to think your end-point can secure itself if the network fabric is untrustworthy! If the network is untrustworthy, it’s “game over, man!” as Private Hudson would say."

At the end of the piece a question is posed "can we maintain a globally connected, anonymous, untraceable Internet and be dependent on devices that run arbitrary code of unknown provenance?"... Apparently if the answer is no, then " we need to create a more authenticated and audited Internet environment"... DOH!

"it is important to address all of the complicated social, political, economic, and technical issues raised to ensure we end up with the Internet we want, one which empowers individuals and businesses, and at the same time protects the social values we cherish. " Agreed but which *we* is that? And do we want backwards compatibility?

Counterpoint to the generational divide...

So my Mum sends me this email. She was only introduced to the Internet in 2000.

"I suspected something was running in the background. And fssm32.exe was quoting 92-95 under CPU usage. I googled "fssm32.exe and CPU usage" and found this:

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/fssm32-exe-taking-all-CPU-resolved-t5718.html

which was exactly my problem. I had had an error message from F-Secure saying it
couldn't connect to update. I updated it manually, after a few tries, and ran a
scan.

It told me I had two trojan keyloggers, and listed them in the TIF but said it
couldn't delete. But they didn't show up under my identity. I found them under
the Admin identity, and deleted them. But of course when I rebooted and ran a
scan, they were back, only this time in a .dbx of the administrator. The
Phishing Email folder. So I deleted both .dbx (me and the admin, who are the
same person) cos I knew new folders would be recreated in Outlook. Then I ran
"Window Washer" with "bleach" (which means it overwrites files three times) and
included 'free space', as well as TIF and the rest ... Then rebooted and ran
F-Secure again.

When F-Secure said I was clean, I confirmed it with two online scans --
TrendMicro and Panda. The sluggishness has disappeared. And CPU for fssm32.exe
is now saying 02 or 03 when I have only Outlook open. I'm *assuming* for now
that if there were any files still in registry, that F-Secure should be telling
me. Maybe I shouldn't assume.

On the F-Secure info page about the type of trojan, it said I'd better change
all my passwords when I was sure I was clean.

I have "HijackThis" but am nervous of using it without guidance.

The problem *seems* to be related to Windows Automatic Updates. I'm set to
Automatic, but when I checked last night, it downloaded 9 Updates, which was a
shock. No idea at all how that happened. I'm still set to Automatic Updates."

Noice huh?

Sentence of the day, even if I do say...

To a colleague today about IT security and information assurance.

"theory" looking for visionary leadership in a world gone sour with an inverted pyramidal house of cards being built on yet smaller physical footrprints with sedimentary protocols forming ingrained foundations whereupon we dance with virtualisation in expanded cyberspace with even less capacity for visibility and management, let alone surveillance and optimsation. L2/L3/L2 -> Ethernet/IP-MPLS/VPLS... ESX/VSwitch/Windows = layers of complexity, layers of code, and yet fully fledged OS's pushed further away from the networking stack... abstracted in to inner space.....