When Prevention Fails, Extending IR and Digital Forensics Capabilities to the Corporate Network (PDF – 6,2 MB)

Speaking at SANS Boston

Thanks to Barbara Basalguete, Stephen Northcutt and the rest of the SANS crew for the opportunity to participate in such a great event, as well as to all the attendees that preferred to stay around after a long training day instead of heading off to Harvard Square for Friday party!

When Prevention Fails: Extending IR and Digital Forensics capabilities to the corporate network

2011 is being a big year for cybersecurity incidents with high profile attacks reported against large organizations including HBGary Federal, RSA, Lockheed Martin and several Sony companies among others. With smarter intruders that can make use of both very sophisticated attacks and simple, yet effective, phishing attacks against our users, everyone should assume that at some point their preventive measures will fail, and that sooner or later you will have to recover from a future intrusion. Based on this assumption several questions arise: When prevention fails, what is left? Am I ready to detect, react and recover from an intrusion? What can Network Security Monitoring and Digital Forensics do for me?

Ismael’s talk will address these questions, describing the latest trends in computer attacks and intrusions, including the use of Botnets and what has been called the Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). Lastly, Ismael will show how Network Security Monitoring (NSM) and Digital Forensics methods and tools can be extended to the corporate network to assist in the early detection and investigation of these threats. Best practices and techniques on how to do NSM, full packet capture, network forensic analysis and data carving will be discussed, along with some live demos using tools that are available to any security practitioner.

A full description of the event can be found here:

http://www.sans.org/info/74514

Registration is still open but you have to be quick. It might be also a good idea to drop me an email if you’re planning to be there

See you in Berlin!

If you haven’t heard of Community SANS courses before, I encourage you to have a look at this new format (new outside the US, where it’s been running for years). This is a great way of bringing the popular SANS courses to your local security community at a reasonable cost, especially for those that can’t attend the major events.  It’s worth mentioning that unlike the SANS Mentor  sessions, these are delivered over a six-day period, just like it is at a larger SANS event, including the full set of books and access to audio files. They are just delivered in your own community, in a small classroom setting and at a discounted cost for tuition and travel expenses.

I’ve already described my experience with SANS, both as student and facilitator, so I won’t go over that again. Also, you can find a further detailed description of the Security 503 track on SANS website, an outstanding course that I’ve already described as the “most valuable course I’ve ever taken”. However, I want you to listen to Mike Poor, instructor at the SANS Institute and co-author of this course (along with Judy Novak and Guy Bruneau), describing it on YouTube. Mike Poor is both an amazing professional and a great guy that I had the opportunity to meet at SANS Sydney in 2008, when I took his Penetration Testing class. As Mike would say, this IDS course is simply “awesome”!

You can download it from the following location:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/security-onion/

The following information is extracted from Doug’s Security Onion blog:

What is it?

The Security Onion LiveCD is a bootable CD that contains software used for installing, configuring, and testing Intrusion Detection Systems.

What software does it contain?

The Security Onion LiveCD is based on Xubuntu 9.04 and contains Snort 2.8.4.1, Snort 3.0.0b3 (Beta), sguil, idswakeup, nmap, metasploit, scapy, hping, fragroute, fragrouter, netcat, paketto, tcpreplay, and many other security tools.

What can it be used for?

-The Security Onion LiveCD can be used for Intrusion Detection. Simply boot the CD and double-click either the Snort-Sguil or SnortSP-Sguil desktop shortcuts. The Snort and Sguil daemons will then start, listening on eth0 for any suspicious traffic and creating alerts in the Sguil console.

-The Security Onion LiveCD can be used to test an Intrusion Detection System. Simply boot the CD and use the included tools (such as nmap, metasploit, idswakeup, scapy, hping, and others) to test your existing IDS or to test the included Snort 2.8.4.1 and Snort 3.0 Beta 3.

-The Security Onion LiveCD can be used to install an Intrusion Detection System. Simply boot the CD and double-click the Install desktop shortcut. For more information about installation, please see the README desktop shortcut.

I haven’t had a chance to download it yet, but I will definitely give it a try over the next few days. I’m very interested in trying out the IDS installation feature and see how it compares to other Sguil installation scripts like NSMnow. I’m currently working on the deployment of a good number of Sguil servers/sensors and NSMnow has reduced significantly the time needed to get them up and running. Hence, any new development on this topic is more than welcome.

I will keep posting my findings on this new exciting tool!