Reality has a funny way of intruding into the best laid plans.
Some of you might have noticed I haven’t been writing that much for the past couple weeks and have been pretty much ignoring Twitter and the rest of the social media world. It seems my wife had a baby, and since this isn’t my personal blog anymore I was able to take some time off and focus on the family. Needless to say, my “paternity leave” didn’t last nearly as long as I planned, thanks to the work piling up.
Given how much time we’ve spent discusing application awareness and how these new capabilities pretty much stomp all over existing security products like IDS/IPS and web filters, does that mean standalone network security devices go away? Should you just quietly accept that unified threat management (UTM) is the way to go because the enterprise firewall provides multiple functions? Not exactly.
Tuesday, September 21st, at 11am PST / 2pm EST, I will be presenting a webinar: “Keys to Selecting SIEM and Log Management”, hosted by NitroSecurity. I’ll cover the basics of SIEM, including data collection and deployment, then dig into use cases, enrichment, data management, forensics, and advanced features.
In our last post we detailed content protection requirements, so now it’s time to close out our discussion of technical requirements with infrastructure integration.
After digging into application awareness features in Part 1, let’s talk about non-application capabilities. These new functions are really about dealing with today’s attacks. Historically, managing ports and protocols has sufficed to keep the bad guys outside the perimeter; but with today’s bumper crop of zombies & bots, the old ways don’t cut it any more.
Now that you’ve figured out what information you want to protect, it’s time to figure out how to protect it. In this step we’ll figure out your high-level monitoring and enforcement requirements.
It was an eventful weekend at chez Rothman. The twins (XX2 and XY) had a birthday, which meant the in-laws were in town and for the first time we had separate parties for the kids. That meant one party on Saturday night and another Sunday afternoon. We had a ton of work to do to get the house ready to entertain a bunch of rambunctious 7 year olds. But that’s not all – we also had a soccer game and tryouts for the holiday dance performance on Saturday.
The question that came up over and over again during our SIEM research project: “How do I derive more value from my SIEM installation?” As we discussed throughout that report, plenty of data gets collected, but extracting actionable information remains a challenge. In part this is due to the “drinking from the fire-hose” effect, where the speed and volume of incoming data make it difficult to process effectively. Additionally, data needs to be pieced together with sufficient reference points…
Over the summer we initiated what turned out to be a pretty darn big data security survey. Our primary goal was to assess what data security controls people find most effective; and get a better understanding of how they are using the controls, what’s driving adoption, and a bit on what kinds of incidents they are experiencing.
In our last post we kicked off the DLP selection process by putting the team together. Once you have them in place, it’s time to figure out which information you want to protect. This is extremely important, as it defines which content analysis techniques you require, which is at the core of DLP functionality.