One month after Sue and Joe get married, Sue carries out some devious activity behind Joe’s back. She makes a copy of the message digest value without anyone knowing. Then she makes a new contract that states that if Joe and Sue get a divorce, Sue owns both her own original belongings and Joe’s original belongings. Sue hashes this new contract and compares the new message digest value with the message digest value that correlates with the contract. They don’t match. So Sue tweaks her contract ever so slightly and creates another message digest value and compares them. She continues to tweak her contract until she forces a collision, meaning her contract creates the same message digest value as the original contract. Sue then changes out the original contract with her new contract and quickly divorces Joe. When Sue goes to collect Joe’s belongings and he objects, she shows him that no modification could have taken place on the original document because it still hashes out to the same message digest. Sue then moves to an island.

Hash algorithms usually use message digest sizes (the value of n) that are large enough to make collisions difficult to accomplish, but they are still possible. An algorithm that has 160-bit output, like SHA-1, may require approximately 280 computations to break. This means there is a less than 1 in 280 chance that someone could carry out a successful birthday attack.

The main point of discussing this paradox is to show how important longer hashing values truly are. A hashing algorithm that has a larger bit output is less vulnerable to brute force attacks such as a birthday attack. This is the primary reason why the new versions of SHA have such large message digest values.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

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EMC, IBM, Novell, Cisco, CheckPoint, Symantec, CA, Attachmate, Q1Labs, eIQ Networks, SenSage and others all have SIEM products. Because of the technology’s relatively new emergence in the marketplace, there are few publications that address more than one vendor’s product. SIEM Implementation shows how to implement multiple products, and also discusses the strengths, weaknesses, and advanced tuning of these various systems. SIEM Implementation covers the gamut of topics a network administrator or security professional needs – from basic concepts and components to high-level configuration, analysis, interpretation and response. It aids in the performance of risk analysis, threat detection, threat analysis and threat response for IT systems and businesses of every size.

tWritten by security and compliance experts and speakers, Security Information and Event Management Implementation shows IT professionals how to effectively implement SIEM in order to efficiently analyze and report data, respond effectively to inside and outside threats, and follow compliance regulations.

This book also shows the separate pieces that make up a complete and cohesive SIEM. These pieces are what most small and medium size businesses are forced to implement, due to the relatively high cost to acquire, implement, maintain and reap benefits from the full scale SIEM systems. This teaches the IT professional how to implement a more integrated collection of discrete SIEM pieces, approaching similar utility of a full featured SIEM tool. Further, SIEM Implementation shows readers how to use the SIEM tool to develop business intelligence, beyond the realm of being just a fancy security tool.

SIEM Implementation is a valuable addition to our security plan for 2010.

Security Plan / Pub Date
Mobile Application Security – Spring 2009
Hacking Exposed Virtualization – Summer 2010
Empirical Security: Protecting Data with Metrics – Summer 2010
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) – Summer 2010
Hacking Evolved – Fall 2010
Hacking Exposed Web Applications, 3rd Edition – Fall 2010
Hacking Exposed Wireless, 2nd Edition – Fall 2010

Key Selling Features

• Includes a Smartbook – a knowledge base of business use cases: real world examples of business needs that can be satisfied by using a finely tuned SIEM system.
• Covers the top SIEM products/vendors: ArcSight, Q1 QRadar, and Cisco MARS
• Authors are security, SIEM, and compliance experts who speak globally around the world, are famous published authors, and have close ties with the government and multiple corporate vendors.
• Foreword by Shon Harris
• Includes product feature summaries, and analysis and trending examples
• Covers regulatory compliance issues
• Provides Incident Response solutions

Market / Audience

• Targeted at IT/security professionals and compliance professionals
• Fueled originally by stealthy threats such as worms and more recently by compliance, the SIEM market is projected to grow from about $380 million last year to $873 million in 2010, according to research firm IDC.
• RSA Security, the security division of EMC, estimates that the SIEM market is expanding at a rate of between 25 percent and 35 percent annually.

Author Profiles
David R. Miller (SME, MCT, MCITPro Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Administrator, MCSE Windows NT 4.0, 2000, and Server 2003:Security, CISSP, LPT, ECSA, CEH, CWNA, CCNA, CNE, Security+, A+, N+). David is an IT security consultant specializing in information systems security, compliance and network engineering. He is a lecturer, an author and technical editor of books, curriculum, certification exams and computer based training videos. He regularly performs as a Microsoft Subject Matter Expert (SME) on product lines including Microsoft Server 2008, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows Vista.
Shon Harris, CISSP, is the CEO of Logical Security, a computer security consultant, a former engineer in the Air Force’s Information Warfare unit, an instructor and an author. She has authored three best selling CISSP books, is a contributing author to the book Gray Hat Hacking, and developed a full digital information security product series for Pearson publishing. Shon was recognized as one of the top 25 women in the Information Security field by Information Security Magazine.

Allen Harper, CISSP, is founder and president of N2NetSecurity, Inc., a consulting company specializing in advanced security and vulnerability analysis, penetration testing, SIEM implementation, and compliance. He served as a security engineer in the U.S. Department of Defense, and is a coauthor of Gray Hat Hacking.

Stephen VanDyke, CISSP, BCCPA, BCCPP, MCSA, Security+, Network+, was a founding member of the U.S. Army Reserve global network Computer Emergency Response Team and helped design and deploy its NetForensics SIEM. He implemented high end, multi-tiered security systems for the Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNFI) network.

Chris Blask, Vice President of Marketing at AlienVault, is on the faculty at the Institute for Applied Network Security, Co-founded Protego Networks (now Cisco MARS) and founded Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity company Lofty Perch. Chris invented the BorderWare Firewall Server in the early days of the Internet Security market and built the Cisco Systems firewall business.

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Source: Risk Management Guide by Shon Harris

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Risk management in the financial sector is more defined and stable because it is based in numbers and statistics that have a more direct correlation to the components it is describing.  In the information security world we have silly things like the Annualized Loss Expectancy (ALE) formula that has variables that are subjectively populated along with other just as ineffective formulas that provide false senses of securities.

Many organizations, corporations and security consultants are comfortable with common balanced scoreboard values, associating color codes to risk values, and/or using arbitrary risk rating systems. Now these can be useful components in risk assessments and potentially useful tools for risk management – but not how they are usually used today. The crux of the questions you should be asking your employees or consultants who hand you a stack of paper covered with pretty graphs, pie charts, and risk ratings used to explain the risk your organization faces is ‘Where’s the beef?’ What is this information based on? Where did these numbers come from? Why does this server or business process fall within the red risk quadrant and the others in the yellow? But here is another important key – will you know if they have to dance to answer these questions? If your consultant starts throwing out acronyms, formulas, and technical mumbo-jumbo will you just figure that he knows what he is talking about since you don’t understand him? This is what most commonly happens. If someone really understands risk management, she can break it down and explain it properly to the necessary audience without going over their heads. Risk management is complicated, but if you are paying someone to perform it for you, you need to know what you are paying for and more importantly the REAL risks your company faces.

One large corporation called me in as a consultant to help them with a wide range of security issues. They had had one of the top four consulting agencies in there carrying out a risk assessment so that the risks could be prioritized and the customer knew what risks had to be mitigated immediately versus ones that could be tackled over time.  The consulting company left my customer with a stack of papers that had colorful spreadsheets, pie charts, graphs, and high-level boilerplate explanations of the identified vulnerabilities. To the executives this was very impressive and they had a false sense of security that their real company risks had been identified and now they just had to be dealt with. The top risk that was called out by the large consulting firm was ‘Mainframe Access’.  This is a very vague term and basically useless. I knew my customer had retail stores throughout the United States and Canada and that credit card numbers and social security numbers were flying around their network in cleartext. The mainframe did not hold this type of data or data that was more sensitive in nature. So this top risk in the paperwork I was holding seemed suspicious to me. I wanted to see what supported this finding. I looked at the mathematical formulas used in the Excel spreadsheet that the risk report findings were based upon and I saw that one variable was not included in their simplistic formula. Someone had fat fingered the formula in the consulting company’s boilerplate template. The stack of reports I was looking at was based upon an incorrect formula. Each risk and its associated ranking was based on this formula. So out of curiosity I corrected the formula and found that now the risk of ‘Mainframe Access’ had moved from number one to number five. This means that the company thought a majority of their upfront resources needed to be allocated towards addressing their mainframe access controls. They had already had meetings, assigned resources, and started focusing more on their old and hardly used mainframe and not on all of the insecure PCs that were holding and processing social security numbers and financial information. But hey, the paperwork had pretty pie charts and the consultants were all in nice shiny suits!

What about those automated products that take input information, do all of the risk analysis and computation in the background, and kick out paperwork that dissects your organizational risks with instructions on how you should go about fixing them? I will return to what your core questions should be, which is ‘what are these results based on’? With risk management products all of their computational secret sauce is baked in and works behind the scenes, which means that it is harder for you to view and evaluate. This means that you need to know enough to ask the right questions before purchasing the product and putting stock into its output. Just to drive the point home, I will provide another scary story.

I was invited to sit a four day class on a risk management product that is commonly used in financial institutions and the government sector. The class was for analysts who configure and use the tool to carry out information security risk assessments. We were able to get under the hood and look at many of the formulas that were being used. The formulas were solid and worthy for their application, but the real problem came from the potential input values. Every formula is just an instruction set with some empty variables. The variables are filled with the necessary input and then the computation is carried out on those inputs and a result is provided. But true with almost every equation is ‘garbage in garbage out’.  The result of the equation has a direct relationship with the inputs. The inputs for this product, and many risk management products, are extremely subjective thus the results range from analyst to analyst. Many people in the class were very mystified by the mathematics that was used within the product and felt that because they did not understand it – the product had to be doing things correctly.

If you are not careful, the largest risk your company could face is the risk assessment methodology being used.  The best case scenario from this would be that a risk assessment was a waste of time and money. The worst case scenario is that your organization is missing some of the largest REAL risks it is being faced with.

Since the term ‘risk management’ is nebulous and not a defined and scientific discipline within the information security realm, anyone and everyone is putting up their shingle pontificating their skills in this field. Make sure to work with true experts not only in the information security field, but those who also specialize in understanding and mitigating risks to meet your organization’s risk appetite.

Source: Risk Management Guide by Shon Harris

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Stay tuned for Part II…

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The hashing algorithm is not a secret—it is publicly known. The secrecy of the oneway hashing function is its “one-wayness.” The function is run in only one direction, not the other direction. This is different from the one-way function used in public key cryptography, in which security is provided based on the fact that, without knowing a trapdoor, it is very hard to perform the one-way function backward on a message and come up with readable plaintext. However, one-way hash functions are never used in reverse; they create a hash value and call it a day. The receiver does not attempt to reverse the process at the other end, but instead runs the same hashing function one way

and compares the two results.

The hashing one-way function takes place without the use of any keys. This means, for example, that if Cheryl writes a message, calculates a message digest, appends the digest to the message, and sends it on to Scott, Bruce can intercept this message, alter Cheryl’s message, recalculate another message digest, append it to the message, and

send it on to Scott. When Scott receives it, he verifies the message digest, but never knows the message was actually altered by Bruce. Scott thinks the message came straight from Cheryl and it was never modified, because the two message digest values are the same. If Cheryl wanted more protection than this, she would need to use message authentication code (MAC).

A MAC function is an authentication scheme derived by applying a secret key to a message in some form. This does not mean the symmetric key is used to encrypt the message, though. You should be aware of two basic types of MACs: a hash MAC (HMAC) and a CBC-MAC.

Source: CISSP All-In-One Study Guide by Shon Harris

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Security expert Harris joins leading publisher for Information Security product series

San Antonio, March 30, 2010 – Shon Harris, founder and president of Logical Security, has signed a deal with publishing house Pearson to create a comprehensive set of training materials for CISSP, SSCP, CEH and Security+ certification studies.

“Pearson is excited to be working with such a great talent and expert author like Shon Harris,” said a Pearson spokesperson. “Her knowledge is top notch and we are excited to be collaborating with her on this and future projects.”

These new training tools – Video Courses, Video Mentors and Cert Flash Cards — approach the rigorous certification exams in a way that addresses a variety of learning styles. The video courses capture Harris’s well-known and effective training style, honed in ten years of security certification training and consulting with Logical Security.

“I am very excited to partner with Pearson to produce the best study materials for IT-security certification preparation on the market today,” said Shon Harris. “This partnership will produce materials that people can use to actually LEARN and IMPLEMENT the security information.”

“Studying for security certification exams CORRECTLY can be one of the best investments you will ever make in your career,” said Harris.

About Shon Harris and Logical Security:

Shon Harris is a former member of the Air Force Information Warfare unit. She is a consultant and has written or contributed to ten information security books. Harris founded Logical Security in 2003, and as president has guided the company to become a leader in certification education and security consulting. Logical Security’s training programs include on-site and online classes, self-study and computer-based materials for students and companies studying to pass certification exams, perform security audits on current infrastructure and comply with a variety of security regulations. The company’s areas of expertise are varied, with specialties in CISSP certification, Microsoft exams, .Net development, career refreshers for security pros, and other IT certifications. Logical Security is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.

MEDIA CONTACT
Mark Bedell
Logical Security
Phone: 888-373-5116 x103
509-468-2188
markbedell@logicalsecurity.com

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Shon Harris announces the newest edition of her preeminent guide to information security certification. For nearly ten years, the CISSP All-in-One Exam Guide has helped information security pros tackle the rigorous CISSP exam and gain CISSP certification. In the fifth edition, Harris adds expanded coverage of all ten exam areas, with the same easy-to-read and practical style that have made her previous guides famous.

“I appreciate the plain, clear, as simple as possible way the information is presented. It would be easy to make these concepts sound hard.” says Stephen Northcutt, president of the SANS Technology Institute, of the fourth edition. “Shon does not do that. She tells the story of security as well as anyone ever has.” He adds that the book is also “perfect for the CXO who wants to understand what security is and what they need to know about it.”

The guide “is an engaging, informative and complete resource,” says Treece Efird, a senior network engineer at Communications Products, on the fourth edition.

CISSP certification requires a breadth of knowledge across information security topic areas – also called the CBK, or Common Body of Knowledge — which include cryptography, telecommunications and network security, business continuity and disaster recovery planning, applications security and legal, regulations, compliance and investigation, among others. Harris’s approach to each complex category includes, in the guide and included CD-ROM:

• Simulated exam questions
• Learning objectives at the start of each chapter
• Practice questions
• Real-world situations
• Video training

The CISSP All-in-One Exam Guide, Fifth Edition is available now at www.logicalsecurity.com/store or Amazon.com. Published by McGraw-Hill Osborne Media. ISBN: 978-0071602174.

About Shon Harris and Logical Security:

Shon Harris, CISSP, MCSE, is a former member of the Air Force Information Warfare unit. She is a consultant and has written or contributed to ten information security books. Harris founded Logical Security in 2003 and as president has guided the company to become a leader in certification education and security consulting. Logical Security’s training programs include on-site and online classes, self-study and computer-based materials for students and companies studying to pass certification exams, perform security audits on current infrastructure and comply with a variety of security regulations.

Now Available at CISSP All-in-One Exam Guide, Fifth Edition
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Author, consultant, security expert and Air Force veteran Shon Harris has announced that she will offer free technology training to military members and veterans who cannot afford the cost of classes at Harris’s company, Logical Security. The broad roster of classes includes the well-known CISSP certification training, along with a variety of other IT certifications and career refresher courses.

“No one gets rich serving our country, sadly,” says Harris. “Many military people are always going through economically hard times.” Harris offers seats in her open classes for anyone who has served or is serving in Iraq or Afghanistan who can’t afford the training.

“It does not matter if I believe in our current wars or not,” says Harris. “I do believe in the people who are doing this work and fighting in these wars.” Harris notes that along with her own service in the Air Force, her father retired from the Army after several tours to Vietnam, her husband will soon retire from the Air Force after duty in Iraq, and her grandfather served the U.S. as part of the Air Corps in World War II. “My frustration and concern is that these wars have basically dropped off the map in our media coverage,” says Harris, “and the soldiers may have fallen out of our country’s consciousness.”

“I have worked hard and am finally in a position in my life to give back,” says Harris. “Let’s see if we can start a ‘pay it forward’ movement for our military.”

To contact Logical Security and sign up for classes, please contact Mark Bedell at markbedell@logicalsecurity.com. Visit Technology certification training to military service for  for a full listing of available classes.

About Shon Harris and Logical Security:

Shon Harris, CISSP, MCSE, is a former member of the Air Force Information Warfare unit. She is a consultant and has written or contributed to ten information security books. Harris founded Logical Security in 2003 and as president has guided the company to become a leader in certification education and security consulting. Logical Security’s training programs include on-site and online classes, self-study and computer-based materials for students and companies studying to pass certification exams, perform security audits on current infrastructure and comply with a variety of security regulations. The company’s areas of expertise are broad, with specialties in CISSP certification, Microsoft exams, .Net development, career refreshers for security pros, and other IT certifications. Logical Security is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.

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