December 15, 2017

5 Security Big Data Challenges

Previously, I started blogging about individual topics and slides from my keynote at ACSAC 2017. The first topic I elaborated on a little bit was An Incomplete Security Big Data History. In this post I want to focus on the last slide in the presentation, where I posed 5 Challenges for security with big data:

5 challenges

Let me explain and go into details on these challenges a bit more:

  1. Establish a pattern / algorithm / use-case sharing effort: Part of the STIX standard for exchanging threat intelligence is the capability to exchange patterns. However, we have been notoriously bad at actually doing that. We are exchanging simple indicators of compromise (IOCs), such as IP addresses or domain names. But talk to any company that is using those, and they’ll tell you that those indicators are mostly useless. We have to up-level our detections and engage in patterns; also called TTPs at times: tactics, techniques, and procedures. Those characterize attacker behavior, rather than calling out individual technical details of the attack. Back in the good old days of SIM, we built correlation rules (we actually still do). Problem is that we don’t share them. The default content delivered by the SIMs is horrible (I can say that. I built all of those for ArcSight back in the day). We don’t have a place where we can share our learnings. Every SIEM vendor is trying to do that on their own, but we need to start defining those patterns independent of products. Let’s get going! Who makes the first step?
  2. Define a common data model: For over a decade, we have been trying to standardize log formats. And we are still struggling. I initially wrote the Common Event Format (CEF) at ArcSight. Then I went to Mitre and tried to get the common event expression (CEE) work off the ground to define a vendor neutral standard. Unfortunately, getting agreement between Microsoft, RedHat, Cisco, and all the log management vendors wasn’t easy and we lost the air force funding for the project. In the meantime I went to work for Splunk and started the common information model (CIM). Then came Apache Spot, which has defined yet another standard (yes, I had my fingers in that one too). So the reality is, we have 4 pseudo standards, and none is really what I want. I just redid some major parts over here at Sophos (I hope I can release that at some point).
    Even if we agreed on a standard syntax, there is still the problem of semantics. How do you know something is a login event? At ArcSight (and other SIEM vendors) that’s called the taxonomy or the categorization. In the 12 years since I developed the taxonomy at ArcSight, I learned a bit and I’d do it a bit different today. Well, again, we need standards that products implement. Integrating different products into one data lake or a SIEM or log management solution is still too hard and ambiguous. But you can learn doing this if you will look for Fortinet and learn how they do this.
  3. Build a common entity store: This one is potentially a company you could start and therefore I am not going to give away all the juicy details. But look at cyber security. We need more context for the data we are collecting. Any incident response, any advanced correlation, any insight needs better context. What’s the user that was logged into a system? What’s the role of that system? Who owns it, etc. All those factors are important. Cyber security has an entity problem! How do you collect all that information? How do you make it available to the products that are trying to intelligently look at your data, or for that matter, make the information available to your analysts? First you have to collect the data. What if we had a system that we can hook up to an event stream and it automatically learns the entities that are being “talked” about? Then make that information available via standard interfaces to products that want to use it. There is some money to be made here! Oh, and guess what! By doing this, we can actually build it with privacy in mind. Anonymization built in! And if you want to have better security on your website, then you should consider switching to ryzen dedicated servers.
  4. Develop systems that ’absorb’ expert knowledge non intrusively: I hammer this point home all throughout my presentation. We need to build systems that absorb expert knowledge. How can we do that without being too intrusive? How do we build systems with expert knowledge? This can be through feedback loops in products, through bayesian belief networks, through simple statistics or rules, … but let’s shift our attention to knowledge and how we make experts by CCTV Melbourne and highly paid security people more efficient.
  5. Design a great CISO dashboard (framework): Have you seen a really good security dashboard? I’d love to see it (post in the comments?). It doesn’t necessarily have to be for a CISO. Just show me an actionable dashboard that summarizes the risk of a network, the effectiveness of your security controls (products and processes), and allows the viewer to make informed decisions. I know, I am being super vague here. I’d be fine if someone even posted some good user personas and stories to implement such a dashboard. (If you wait long enough, I’ll do it). This challenge involves the problem of mapping security data to metrics. Something we have been discussing for eons. It’s hard. What’s a 10 versus a 5 when it comes to your security posture? Any (shared) progress on this front would help.

What are your thoughts? What challenges would you put out? Am I missing the mark? Or would you share my challenges?

December 11, 2017

Startup Marketing

Category: Marketing — Raffael Marty @ 8:53 am

You are an enterprise software startup. You are in the security space. Your company is still early, trying to sign its first 10, maybe 40 customers. What should you be doing for marketing? What works? What doesn’t? What approaches yield the biggest return for your investment? These are some questions that I have been pondering lately with startups that I am working with. I decided to do some research among my marketing and startup friends to explore what marketing approaches work for them.

The full posts you can find on my other blog at cryptojail.net. There you will find a discussion of:

  • Positioning and value proposition
  • Identifying your top 200 prospects
  • Defining measurable goals
  • Building a killer Web site
  • Getting reference customers
  • Keeping your marketing fun and unique
  • Becoming good at PR
  • etc.

And don’t forget about proper advertising and marketing strategies. A good SEO campaign from the best SEO company will give your business the attention it deserves.

Here are the individual posts:

  1. Startup Marketing
  2. Get Good at PR
  3. More PR Activities
December 6, 2017

An Incomplete Security Big Data History

Category: Big Data,Security Information Management,Security Market — Raffael Marty @ 12:49 pm

Earlier today I was giving the keynote at ACSAC 2017. This year’s theme of the conference is big data for security. As part of my keynote, I talked about the history of big data in security. Following is the slide I put together:

Security Data History

This is by no means a complete picture, but I tried to pull together some of the most important milestones along the security data journey. To help interpret the graph, the top part shows some of the most important developments in security, while the bottom shows the history in the big data world at large. I am including the big data world as without the developments in big data, security would not be where it is today.

In addition to distinguishing between security and big data developments, I am using blue and green triangles to differentiate between ‘data collection or centralization’ (blue) and ‘data insight’ (green) milestones. I had a hard time coming up with too many ‘data insight’ milestones in both big data and in security. Seems we have a bit more work to do in our industry.

Let me make a few remarks about the graph. I’d be curious about your thoughts also; please leave a comment.

  • Security has been dealing with big data (variety, velocity, and volume) since 1996 – we just didn’t call it that back then.
  • We have been trying to apply anomaly detection to (network) security data for a long time. Interestingly enough, we are still dealing with a lot of the same issues as we had back then; one of them is having access to good training data.
  • We have been talking about security visualization for a long time. The first VizSec conference was held back in 2004. And in fact, we released the first versions of AfterGlow in early 2004.
  • In 2006 we released the first common data format, the common event format (CEF). CEF was a vendor driven approach (I co-wrote the standard while at ArcSight). Later in 2007, I approached mitre to help us take the effort public under the CEE banner. Unfortunately, that effort wasn’t super successful. Later I rewrote CEF at Splunk and we called it the common information model (CIM). Now we also have Apache Spot that released yet another standard data format. Which standard are we going to use? Well, for my own purposes, none of these standards really made the cut and I wrote yet another field dictionary at Sophos (to be released). The other problem with these standards is that none of them cover semantics, only syntax!
  • While deep learning had a big break through in 2009, we really only started using those algorithms in security in 2016. That’s probably a good thing. It’s just another machine learning algorithm that is actually really amazing at helping classify malware. But for a lot of other security problems it’s just not suited.
  • In 2014 I wrote the first version of the security data lake booklet. Most of the challenges I address in there are still applicable today. One of the developments that has helped making data lakes more realistic, are developments like Apache Drill or PrestoDB; or in general, the separation of data storage (e.g., parquet) from the query engines. These developments allow us to query our data lake with many different storage formats (CSV, JSON, parquet, ORC, etc.). It still requires a master data record to understand what we have and let us manage schemas across data sources.
  • Looking at database technologies, it is amazing to see what, for example, AWS has been providing with regards to tooling around data storage and access. Athena, RDS, S3, and to a lesser degree QuickSight, are fantastic tools to manage and explore large amounts of data. They provide the user with a lot of enterprise features out of the box, such as backups, fault tolerance, queueing, access control, etc.

What major milestones am I missing?