Slashdot Mirror
Mission Critical Security Planner
Greenberg delights in skewering bureaucracies that believe planning and methodology is an end in itself, yet recognizes key business realities facing security advocates and suggests practical approaches to "selling security" within an organization -- an important topic given tight or shrinking budgets.
Greenberg is clearly a security guy and writes with experience and authority -- at times the style is conversational and humorous and at others professorial -- it is a good read for a security-focused text. While providing a strong overview of sound security planning and risk management concepts, MCSP also digs down and provides details where it counts regarding filters, proxies, IDS/VA, configuration management, content management (ActiveX, etc), and so forth yet consistently presents this low-level detail within the framework of an actionable security planning methodology that will be relevant five or even ten years from now. MCSP is anything but a security cookbook of technology discussions gleaned from public sources, although many basic concepts and topics are explained in the book's comprehensive glossary. Instead, the book presents the strengths and weaknesses of various technologies and approaches as they relate to the security improvement process.
MCSP utilizes a sequence of sophisticated worksheets to guide the reader through the security planning process and create a dynamic, actionable security plan -- not a plan that lives on the shelf. Using Greenberg's approach there are three components to the Security Plan: Security Stack (physical, network, application, OS), Life-Cycle Stack (technology selection, implementation, operations, incident response), and Business (information, infrastructure, people). Interestingly, you may have noticed that the Security Stack is similar to the OSI model -- this is typical of the rational and logical approach throughout the book. Using the worksheet approach as a guide, the Security Plan is mapped to 28 pre-defined security elements addressing the core security planning challenges of a distributed computing environment. Based on the worksheets, the impact analysis method approach provides a readily understandable plan that reflects the specific business, technical, and lifecycle tradeoffs in your organization.
Greenberg keeps it interesting with many anecdotes illustrating key points and thought-provoking arguments. For example, he advocates an approach that will hold vendors accountable for poor security by providing a quantifiable method for business software users to track security. The final chapter covers strategic security planning with PKI and provides a roadmap for selling an organization on the benefits of PKI when appropriate.
MCSP is an innovative and useful security book. The book provides security staffers and planners with the logical framework and tools they need to create a comprehensive, living, and actionable security plan enabling the organization to shift from a reactive security posture to a more pro-active approach. Highly recommended.
Online reader resources are available and chapter one maybe downloaded from http://www.criticalsecurity.com.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: Setting the Stage For Successful Security Planning.
- Chapter 2: A Security Plan That Works
- Chapter 3: Using the Security Plan Worksheets: The Fundamentals
- Chapter 4: Using the Security Plan Worksheets: The Remaining Core and Wrap-Up Elements
- Chapter 5: Strategic Security Planning with PKI
- Chapter 6: Ahead of the Hacker: Best Practices and a View of the Future
You can purchase Mission Critical Security Planner from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
My linksys router's firewall doesn't provide good security???
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
I can't see the chapter about "how to avoid slashdotting". ;-)
Webmasters sure need a "actionable, meaningful security approach" for this
A Useful, Actionable, Manageable approach to security???
Doesn't this guy know that security is all complicated and stuff and that people need to hire VERY expensive security consultants like me?
This is the first time I have seen a book since my leadership training in the mid 80's that actually talks about measured improvement! Every job I have held since I retired from the Navy (all IT related), security "success or failure" is based on scanning with Nessus or a similar tool and if the machine passes "It's secure". No measurement of improvement, no training, just run the scan and use a "click through PowerPoint presentation" and you're done! The problem with the Government and security is that it gets tied up too much in "committee" where you have people who have no clue on security weighing in and actually believing that if you are C2, you are secure. This book should be a requirement for IT management, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector. From what I can see of the worksheets, it is not tied down with details, but straightforward questions of what to do and how to measure the results. Find that in TCSEC or Common Criteria!
I know /. gets a commission if we click on that link to buy the book from B&N, but Amazon has it for $10 less.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Microsoft has announced in a press release that it will be suing Wiley and Eric Greenberg for attempted copyright infringement. Microsoft claims that the "MCSP" consolidated title is trying to compete with a yet unannounced revision for a product name: "Microsoft Certified Service Pack (MCSP)."
"This is nothing against Mr. Greenberg," said Bill Gates when asked to comment. "We just don't want any competi- excuse me, confusion."
More on this as details develop.
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
How good is this at covering the basics of the hazy cloud that is "real" security, both against online attacks and social engineering?
I'm currently at the level of "if it passes [insert_attack_script] its safe" but would like to learn how to get past that. I can competently secure a given box, but I think attempting a mid to large size network would be a "learning experience" (read: disaster) for me.
Any suggestions?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The book does exactly that, takes-on real security issues. On social engineering, this is addressed in the book via the "Business-People" security planning template he provides and the associated discussions and commentary/guidance all through the book.
Am I supposed to cover all the air intakes, windows and doors with plastic and duct tape if this alert is in force?
ok, I'll take your flamebait...
2. There is no step 2
Yes, there are other steps:
2. If you believe any Micro$haft product is secure, even with the latest rounds of Security Patches, make your way to an emergency room ASAP to get Bill G.'s hand extruded from your ass, because you're apparently just a puppet with Daddy Bill mouthing the words.
3. If you believe in OpenVMS, visit http://www.reversemylobotomy.com/
Intel can't come up with a chip fast enough that M$ can't slow down...
Like, what percentage of attacks are actually prevented by such measures ? E.g., how many sites have been protected from the SQL Slammer worm by their firewall, and on how many sites has the firewall failed, and why ?
Despite the flood of publications entering the market, I have never seen any in-depth discussion of quantifyable merits of security software. Usually the argument for investments into security is that you will save the cost caused by incidents (so the hidden assumption seems to be that the measures taken will be 100 per cent effective ?). Does this book provide any more insight ?
and that is the point of this book. Security is a process/plan, not a software feature. A firewall could have prented the SQL Slammer. Then again, a firewall could not have prevented the SQL Slammer worm. The difference is whether or not the IT folks knew how to configure the firewall to meet their needs (in this case of the SQL worm, they didn't configure it on port 1434 or in general because clearly most just had a default setup of some kind). Furthermore, the use of software like Microsoft SQL and its related components (MSDE, etc) is a planning issue as it relates to security-- companies don't even know what the have installed and if they have installed it, they have no process to assess their (in)security. This book drives at the heart of that whole debate and tries hard to provide a workable process. How do you plan, for an organization overall, for proper configuration of what you do deploy? How do you convince people to use an IDS and if you do, how to you assure success (e.g. the author discusses the relationship between IDS's and vulnerability analysis)? If you get a book that simply gets quantitative on different software features (e.g. IDS, VA, firewall), it might not be very helpful. What would be helpful is how you plan and use this software. That's what this book helps with.
I suppose it should surprise me why so many idiots got into computer security, but since it is so complex and easy to bullshit, and only a qualified person can tell that they dont know what they are talking about, that it actually ISNT a surprise. And if they make sure nobody around them is competant, then nobody will even know they have been hacked.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
...three components: Security Stack, Life-Cycle Stack, and Business Stack. Sounds like a good way to have respective officers of a company plan for security, CTO handle security, CIO handle life-cycle, and CEO handle the business.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
For instance I know a fellow at a large financial institution who put 5 people in prison in 2001. These aren't kiddies or Mitnicks, these are people who've actively targetted this business and tried to break in. Naturally the security geeks mostly lose sleep over the ones they fear they didn't catch / observe.
Kiddies, worms, and all the forms of low-level noise that are part of the modern net aren't the problem. If you're successfully hit by a worm then basically you don't care enough to bother to put defenses in place because the worms usually follow the vulnerability disclosures by months, not hours or days.
If you have assets that are worth protecting then the first step in securing is to assess the cost of being rooted, and determining a cost-effective approach to mitigating attacks.
Usually this means 'defense in depth', e.g. planning and ensuring that an attacker's reconnasance will set off the alarms allowing you to mitigate before an *effective* attack is started.
My $0.02, anyone relying on a *firewall* to protect their assets has already lost the game. A serious perimiter defense probably includes a carefully secured firewall, network IDS, and host/configuration IDS/configuration management, just for starters. As with all engineering tasks, care in design directly translates to both the effectiveness and the cost-effectiveness of the results.
This book sounds like a positive step in communicating the knowlege of how this is done.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
:(
I tried to go to that site, but it couldn't be found.
Careful Eric, the acronym "MCSP" could be construed as "confusingly similar" to the acronym "MCSE".... plus, Bill Gates purchased the rights to the letters 'M' and 'S' last week, and you used both. Cough up!
/
s/nerd/boss/
s/jock/janitor/
s/baghdad/crater
I remember a time before Microsoft when MCSP meant "More Crappy Software Patches" that Microsoft decided to use the Acronym to mean other very similar things just proves the old proverb: (1) A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, (2) Shit piled any other way would still stink, or (3) MS Bash can be fun for some fact for others . . ..
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.