Hacker Guard

Continuous monitoring of baselines is the 2nd principle learning objective of SANS Hacker Guard. Looking to justify investing in continuous monitoring processes? Federal Computing Week just published a great discussion by industry leaders on why it is crucial to set up programs which allow operations and security professionals at all levels to view deviations from baselines. Every system changes; the addition of a user, a system upgrade or patch, new functionality. But have changes been made to a system that were not authorized? Once a baseline has been established, there are two ways to find out if unauthorized changes have been made: Continuous monitoring of baselines or learning about the change through a breach, and usually that means

This Thursday, May 30, at 1:00 pm EDT, Dr. Eric Cole, SANS Institute Fellow, will discuss the importance of investing in Cyber Security Defense training, in light of last month's Verizon 2013 Breach Investigations Report. Register for this free webcast by clicking here. The report highlights that more than two-thirds of all breaches were due to poorly configured systems and urges organizations to invest in training employees on basic cyber defense techniques. Dr. Cole will highlight the Verizon report recommendation that all organizations commit to learning the

In a revelation you would expect to read in some financial thriller novel, The New York Times reports Bloomberg News acknowledged yesterday their reporters used the company's terminals to monitor when subscribers (315,000 of them) had logged onto the Bloomberg News service terminals and to find out what types of functions, like the news wire, corporate bond trades or an equities index, they had looked at. Bloomberg L.P., founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1982, current Mayor of New York, provides proprietary hardware to over 300,000 financial analysts and government officials worldwide. The terminals are leased for a minimum of $20,000 each annually. Bloomberg L.P. also provides financial information services realtime to these terminals. In addition, the company publishes Bloomberg

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of InfoWorld Security because of their lack of respect for subscriber privacy. So I just couldn't resist commenting on an extremely misleading headline column posted by Roger Grimes yesterday, "Too Many Admins Spoil Your Security". Not faulting Mr. Grimes. His article stresses the basic and inexcusable error in giving all users administrative privileges to every application within an organization. But a casual glance at the headline, which is all most security professionals would give to this article, leaves the impression that System Administrators screw up security, and that the root cause of our security woes is that we have hired too many system admins. Nothing could be further from the truth in most organization, especially small and medium size businesses which

Here is the list of six articles we would like you to review prior to next week's SANS Hacker Guard Training, live in New York, Live in Columbus, OH, and live online: The articles can be found in these HackerGuard posts: 1.Found, Someone Doing Smart Security Work, 2.Why Do so many University Healthcare Systems have breaches, 3.Tarala challenges security pros to pen test their own