Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 23

Announcements

• Two new blog posts have been released titled "Microsoft Patch Tuesday - February 2010 - "From Microsoft with Love" Edition" and Shmoocon 2010 Security Conference.
• A webinar is scheduled for February 25, 2010 titled, "Finding and Stopping Advanced Persistent Threats" where Tenable CEO Ron Gula and Tenable CSO Marcus Ranum will discuss strategies for preventing, finding and eliminating advanced persistent threats in enterprise networks.
• You can provide feedback to this podcast and all of our social media outlets by visiting our discussions forum and adding messages to the "Tenable Social Media" thread. I would love to hear your feedback, questions, comments, and suggestions! I put up a call for ideas on new Nessus videos, so please give us your feedback!
• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions, there are currently 12 open positions listed!
• You can subscribe to the Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes!
• Tenable Tweets - You can find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tenablesecurity where we make various announcements, Nessus plugin statistics, and more!

Interview: Josh Corman

Ron Gula interviews Josh Corman and discusses information asymmetry, compliance and more. Josh is an analysts with the 451Group and recently published a 451 Spotlight (registration required) which describes the evolution of trust between consumers and vendors the security industry has gone through over the past 15 years.

Stories

• Casual Hex and the Failure of Security Awareness Training - We've all heard that end-user security awareness training is an important piece of your security strategy. However, in this article, Larry Pesce throws a dose of reality on this strategy and states that users will ignore the training and become victims of attacks anyway. I do agree that end-user awareness training will do little to stop people from clicking on nasty stuff and is not likely to make them techno-geeks who understand how attacks work. However, this does not mean that it's a lost cause. Effective training will help people identify suspicious emails, know how some of the attacks work, be more resistant to social engineering and teach them what to do once they have become compromised. There is value in this training, and when coupled with some of the other defensive techniques, such as limiting access to Internet services, it can increase the security of your organization. For example, by teaching people about the nasty stuff out there on the Internet, they may be more inclined to accept a more stringent Internet usage policy. Furthermore, by giving up on end-user awareness training you are leaving the user to swim with the sharks when they take the corporate laptop to a coffee shop or browse the web at home.
• Reverse Engineering File Formats - A really neat article from Jeremy Brown on how to reverse engineer a file format. You may think that "reverse engineering" always requires a debugger and staring at hex code for days on end. Jeremy shows us an example of using an application's error messages to figure out the structure of the file format.
• TSA Gets Some Intelligence - Hopefully this comes with training too! I believe that providing intelligence to the TSA is a good thing, but I hope that the government also provides them with training on how to use it to profile passengers. The same is true in your organization's security strategy; it's great to have all of the information about your systems and network, but it's also important to know what to do with it. For example, if you are collecting information from all of your systems' logs but not acting upon it or analyzing it for trends, then you are not recognizing the value of the information.
• Postgres Database Default Password - Another reason why I love OSVDB
- Default passwords are a security hole that can be avoided. We need to educate developers and companies that make software to not build this into their products. Allow users to choose their own passwords! Also, Nessus Plugin 10483 will detect this default password in Postgres.