SexyDefense Gets Real
As some of you know by now, the recent focus of my research has been defense. After years of dealing almost exclusively with offensive research, I realized that we have been doing an injustice to ourselves as professionals. After all, we eventually get to help organizations protect themselves (having the mindset that the best way to learn defense is to study the offensive techniques), but nevertheless, when examining how organizations practice defense one has a feeling of missing something. For far too long the practice (and art?) of defense has…
Malware Doesn’t Care About Your Disclosure Policy, But You Better Have One Anyway
All over the world, things are changing in ICS security—we are now in the spotlight and the only way forward is, well, forward. Consequently, I’m doing more reading than ever to keep up with technical issues, global incidents, and frameworks and policies that will ensure the security of our future. From a security researcher’s perspective, one exciting development is that .gov is starting to understand the need for disclosure in some cases. They have found that by giving companies lead time to implement fixes, they often get stonewalled for months…
Thoughts on FIRST Conference 2012
I recently had the opportunity to attend the FIRST Conference in Malta and meet Computer Emergency Response Teams from around the world. Some of these teams and I have been working together to reduce the internet exposure of Industrial Control Systems, and I met new teams who are interested in the data I share. For those of you who do not work with CERTs, FIRST is the glue that holds together the international collaborative efforts of these teams—they serve as both an organization that makes trusted introductions, and vets new…
Thoughts on AppSecDC 2012
The first week of April brought another edition of AppSecDC to Washington, D.C., but this year people from two different worlds came to the same conference: Web security and Industrial Control Systems security. Of course, at the device level this convergence happened a long time ago if we take into account that almost every modern PLC includes at least a web server, among other things. I was presenting Real-world Backdoors in Industrial Devices on the Critical Infrastructure track, which included really exciting topics from well-known researchers including:…