Re: [logs] most popular reports...?

From: Stephen P. Berry (spb@private)
Date: Fri Aug 20 2004 - 00:35:03 PDT


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Tina Bird writes:

>I mean they give me all these
>sophistiated architectures for building custom alerts based on what I care
>about, and very little in the way of tools that help me quickly identify
>things which are "odd."  Well, hell.  That's not a sufficient improvement
>over the open source tools to make them worth the money...maybe it will be
>soon...

Well, part of this is obviously the heavily-entrenched `signature'
mentality which characterises the (vast) majority of system monitoring/log
analysis/intrusion detection/antivirus/spam handling products today.
Let us imagine that I have just ranted for several paragraphs about this.


Pause for thought:  how many monitoring widgets (system monitors, log
monitors, IDSes, or whatever) allow you to enunciate a risk analysis or
threat model in their configuration?  My contention:  if you can't
enunciate such a thing, then the concept of `anomaly' is almost certainly
poorly defined.

How many organisations have (or are capable of producing) a threat model
or a risk analysis?  How many organisations are out there that
don't even have a formal security/usage policy at all?

My point:  either you tell a widget what is Known Bad (with the assumption
that everything else is Good---or at least Acceptable) or you tell a widget
what is Known Good (with the assumption that everything else is Bad).
In the former case, you can rely on a savvy third party to maintain a
laundry list of les exploites du jour.  In the latter case, you have to
either be able to enunciate a list of Known Good behaviours yourself, or
you're expecting the vendor-supplied widget to accomplish an act of either
psychic or theological significance.




- -spb

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