Why Collect Full Content Data?

I recently received the following via email: I am writing a SANS Gold paper on a custom full packet capture system using Linux and tcpdump. It is for the GSEC Certification, so my intent is to cover the reasons why to do full packet capture and the basic set up of a system (information that wasn't readily available when setting my system up)... I am already referencing The Tao of Network Security Monitoring. These are the questions that I came...

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Spectrum of State Responsibility

"Attribution" for digital attacks and incidents is a hot topic right now. I wanted to point readers to this great paper by Jason Healey at the Atlantic Council titled Beyond Attribution: Seeking National Responsibility in Cyberspace. ACUS published the report in February, but I'm not hearing anyone using the terms described therein. Probably my favorite aspect of the paper is the chart pictured at left. It offers a taxonomy for describing state...

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Recommended: The Great Courses "Art of War" Class

I recently purchased and listened to an audio course titled The Art of War (TAOW) by Prof Andrew R. Wilson and published by The Great Courses. From the first few minutes I knew this series of six 30 minute lessons was going to be great. For example, did you know that "Sun Tzu" didn't write "The Art of War?" An anonymous author wrote the book in the 4th century BC, based on Sun Tzu's lessons from his time in the 6th century BC. Also, "The Art of War"...

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Commander's Reading List

Last month a squadron commander asked me to recommend books for his commander's reading list. After some reflection I offer the following. I've divided the list into two sections: technical and nontechnical. My hope for the technical books is to share a little bit of technical insight with the commander's intended audience, while not overwhelming them. The plan for the nontechnical items is to share some perspective on history, policy, and contemporary...

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Do Devs Care About Java (In)Security?

In September InformationWeek published an article titled Java Still Not Safe, Security Experts Say. From that article by Matthew J. Schwartz: Is Java 7 currently safe to use? Last week, Oracle released emergency updates to fix zero-day vulnerabilities in Java 7 and Java 6. But in the case of the Java 7 fix, the new version allows an existing flaw--spotted by security researchers and disclosed to Oracle earlier this year--to be exploited to bypass...

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