Security Laboratory
Welcome to the Security Laboratory. I'm Stephen Northcutt and like many of you I am a manager and leader with an information technology job. At the SANS Technology Institute, we are always striving to become more skilled and knowledgeable in computer security as well as the people side of the job. The "Security Labratory", for you creative spellers, is an informal set of articles and whitepapers, almost a blog, about security, information technology, and the computer security industry. As we learn more, ponder issues and research content for SANS Security 401 Security Essentials and the GIAC Security Essentials Certification, we will continue to add to this site. Our hope is for this to be a resource for the community and we would love to hear from you. Feel free to drop us a note at stephen@sans.edu.
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Featured Links
- Security West 2008 : May 9 - 16 : San Diego, CA
- Pen Test & Hacking Summit : May 31 - Jun 9 : Las Vegas, NV
- Web App Security Summit : May 31 - June 9 : Las Vegas, NV
- SANSFIRE 2008 : July 22-31 : Washington, DC
- Boston 2008 : Aug 9 - 17 : Boston, MA
- Virginia Beach 2008 : Aug 21 - 29 : Virginia Beach, VA
Security Laboratory: Thought Leaders
Amrit Williams, Chief Technology Officer, BigFix
Created June 30th, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttAmrit Williams, Chief Technology Officer at BigFix, was formerly a research director in the Information Security and Risk Research Practice at Gartner, Inc. He is certainly a security thought leader and if you have not been introduced to him before, we are sure you will find he has some interesting out of the box opinions.
Andrew Hay, Q1 Labs
Created May 13th, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttAndrew Hay, one of the authors of the popular OSSEC Host-Based Intrusion Detection Guide and upcoming Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring book has agreed to be interviewed for the SANS Security Thought Leader series.
Gene Schultz, CTO of High Tower
Created April 4th, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttThe Security Laboratory is pleased to interview Dr. Gene Schultz, one of the most experienced security practitioners in the field.
Tomasz Kojm, original author of ClamAV
Created April 3rd, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttTomasz Kojm is the original author of ClamAV, an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways.
Bill Johnson, CEO TDI
Created April 2nd, 2008
By Stephen NortcuttBill Johnson, CEO TDI, was the first person in the industry, that I am aware of, to sound the clarion call that we might be vulnerable to attacks via the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). That certainly qualifies him as a security thought leader, and we thank him for his time.
What is a Security Thought Leader
Created March 22nd, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttWith the Security Thought Leader project Stephen hopes to introduce you to some really great men and women. A security thought leader can be defined by certain criteria: a person who is recognized by their peers as a thought leader, who passes their information on to help others, who has innovative ideas, and who shares ideas as actionable distilled insights.
Gene Kim, Tripwire
Created March 14th, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttGene Kim is one of the original authors of Tripwire, a software product used to manage configurations and change. Gene is willing to share his thoughts on virtualization with the Security Laboratory thought leadership series, and we certainly thank him for his time!
Kevin Kenan, Managing Director, K2 Digital Defense
Created March 14th, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttImperva and a few other vendors are starting to understand the importance of database security and release product, but Kevin Kenan, Managing Director, K2 Digital Defense picked up on this long ago.
Leigh Purdie, InterSect Alliance, co-founder of Snare
Created March 7th, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttPerhaps, one of the hottest topics in 2008 is log file analysis (who would have guessed). And while the commercial tools are getting a lot of the press, an open source and also commercial tool is ending up on a lot of systems. It is called Snare and Leigh Purdie is the thought leader behind the project. He has been willing to invest the time for a thought leadership interview with the Security Laboratory
Marty Roesch, Sourcefire CEO and Snort creator
Created February 26th, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttI keep thinking about the news reports that Chinese hackers managed to exfiltrate six terabytes of sensitive data from a large number of systems belonging to the Department of Homeland Security in November 2007. It seems like that would be impossible to do without being detected. But, I have to wonder, since the famous Richard Stiennon paper, Intrusion Detection is Dead, organizations have been replacing IDS with IPS, and maybe, just maybe, they think the devices do their job in some kind of "fire and forget" mode. Sourcefire was kind enough to allow me to interview Snort creator and Sourcefire CEO Marty Roesch on this topic.
Dr. Anton Chuvakin, Chief Logging Evangelist with LogLogic
Created January 28th, 2008
Dr. Anton Chuvakin from LogLogic is probably the number one authority on system logging in the world, and his employer is probably the leading vendor for logging, so we appreciate this opportunity to share in his insights.
By Stephen NorthcuttKishore Kumar, CEO of Pari Networks
Created January 23rd, 2008
By Stephen NorthcuttOne of the ongoing research projects in the Security Laboratory is to work with the thought leaders in information security to get an understanding of their vision for our industry. We have recently had the honor of working with Kishore Kumar, CEO of Pari Networks, and we certainly thank him for his time.
Ivan Arce, CTO of Core Security Technologies
Created October 26th, 2007
By Stephen Northcutt
Ivan Arce, Chief Technology Officer of Core Security Technologies, sets the technical direction for the company and is responsible for overseeing the development, testing and deployment of all Core products. He talks with us here about the recent update to their product to include web application testing, the latest web attack techniques, and his security philosophy.Mike Weider, CTO for Watchfire
Updated July 23rd, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttStephen Northcutt interviews Mike Weider, CTO of Watchfire, regarding recent trends in web app vulnerabilities as well as his company's solutions for web application security.
Jeremiah Grossman, Founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security
Created July 12th, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttJeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security, talks with Stephen Northcutt about the state of web application security as well as WhiteHat's approach to website vulnerability assessment and management.
Interview with authors of The Art of Software Security Assessment
Updated July 9th, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttThe Leadership Laboratory recently posted a book review of The Art of Software Security Assessment. The book raises a number of issues that we would love to explore further and the authors, Mark Dowd, John McDonald and Justin Schuh have graciously agreed to an interview. One section was titled Code Auditing and the Development Life Cycle and we used that as the basis of the interview.
Ryan Barnett, Director of Application Security Training at Breach Security, Inc.
Created June 29th, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttRyan Barnett, Director of Application Security Training at Breach Security, Inc. talks with Stephen Northcutt about the current state of web application security.
Dinis Cruz, Director of Advanced Technology, Ounce Labs
Created June 11th, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttDinis Cruz, Director of Advanced Technology for Ounce Labs, talks with Stephen Northcutt about the many facets of OWASP, as well as the important questions that need real answers in order to develop secure web applications.
Brian Chess, Chief Scientist for Fortify Software
Created June 9th, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttBrian Chess, Chief Scientist for Fortify Software, talks with Stephen Northcutt about static analysis and other web application security solutions.
Caleb Sima, CTO for SPI Dynamics
Updated May 29th, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttStephen Northcutt interviews Caleb Sima about the development of Caleb's company, SPI Dynamics, and the increasing need for solutions for web application security.
An Interview with David Hoelzer, author of DAD, a log aggregator
Created May 1st, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttAn interview with David Hoelzer describing DAD, an open source Windows event log and syslog management tool that allows you to aggregate logs from hundreds to thousands of systems in real time.
An Interview with Ron Gula from Tenable about the role of a vulnerability scanner in protecting sensitive information
Created March 22nd, 2007
By Stephen NorthcuttIn a new twist for vulnerability scanners, Nessus can now search for sensitive information like Social Security Numbers and Credit card numbers.
