SANS Technology Institute - Security Thought Leaders

Chris gives us his vision on the current state of log and event management as well as some specifics about LogRhythm.

John Pirc from IBM's Network Security Solutions has agreed to be interviewed by the Securitylab; we certainly thank him for giving us his time to discuss security and the Intelligent Network.

We asked Leigh Purdie if he would give us an update on Snare and log analysis, as a follow to our interview with him in March, 2008, and we certainly thank him for his time.

At larger conferences, the SANS Institute has a vendor show, and I like to attend to find out about new companies and new technology. There was a vendor at our last show in Las Vegas, Secure64. I had never heard of them, so I wandered over and we had a great chat. They are a DNSSEC vendor who sells a product based on the HP Itanium architecture. The more they talked, the more I learned about an incredible guy, a security thought leader named Bill Worley, so please let me introduce you to Bill.

One of the important concepts that we want to explore in security thought leadership is the idea of group or team thought leadership. And so we are looking for examples of teams that exhibited security thought leadership. Doug Brown, former Manager of Security Resources, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was on a team that exhibits many of the characteristics of security thought leadership.

Amrit 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, 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.

The Security Laboratory is pleased to interview Dr. Gene Schultz, one of the most experienced security practitioners in the field.

Tomasz 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, 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.

Gene 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!

Imperva 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.

Perhaps, 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

I 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 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.

One 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.

The Leadership lab came across an interesting company, Itiva. Their CTO, Dr. Robert Arn, was kind enough to share his time and thoughts with our readers, and we certainly thank him for his time.

Charles Edge talks with Stephen Northcutt about security issues in the Mac world; even though the core OS is pretty safe, there are vulnerabilities that every Mac user should be aware of.

Stephen 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.

The 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.