[SATLUG] ISSA Geeks Night Out Presentation on "Cyber Terrorism"

[Al Castanoli]

On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 23:06 -0600, tweeks wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 December 2006 04:58, Travis H. wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 01:09:58PM -0600, M itch Thompson wrote:
> > > Yup, saying 'cyber'-anything is marking yourself as clueless.

> > > It's read/heard everywhere on Security Hill.

> Yeah.. and that's sad too..  AFCERT doesn't use the same lame terminology do 
> they? 

> When CERT started calling their alerts "Cyber Security Alerts".. I felt like I 
> was watching some Saturday morning hacker cartoon... that's when I stopped 
> following them.  Now they're just a half baked bunch of re-broadcasters 
> anyway.  They don't even distribute their signing key on public key 
> servers... Back in the day (when they were still run by security gurus) we 
> needed them.  Now that all the vendors publish their own alerts, and we have 
> the CVE... the world IS a safer place.  

> Cert can "# : > cyber-alerts" for all I care..

There's been  a concerted effort to get away from terminologies like
information warfare and cyber security in the mainstream military, with
the global name "information assurance" taking over as a better
reflection of what we're actually doing with machinery and data.
There's a lot more to providing computing services to the warfighter
than just protecting it against enemy attack.

That said, it's still a constant struggle to try to stay ahead of the
malicious hackers out there, when it would be a lot more comfortable to
just react to changing scenarios, by following the DoD's system of
Information Assurance Vulnerability Assessments, the current
nomenclature for "cyber security alerts" and other bulletins, but simply
relying on best practices always seemed a reactive stance to me.

One thing that Open Source Software does for us is give us a chance to
really know what our code is doing in a program, rather than blindly
waiting around for a vendor to fess up to security bugs.  We system
administrators need to work closely with our network engineers to ensure
only needed ports are available, and that there aren't too many
convenient holes in our firewalls that could be eliminated through more
careful systems design and buildout. This is especially true now that
China is taking a more offensive stance on systems and network
security. 

Al Castanoli, retired military information systems security officer