At the very least, this will apply a ‘many eyes’ to some of the SSL code and so long as the ssh pruning isn’t wholesale slash-and-burn that cutting it back may prove efficacious for two reasons.
Less code can be simpler code, with decreased likelihood of there being a bug due to complexity and interaction.
From the left hand doesn’t know what the right hands is doing department:
Ngair Teow Hin, CEO of SecureAge, noted that smaller companies
tend to be “hard-pressed” to invest or focus on IT-related resources
such as security tools due to the lack of capital. This financial
situation is further worsened by the tightening global and local
economic climates, which has forced SMBs to focus on surviving
above everything else, he added.
Well, lets leave the vested interests of security sales aside for a moment.
I read recently an article about the “IT Doesn’t matter” thread that basically said part of that case was that staying at the bleeding edge of IT did not give enough of a competitive advantage. Considering that most small (and many large) companies don’t fully utilise their resources, don’t fully understand the capabilities of the technology they have, don’t follow good practices (never mind good security), this is all a moot point. Continue reading Tight budgets no excuse for SMBs’ poor security readiness
Last month, this question came up in a discussion forum I’m involved with:
Another challenge to which i want to get an answer to is, do developers
always need Admin rights to perform their testing? Is there not a way to
give them privilege access and yet have them get their work done. I am
afraid that if Admin rights are given, they would download software’s at
the free will and introduce malicious code in the organization.
The short answer is “no”.
The long answer leads to “no” in a roundabout manner.
Skip over his ranting about the definition of “hackers”
This is the meat:
Wewrote the OSSTMM 3 to address these things. We knew that penetration
OSSTMM Logo
testing the way it continued to be marginalized would eventually hurt
security. Yes, the OSSTMM isn’t practical for some because it doesn’t
match the commercial industry security of today. But that’s because the security model today is crazy! And you don’t test crazy with tests
designed to prove crazy. So any penetration testing standard, baseline,
framework, or methodology that focuses on finding and exploiting
vulnerabilities is only perpetuating the one-trick pony problem.
Furthermore it’s also perpetuating security through patchity, a process
that’s so labor intensive to assure homeostasis that nobody could
maintain it indefinitely which is the exact definition of a loser in the
cat and mouse game. So you can be sure it also doesn’t scale at all with
complexity or size.
I’ve been outspoken against Pen Testing for many years, to my clients, at conferences and in my Blog. I’m sure I’ve upset many people but I do believe that the model plays up to the Hollywood idea of a Uberhacker,
produces a whack-a-mole attitude and is a an example of avoidance behaviour, avoiding proper testing and risk management such as incident response good facilities management.
I’ve seen to many “pen testers’ and demos of pen testing that are just plain … STUPID. Unprofessional, unreasonable and pandering to the ignorance of managers.
In the long run the “drama-response” of the classical pen-test approach is unproductive. It teaches management the wrong thing – to respond to drama rather than to set up a good system of governance based on policy, professional staffing, adequate funding and operations based on accepted good principles such as change management.
And worse, it
shows how little faith your management have in the professional capabilities of their own staff, who are the people who should know the system best, and of the auditors who are trained not only in assessing the system but assessing the business impact of the risks associated with a vulnerability
has no guarantees about what collateral damage the outsider had to do to gain root
says nothing about things that are of more importance than any vulnerability, such as your Incident Response procedures
indicates that your management doesn’t understand or make use of a proper development-test-deployment life-cycle
Yes, classical hacker-driven pen testing is more dramatic, in the same way that Hollywood movies are more dramatic. And about as realistic!
