Get in touch
2543934363
gsatactical@gmail.com
GLOBAL SECURITY AGENCY (GSA)
GLOBAL SECURITY AGENCY (GSA)
Security and the One Percent: A Thought Exercise in Estimation and Consequences
Richard Bejtlich • October 31, 2020
security 1%
Introduction
A First Cut with FIRST
even if every single US FIRST member represented a publicly traded company
FIRST representation for US publicly traded companies is only 2.5%
Beyond FIRST
estimate that says 75% of publicly traded US companies have sub-par or non-existent security programs.
5.6 million employer firms in the United States in 2016.
This creates a total of 4,000 US organizations with decent security, out of 400,000 that need it. Those 4,000 are the security 1%.
40 US security teams that qualify as global leaders and innovators
These 40 are the US .01%.
that US group of 400 is the .1%.
Sanity Check: A Few Statistics
Accenture Security Third Annual State of Cyber Resilience Report
PWC Global Digital Trust Insights Report
DBIR
DBIR
Security and the One Percent
These are the 1%
If those are the 1%, it means that the 99% are not included in these discussions.
mean nothing, or almost nothing to those 99% of organizations that do not have security capabilities
An Analogy: Personal Finance
The Consequences of the Security One Percent
The consequence of the existence and mindshare dominance of the security 1% is that the strategies and tactics they employ may work for the 1%
, but not the 99%.
methods that the security 1% use to defend themselves are irrelevant at best to the 99%, and damaging at worst to the 99%.
They end up simply being victims when actual intruders use PESTs to pillage the 99%'s assets.
Conclusion
the benefits of certain activities that may accrue to the 1% may be, and likely are, irrelevant and/or damaging to the 99%.
I challenge the security 1% to first recognize their elite status, and second, to think how their beliefs and actions affect the 99% -- especially for the worse.
The new season is a great reason to make and keep resolutions. Whether it’s eating right or cleaning out the garage, here are some tips for making and keeping resolutions.
There are so many good reasons to communicate with site visitors. Tell them about sales and new products or update them with tips and information.
Write about something you know. If you don’t know much about a specific topic that will interest your readers, invite an expert to write about it.
Recently, I had the privilege to write a detailed analysis of CVE-2023-34362, which is series of several vulnerabilities in the MOVEit file transfer application that lead to remote code execution. One of the several vulnerabilities involved an ISAPI module - specifically, the MoveITISAPI.dll ISAPI extension. One of the many vulnerabilities that comprised the MOVEit RCE was a header-injection issue, where the ISAPI application parsed headers differently than the .net application. This point is going to dig into how to analyze and reverse engineer an ISAPI-based service! This wasn’t the first time in the recent past I’d had to work on something written as an ISAPI module, and each time I feel like I have to start over and remember how it’s supposed to work. This time, I thought I’d combine my hastily-scrawled notes with some Googling, and try to write something that I (and others) can use in the future. As such, this will be a quick intro to ISAPI applications from the angle that matters to me - how to reverse engineer and debug them! I want to preface this with: I’m not a Windows developer, and I’ve never run an IIS server on purpose. That means that I am approaching this with brute-force ignorance! I don’t have a lot of background context nor do I know the correct terminology for a lot of this stuff. Instead, I’m going to treat these are typical DLLs from typical applications, and approach them as such.
Cybersecurity is a social and policy problem, not a scientific or technical problem. Cybersecurity is also a wicked problem. In a landmark 1973 article, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning , urban planners Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber described wicked problems in these terms:
MITRE ATT&CK
disturbing story today
Google Books
#GSASECURITY
3416, 13th Street Suite #201, Washington, DC, 20032
www.gsasecurity.org
(254) 393-4563