Book Review: Python And AWS Cookbook

I’ve been playing around with AWS properly for the last couple of months and had mainly been getting myself up to speed with the key security considerations, the console, the various services AWS provides, while playing around with setting up an ELK stack in AWS.

I’ve also been interested in playing around more with Python so figured this would be a good opportunity to combine both and get a better understanding of AWS and Python at the same time.

This book introduces you to the Boto Python interface to AWS and walks you through a series of very simple examples of how to use it.

The book is primarily split into two section; one covering EC2 and the other S3. Both sections cover all the basics that you could look for, including how to enumerate the EC2 instances/S3 buckets in your account, how to loop through regions (if needed), how to create new instances or buckets and how to edit tag, metadata and such. The book also covers some basics of ELBs, security groups and S3 permissions so basically, most of what you’d need to do some basic scripting of EC2 and S3.

The book briefly touches on CloudWatch and SNS but nothing too in-depth, nor does it cover any of the other AWS services Boto current supports (See here for the current list).

A lot of people have criticized this book as only touching the surface of AWS, and that's definitely true.. you can know nothing about Boto at the start and get through this book in around eight hours (probably much less if you know Python beforehand.. which I didn’t). However, at the end you’ll know enough to get and running and can then loop back to either the Boto or AWS documentation to fill in any more gaps.

If you’ve just used the AWS console and haven’t tried you hand at the API, then this is a perfect intro to the nuances that exist with the APIs and ultimately you’ll learn way more about AWS because you’ll start seeing options or constraints in the API calls that you may not even realize exist (or at least I know I did!).

While there’s nothing much here that you can’t get directly from the Boto documentation, I always like following a book along as opposed to jumping around read-me docs so if you’re similar, and looking for a book to kickstart your understanding of Boto and to help you put together some basic scripts for AWS, I really recommend this.

I'd love to see an updated edition of this book, as it was released in 2011 and things around moving so quickly on AWS, it would benefit from a refresh and also some more examples added.

Links:
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Python-AWS-Cookbook-Mitch-Garnaat/dp/144930544X/
Safari https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/python-and-aws/9781449308100/

edX Economics of Cybersecurity Course Review

I've been keeping an eye on the area of economics and information security for around eight years so when I saw this course pop up back in November I signed up immediately for January, despite not really knowing what to expect.

If you work in information security and are a fan of the Freakonomics series of books/podcasts, then the ideas used to analyze info sec in this course will be right up your street so just go and sign up now for the next session!


If you're not sure what on earth economics of information/cyber security is, then have a quick read of this paper and it'll give you a much better intro than I could ever give.

The course itself is the usual style of MOOC with recorded video sessions along with discussion forums, live webinars and some multiple choice questions at the end of each section.

The course material is split over six sections covering the following topics, with each section around an hour in length and with an accompanying webinar of a further hour:

• An introduction to economics in the context of security;
• Measurement of security; 
• Security investment and management: 
• Market failures and 
• Human factors in security.

In terms of content, I thought that the material was a fantastic introduction to a wide range of aspects of economics of security and pretty much spot on for the level of detail I was expecting. I would have loved to see more detail but have to appreciate that it's an introductory course!

I found that based on my existing reading in the area, I was very familiar with the majority of the content in the course, in particularly the areas around the fundamentals of applying economics in security, measuring security, investment and risk management and behavioral heuristics/biases. However, the section on policy interventions and privacy definitely gave me some new insights.

In terms of pre-requisitions for the course, I feel that if you had never done micro economics or had any exposure to the area of economics before, then it'll probably be a bit of a shock to the system on the first week as they very much dive straight in! Because I'd read a lot on the topic, albeit in a completely unstructed way, I was pretty familiar with almost all of the topics covered and with some basic background in economics I was able to keep pace no problems.

I also felt that some of the sections could have had more context set initially to lead people from a traditional, technical information security background in. For example, the human factor section jumps straight into explaining the reasons behind poor decision making by individuals, but doesn't really explain where in information security you'd normally see these kinds of poor decisions being made. For more experienced info sec professionals, they'll immediately understand the context in relation to either risk management decisions or end user opinions, however for more junior people, outlining the examples up front in simple terms would greatly benefit the course.

I was a bit disappointed with the multiple choice questions at the end because when you got answers wrong, there was no way to get prompts as to what the right answers were and you only get the description of what the right answer was when you get the answer right... So in the end I found myself attempting to brute force the answers for a number of questions, just to understand why I go the question wrong!

I really enjoyed it personally as a refresher in the area and also learned some new aspects that I hadn't come across in the areas of market failures and policy intervention and privacy. Also, I'm always a big fan of inter-disciplinary approaches to information security as I find if you stick with just learning from people who come from the same educational/professional background as yourself, it's very easy to become siloed in the way you look at a problem.

Overall, I think that this entire course should be considered mandatory content for any security management type certifications (CISM, etc) as it provides a fantastically unique view on security that if you're working in info sec management, you really need to understand. 

I'd love to see a follow on, more in-depth course form the same lecturers to go into more detail on the topics covered in this corse, look at some practical examples of analysis and review and compare/contrast the different research that has been published in the area of economics of info sec over the past few years. Hopefully that won't be long coming!

edX: https://www.edx.org/course/economics-cybersecurity-delftx-econsec101x

Book Review: Information Security Analytics

I came across this book on Safari during the week and the title definitely caught my eye as I'm always interested to see new material in the area of data analytics and security. Additionally, when I saw that the book was only around 180 pages, I figured this would be a nice easy read and intro to analytics that I could learn a few bits from and potentially recommend to others.

Unfortunately, the book really disappoints in both aspects and while there are one or two good chapters, I can't recommend reading the whole thing or paying full price for it.

The book starts off really well, giving an overview of what the authors mean by security analytics and mention many of the concepts that are, or can be, used to derive meaning out of data, such as statistics, machine learning, regression, text mining, simulations and clustering.

The second and third chapters give an intro to some of the tools of the trade that are most often used, mentioning R, Python, Simulation Software, Hadoop, Mapreduce and NoSQL databases and then work through some practical examples and exercises around the analysis of log file data, covering loading data into Hive, doing fuzzy searching on the data. What was nice in this chapter is that they use freely available data sets so you can easily download the data and follow along.

The fourth chapter moves on to simulations and unfortunately at this point I felt the book went downhill. Seeing as simulations are a new area for me, I was looking forward to learning something really new in this chapter but I felt that there wasn't enough context put around how simulations could be used for security analytics and while a practical example using anti-virus data is used, it really doesn't flow as well from the previous chapter and appeared a bit contrived.

The fifth chapter then seems to revert back to similar content as the third chapter and covers Access Analytics. However, the structure of this chapter is very strange and starts off with a explanation of what VPNs are, the threats around VPN access and then talks a lot about Python, which seems strange to include here for such a short book and really should have been covered in the second chapter on tools. Unfortunately, this entire chapter effectively is simply an example of using Python and doing haversine analysis, which while really cool and definitely worthwhile, shouldn't really be a full chapter on itself.

I have to say that at this point I was pretty much ready to put the book down but figured I'd continue on seeing as there wasn't much left and I'm definitely glad I did as chapter six provides a really nice introduction to text mining and touches on word association, correlation and clustering. This is a really solid chapter that I'd highly recommend people new to the area read.

The last chapter finishes off with a discussion on the importance of utilizing data more and promotes the reader to go and dig more using the techniques outlined in the book.

Overall, while the book starts off well and has one or two good chapters, I really can't recommend people buy this book or read all the chapters. There's definitely good content in here but the structure, focus and level of detail seems to vary dramatically across each of the chapters and there's overlapping areas that should really have been consolidated.

I really couldn't recommend purchasing it at the current price of around €50 and honestly can't see how the publishers could even justify trying to price the book in this bracket.

I'd really love to see a second edition of this where the material is restructured a bit and made to flow better as I think it could really be a great intro to security analytics if this was done and it was priced closer to the €15 price point.

If you have a Safari or other eBook subscription and can read some of the chapters for free then it's definitely worth a quick flick through, especially to read the first three chapters and the chapter on text mining.

Links:
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Information-Security-Analytics-Insights-Anomalies/dp/0128002077/
Safari http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/networking/security/9780128002070

Book Review: Designing and Building A Security Operations Centre

When I first came across this book, I really wasn't sure what level of detail or focus the author would be taking so I'll cover that off straight away. While this book touches on some technical areas, this book is very much focused on the organisational, operational and managerial aspects of building and running SoCs.

If you're looking for a book to tell you what tools to select for a SoC, how to architect them, what types of monitoring and response you should be doing then probably best to look elsewhere.

However, if you are interested in working in a SoC, are currently working in a SoC at a junior level or planning to set up or outsource a SoC and new to the area then I'd definitely recommend you read this book.

The first chapter walks through some basics around the types of operations centres and talks through the key phases in developing a SoC, which the author then uses as the basis for the structure of the book.

The second and third chapters discusses SoC customers, event/alert/incident definitions, SLAs and service catalogs before moving onto the various systems and supporting processes that need to be in place to support a SoC, with a particular focus placed on ticketing systems.

I particularly liked chapters four and five, which give good insight into some potential organisational structures and reporting lines for SOCs, high level roles and key considerations in terms responsibilities, breaking it out into options for smaller and larger SoCs. This chapter alone is worth a read if you're new to SoCs as it'll give a good insight into the kind of resources you'll need and ideas on how these might overlap with your existing team.

Chapter six moves into covering the daily operations that should take place within a SoC. It doesn't go into details on incident response but does highlight the importance of root cause analysis and review documentation after the incident has been resolved and the need for communication plans to be in place. It also highlights some of the key challenges in follow the sun models around duplication of technical resources, inefficient handovers and inconsistent training/knowledge sharing and the positives of such models including local data storage for regulatory reasons and reduced local cultural/language barriers.

Chapter seven covers the importance of training and potential approaches to training your SoC team. I really liked the emphasis that the author placed on this aspect of SoC management but I think this chapter could have been incorporated into the previous chapters around teams and people resources.

Chapter eight touches briefly on metrics but rather than dive into long lists of potential metrics, discusses some of the potential approaches to metrics. The section here on vulnerability prioritisation is interesting but for me felt a little out of place within the overall context of the book.

Chapter nine runs through the threat intelligence that will normally be required within a SoC and covers off some of the publicly available resources along with touching on the types of commercial offerings in the area without diving into any particular vendor's commercial offering.

The last few chapters wrap up with some material on outsourcing that is very much worth a read if you're planing on outsource a SoC or engaging with a MSSP. One really nice aspect is that it contains a list of seventy four questions that to consider when selecting an MSSP. I always like to see guidance like this on the selection process for outsourced service as often there's a huge information asymmetry between clients and vendors in info sec and this guidance can at least help clients ask the right questions.

Overall, for the audience I outlined at the start of the review, this books is well structured and a solid introduction to the managerial aspects of SoCs. I felt it could have been shorted down a bit to make it more concise, but other than that it was an informative read and worthwhile for the right audience.

Links:
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Building-Security-Operations-Center/dp/0128008997/
Safari http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/networking/security/9780128008997

Book Review: The Frugal CISO

I came across The Frugal CISO purely by accident over Christmas as it popped up as a new addition to Safari and as I'm always on the look out for security books that are a little bit different and non-technical, I figured it would be worth a read.

I'm really happy that I did because the Frugal CISO is a really solid book on both information security management and management in general. This is definitely a book I'd recommend to anyone either taking up a leadership position in an info sec team or setting up a new security team in an organisation. For me personally there were a lot of points that resonated me with as I've spent the last year putting in place a new regional security team from scratch for a large multinational and there's definitely some good lessons that I learned along the way that are included in this book!

I do feel that the title of the book doesn't do it justify however, as while the title seems to indicate that this book will be very focused on cost saving, it's really much more than that. This book is more about being a realistic CISO.. and if there wasn't already a book called the Pragmatic CSO, I'd have called it that!

The book starts off on some very interesting points on the stages of maturity for an info sec team. The approach used differs from the usual maturity levels that we often see in info sec books and focuses more on the organisational aspects of maturity covering things like funding and resource allocation, planning intervals, alignment with business strategy and stability of the team.

The next few chapters of the book focus on giving solid management advice in light of the challenges faced in info sec such as reduced budgets, increasing threats, and competition for staff, with particularly good chapters on team management and hiring that any hiring manager should read.

The book then moves onto a few chapters focusing on alternative views of policy definition and security awareness and a good chapter on taking stock of your info sec program and always considered why you're doing what you do and whether it's still necessary.

The final few chapters have some great advice on budgeting, appreciating that what works in one company, may not work in all companies and on being flexible and aiming to engage rather than block the business.

Overall, this book is full of good insights and ideas for info sec managers and while some of the material will be more general management focused, it's definitely a very highly recommended read for anyone in information security management and one that I'll definitely be recommending. I'd also love to see a follow up book that deep dives a bit more into some of the areas around maturity and engaging with the business as while these are oft discussed topics, they rarely get the level of detail that I think a lot of people would benefit from.


Links:
CRC http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781482220070
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/The-Frugal-CISO-Innovation-Approaches/dp/1482220075
Safari http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/networking/security/9781482220070

Book Review: AWS System Administration

First of all I would note that my review of this book is based on the rough cuts edition published on Safari and as such is not a fully final version of the text.

However, even at this stage, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone looking to get started with AWS. While there is huge amounts of material already on the web about AWS, it can be overwhelming for a newbie due to the huge range of services offered by AWS and this book is a create summary and introduction.

The author starts off by introducing the basic concepts around EC2, which is pretty much the first thing everyone with an AWS account looks at. The book touches very briefly on the GUI aspects of the AWS management console but very quickly forgoes this quickly to focus exclusively on how to programatically administer AWS.

The book then starts looking at instances, CloudFormation (a rather neat provisioning tool covering a lot of AWS services) and AMIs, before explaining the fundamentals around securing access with IAM and network security with security groups.

Following this the author then touches on configuration management using Puppet, and then ties all this together by walking through an example setup of a web based application within AWS that utilises the majority of the most common AWS services.

The final few chapters touch on log management, DNS, monitoring and backups, but these chapters at present are much lighter than the others. The focus of these chapters seem to be really about helping the sys admin understand some of the main caveats when considering these activities in AWS, rather than being a detailed discussion on how each can be implemented within AWS. I'm not sure if this is a result of the book not being fully finalised or simply due to the potentially huge scope that would exist if the author tried to cover these topics in more detail.

Throughout the book I particularly liked how the author highlights not only the good points of AWS, but also where there are gaps in the various services and the potential issues that a sys admin may hit when trying to work around there. It's these bits of info that I think differentiate the book from the material you'll get online as obviously sometimes that published material on AWS can be very focused on how everything "just works".

If you're looking for a high level introduction to the fundamentals of AWS system administration, then I'd definitely recommend this book.

Combining this book with a higher level cloud architecture book such as Cloud Architecture Patterns, make for an ideal quick intro to cloud computing and AWS.

I really hope the author goes on to develop a further more advanced book covering some of the other AWS services and more complex use cases within enterprises as I think this would be a great addition to my library!

Links:
Safari: http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/operating-systems-and-server-administration/9781449342562/

Book Review: Measuring and Managing Information Risk

I first came across Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) in around 2007 when I was looking into various risk analysis methods but couldn't find too much about it other than a white paper and a high level Cisco presentation.

Then in 2010, I did my MSc thesis on investigating quantifying information security investment decisions and this led me closer and closer towards FAIR and the approaches used by it such as quantified estimates, subject matter expert calibration and Monte Carlo simulations.

At the time I had a great chat with Jack Jones (one of the authors of this book and original creator of FAIR) and even attended the FAIR Basic Analyst training course delivered by CXOWARE.

However, most people aren't this lucky and while FAIR has been adopted by the Open Group and even has a certification in place with the OpenFAIR program, there hasn't been great material to self study for the exam. So when I heard this book was going to be published, I was really excited.

The book starts off by first explaining what FAIR is, walks through the FAIR model  and explains each variable within the model. The authors highlight some of the changes to the model since the original whitepaper on FAIR and cover why the changes have taken place.

It then moves on to provide a number of different worked scenarios using the FAIR approach, covering discussions on assets, threat communities, threat profiles, scenario building and actual analysis. This is the first time I've seen someone other than myself really walk through some FAIR analysis examples and these are great to see if you've never touched on FAIR before.

The book then shifts tact a little and looks at how controls are viewed from the authors' perspectives; covering asset level controls, variance controls and decision making controls. The sections on variance and decision controls will definitely require a second read before I fully get to grips with the nuances of what the authors were highlighting. However, these chapters bring a level of depth of discussion on controls that I've never seen elsewhere, and something that I think would feed very well into ISACA or other similar groups with a strong control focus.

The book then goes on to cover risk management briefly, and the moves to risk metrics, using the Goal, Question, Metric approach. What I liked particularly about the metrics section is that they didn't simply just list a long number of metrics, but approached is more like a worked example of the approach to defining the metrics. First they look at the goals of risk management, then break these down into sub-goals in order find the questions that match these sub-goals, and finally identify the metrics that you may wish to gather. This chapter also introduces probably the best description of the difference between risk appetite and risk tolerance; comparing risk appetite with the speed limit on a motorway, and risk tolerance the variance around that speed limit in which the police would accept.

What's fantastic is that throughout the book there's a real sense of practical, real world application of this risk analysis approach. There are practical examples of analysis scenarios and even an entire chapter outlying where you can go wrong. This is something that I've often seen lacking other books on information or IT risk analysis, which are often full of theoretical approaches, but which lack any relevant examples and definitely don't outline where you'll have problems. This gives the book a practical credibility that I believe will find favor with info sec professionals who normally would shy away from risk management books.

I would say that the book definitely assumes some prior knowledge in approaches such as Monte Carlo simulations and why you may use them, but if you haven't come across these before, then I'd highly recommend The Failure of Risk Management by Doug Hubbard to get you up to speed.

Overall, this is the book I was looking for on information risk analysis four years ago… and I'm thrilled to see it's finally arrived. Even if you never plan to use FAIR as your risk analysis methodology, there's enough in this book that it will help anyone's critical thinking in relation to information security and I can't recommend it highly enough. Everyone in info sec should read it!


Links:
Elsevier http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780124202313
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Managing-Information-Risk-Approach/dp/0124202314/