The Cybersecurity Maturity Matrix
Posts by Year
2024
2023
Improving CISA KEV data integrity
tl;dr - Sometimes CISA removes Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog records. It would be awesome if they marked them as withdrawn and/or superseded instead.
When your product becomes a feature
Having spent a few years using, maintaining, and building security products of every conceivable shape and size, it’s become apparent how uniquely risky it is to invest in building cloud[1] security products.
Top initial access techniques from 2019-2022, mapped to ATT&CK
Based on initial access data from dozens of cybersecurity industry reports over the past four years, here’s a visualization of the top five initial access techniques, and how they’ve trended over the years:
Not all attack surface is created equal: Why protecting security controls is critical
Any exposed attack surface can be used by an adversary to gain or maintain access to your environment. Security controls are a uniquely high-risk part of your attack surface, because compromising a security control often provides an adversary with privileged and/or uniquely positioned access to the environment. And evidence shows that adversaries are capitalizing on exposed, vulnerable attack surface.
CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) affecting security controls
Since its inception, I’ve been bullish on the value of the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, along with their periodic analysis of the top exploited vulnerabilities based on the same. The KEV catalog contains a concrete set of trailing indicators that tell you which vulnerabilities should be prioritized for patching or other forms of remediation.
Your security controls are (a huge) part of your attack surface
Security software is just software, subject to all of the same problems as any other type of software. And like so much of the software we find in the enterprise, security software has some predictable characteristics:
Breaking down exposure management
While participating in some industry analyst research, I was asked how I’d walk someone through and connect these concepts. This is a paraphrased version of the talk track (with some visuals based on prior work).
Dave Aitel (and friends) on BlackHat, DEF CON, and infosec culture Permalink
The Vegas security conferences used to feel like diving into a river. While yes, you networked and made deals and talked about exploits, you also felt for currents and tried to get a prediction of what the future held. A lot of this was what the talks were about. But you went to booths to see what was selling, or what people thought was selling, at least. But it doesn’t matter anymore what the talks are about. The talks are about everything. There’s a million of them and they cover every possible topic under the sun. And the big corpo booths are all the same. People want to sell you XDR, and what that means for them is a per-seat or per-IP charge. When there’s no differentiation in billing, there’s no differentiation in product.
Google DFIQ: Open source building blocks for IR playbooks Permalink
The DFIQ project (GitHub, website) is an open source collection of questions that analysts should ask during certain types of investigations. There’s a simple tagging system that allows a unique question to be associated with platforms, primitives like file or network knowledge, and of course MITRE ATT&CK techniques. Questions are used in the context of scenarios, which are effectively types of incidents.
Exposure management via CISA’s Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities Permalink
This is textbook example of the type of input you’d apply to an exposure management process:
Incidents as a measure of cybersecurity progress
Phil Venables published a helpful collection of ways that risk and cybersecurity leaders can share their successes, ideally on an ongoing basis. His working theory, which I believe is correct, is that we’re not great at this. And as a result, many of our peers only hear from us when things go sideways, which leads to a variety of problems.
Roundup of security conference and CFP trackers
A collection of websites and projects that I’ve used in an attempt to track upcoming information security (infosec) or cybersecurity conferences, including call for papers (CFP) deadlines.
Exposure management - Managing assets, attack surface, attack paths, and vulnerabilities with purpose
There are a variety of cybersecurity product categories and activities intended to reduce the likelihood that an adversary finds and successfully exploits a vulnerability, resulting in an intrusion (and ultimately a breach):
Threat modeling templates
In the course of reviewing a number of published threat models, it became apparent that there is not (nor does there need to be) any standard output format, even given the same methodology (e.g., STRIDE).
Threat modeling, the cloud, and shared responsibility
An interesting aspect of cloud-related threat models is that cloud-based threats must take into account shared responsibility models that are specific to each cloud provider and service.
Roundup of threat modeling resources
I don’t know much about threat modeling, except that as long as I’ve been working in cybersecurity, we’ve been asking people about their threat model, telling them to do threat modeling, and in the worst cases using greedy threat models to convince folks that they should prioritize things that they probably should not.
Information asymmetry is the root cause of every breach
Information asymmetry is the root cause of every breach. Your adversary knows something that you do not.
The top initial access vectors in 2022, mapped to ATT&CK
In reviewing security firms’ 2022 threat data, a subset of these include insight into the initial access vectors leveraged most frequently in successful intrusions. This is a summarization of findings based on their reporting.
A company with a formal org chart is a company big enough to have an informal org chart that accurately describes how things actually get done. Permalink
From Byrne Hobart at The Diff, a list of scaling bottlenecks often encountered by startups: Recruiting, decision-making, management, and more.
If you wait until you feel like doing stuff, you’re fucked. Permalink
If there’s an article-length version of Atomic Habits, published years prior to the best-selling book, this might be it.
Observability as a function of your threat model
This model attempts to explain the relationship between visibility, observability, detection, and mitigation, which are closely related and important to understand when implementing any information security or cybersecurity program.
The future of cybersecurity might be insurance
For some time now, I’ve been considering a hypothesis that the future of cybersecurity is some form of vertically integrated set of products, services, and insurance. This won’t represent emerging or niche cybersecurity products and services, but will bring actuarial rigor to identification and measurement of the outcomes that cybersecurity vendors claim to provide, and so it will represent the subset of offerings that provide consistent, provable value (i.e., things that reliably mitigate high impact threats). The primary consumer benefit will be a faster path to implementation of a plenty good enough cybersecurity portfolio for a large percentage of organizations.
Publish your Twitter archive in seconds Permalink
A simple, elegant application from Darius Kazemi (GitHub, Website) that runs locally via your web browser and takes as input:
Incidents: An organizational Swiss Army knife
Incidents may be one of the best measures of maturity, effectiveness, and progress in any highly operational environment, including but not limited to security operations and technology operations (including site reliability engineering, or SRE). However, incident management done right can be an invaluable tool that you can point at virtually any problem- or failure-prone system to make it better.
Visibility, observability, detection, and mitigation in cybersecurity
The concepts of visibility, observability, detection, and mitigation are foundational to cybersecurity–security architecture and detection engineering in particular–and technology operations in general. They’re useful for communicating at almost every level, within technical teams but also to organizational peers and leadership.
An open source catalog of offensive security tools Permalink
From Gwendal Le Coguic (@gwen001 / @gwendallecoguic), offsec.tools is a fairly wide-ranging collection of offensive security tools. At the time of publication, it includes close to 700 tools, though some very popular free tools (e.g., mimikatz, impacket) are missing, and the project’s appetite for cataloging commericial tools (e.g., Pegasus, FinFisher, etc.) is unclear.
Roundup of commercial spyware, digitial forensics technology use by governments Permalink
From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
Simple, measurable ATT&CK testing with Atomic Red Team
This Google Sheets template aims to make it easy to perform simple, measurable testing of MITRE ATT&CK techniques using Atomic Red Team or an adversary emulation solution of your choosing.
The most prolific ransomware groups in 2022
It’s 2023 and security firms are starting to release findings from 2022 threat data, notably their lists of the most active, impactful ransomware groups.
Incidents as a measure of cybersecurity progress Permalink
Phil Venables published a helpful collection of ways that risk and cybersecurity leaders can share their successes, ideally on an ongoing basis. His working theory, which I believe is correct, is that we’re not great at this. And as a result, many of our peers only hear from us when things go sideways, which leads to a variety of problems.
2022
LastPass: The breach that keeps on giving Permalink
LastPass was breached in August, and has since updated their breach disclosure several times, each update just a little bit worse and more concerning than the last. Unfortunately, for a business with a large consumer customer base, it’s almost impossible to use these disclosures to determine whether LastPass should be trusted. For security practitioners, it’s much eeasier:
The Open Source Security Index Permalink
The Open Source Security Index tracks the most popular and fastest growing open source security projects on GitHub. This project is the brainchild of Chenxi Wang of Rain Capital fame.