My First Book is 20 Years Old Today

On this day in 2004, Addison-Wesley/Pearson published my first book, The Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Beyond Intrusion Detection.

This post from 2017 explains the differences between my first four books and why I wrote Tao.

Today, I'm always thrilled when I hear that someone found my books useful.

I am done writing books on security, but I believe the core tactics and strategies in all my books are still relevant. I'm not sure that's a good thing, though. I would have liked to not need the tactics and strategies in my book anymore. "The Cloud," along with so many other developments and approaches, was supposed to have saved us by now.

Consider this statement from a report describing CISA’s red team against a fed agency:

“[A]ttempts to capture forensic data via packet captures occurred directly on the compromised Solaris and Windows hosts, where the red team observed the data being collected and therefore had the opportunity to disrupt collection, tamper with evidence files, and better adapt and evade their defenses.”

This is why you should not rely on EDR, either, for your only understanding of adversary activity. The adversary can shut down or alter your endpoint security tooling. For network security monitoring, you also shouldn’t collect on endpoints. Collect using network taps, or in a pinch, span ports.

There is nothing in this intrusion that would have been a surprise in 2004.

Here is the post I published in 2004 when the first copy showed up on my doorstep.

There's nothing like getting a real copy in your hands, and I cherish that experience!

I will probably revisit this event in 5 years. See you then!

Zeek in Action Videos

This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project . Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on. I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot . Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship . It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition. I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material. In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol