Tag Archives: infosec best practices

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Even good security rules need to grow

security rules help keep hackers out

Although Linux systems are by-and-large more secure than many other systems, they still need to be administered intelligently. Stupid configurations often lead to unfortunate results. According to Akamai: “As the number of Linux environments has grown, the potential opportunity and rewards for criminals has also grown”. As part of the IT best practices project, I’ve recently added a rule which disallows password authentication over ssh. This blog post explains this, and why people who manage Linux systems should care.

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Ohio LinuxFest Assimilation Presentations

Ohio LinuxFest logo

Last weekend, I had the honor of giving the opening keynote on Friday at the 2015 Ohio LinuxFest and a session presentation on the Assimilation project the next day. Both talks were very well-received, but the reception the Assimilation project talk received from the standing-room audience was extraordinary. So it seems good to give a summary of the talk and why I think they resonated so strongly to it.

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Security: Automate or Die!

Automate or die!

Today’s blog post is about the imperative, absolute necessity for automation in cybersecurity. Those of you who read this blog regularly will note that this has been the theme for a while – with three recent articles about automation and one on the IT best practices project (which is all about automation). In this article we talk about why to automate cybersecurity, what to automate and how to automate cybersecurity.

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Security Automation at OSCON on Thursday July 23rd!

OSCON 2015 Logo - Security Automation talk

One of the key things that make DevOps deployments possible is more automation to make things more reliable. These tools include things like Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, and even tools like Hubot, and concepts like Infrastructure as Code, Test Automation, and Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and ChatOps. These tools have changed the face of system administration in the last decade. Unfortunately, security automation has lagged significantly behind the DevOps movement.

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Eating the Security Compliance Elephant

How to eat an elephant? One bite at a time

Getting your organization into security compliance is a lot like eating an elephant. It’s a daunting task, but there’s really not much you can do but eat it one bite at a time. A recent Verizon survey indicated that 80% of all organizations surveyed indicated they have trouble staying in compliance. For these organizations, they get to eat that elephant again and again – and worse yet, under the critical eye of an auditor. Once you eaten the elephant, you don’t want it to become an annual event.

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Announcing the IT Best Practices Community

Cybersecurity best practices community

Computer security is problematic today, is expected to get worse for years to come. The security field is widely acknowledged to be suffering from a shortage of qualified security experts. Many people believe that significant improvements in automation are the only way to address this growing problem. Compared to the level of automation that system management has experienced in recent years, security has been estimated to be at least a decade behind.

Our IT Best Practices community was created to help support security automation efforts. We aim to collect, categorize and curate mechanically-verifiable best practices for servers, services and networking, in support of the idea of “best practices as code”.