Brianne Fahey

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Typically Mean Averages

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I wonder if I am a typical security analyst?

But what is typical?  Hard to tell what an average is since for every person near the core of the bell curve, there are quite a few outliers keeping things both challenged and balanced.  If asked to describe the typical security analyst, I would throw out a few generalizations based on what I’ve encountered in my experiences.

A profile performed by DataUsa.io has put together a slick Profile of the Average Security Analyst. The typical analyst experiences a solid salary, strong job growth, highly educated peers, demanding technical skill requirements, and a roughly 75% white 75% male field.

From https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151122/

Sounds awesome. And intimidating.

Everyone has their own reasons for moving to a Security Analyst role. I fit some of the general averages noted above, but not all. Certainly diversity of people bring diversity of thought.  If one of the main tenants of a secure enterprise is “Defense in Depth“, then certainly you should invest energy into building defense by diversity. Perhaps it is wise for both your layers of security and your team resources be deep, diverse, adept, and agile.

I don’t always love difficult people, but I do love challenging work.

I don’t see myself as a typical analyst because I bring differences in thought and approach.  I ask questions. I draw connections. I talk to people in the business. I look for ways to align things. I act with a goal in mind.  I draw it out or write it down and hone it till it works or throw it out and take another path toward the goal. I aim to evolve and improve. When I want to learn about someone I ask them out for a coffee walk or a breakfast.  I sometimes make songs out of the ideas I’m working through or take a doodling break to try to think into a breakthrough.

I do see myself as a typical analyst because I like to make order out of chaos. I want to understand what happened and enact protections. I often feel exhausted after a day with a lot of people interactions.  I easily memorize IP addresses and hostnames while I research events but I don’t always remember the names of my people I just met. I believe that Ex Machina and Black Mirror are equally awesome and terrifying because they’re tangibly realistic.

In this industry, the pace is fiery fast and the challenges are densely packed. The targets move and I’m sure the typical averages will also.

Find a Flow

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If you can see it, you can get to it.

When I think through the parts of an event analysis, I look to put things in order and in perspective on my way from a hypothesis to a conclusion. Putting together a thought outline that works for me was a good excuse to test out LucidChart.

In my example, I start by enumerating the actor’s profile and the activity that generated a signal.  If I can source, trace, and verify the details pulled out of the logs to connect activities to an IP or a piece of hardware or an application or a procedure or an owner, I can work to build out the story and resolve my questions. When the case requires input from an investigation partner like human resources, you’ll have a solid frame of notes and findings to rely on for that discussion.

One of the reasons I chose this scenario as an example is because I believe a successful analysis is a complete analysis. Thorough, of course – to your personal quality level, but not necessarily ending the the proving out of malicious activity. Vetting that activity can be anomalous and still acceptable is a decent outcome.

You don’t have to catch a bad guy to do a good job.

Build a structure that works for you.  Once you establish your flow and create a template, you’ll start to save some time without sacrificing quality. Find your flow and go catch yourself some answers.

Virtually No Room for Ego

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You can’t watch from the sidelines forever…

One of the reasons I’m such a fan of continuous learning is for the perspective it brings. For me, going through a capture the flag (CTF) exercise or packet capture lab is a humbling experience.

From https://behappy.me/poster/every-next-level-of-your-life-will-demand-a-different-y-o-u-1164332

Even if you’re confident in your grasp of the concepts, implementing them is a totally different experience. It reminds you to value people who have skills you don’t. It reminds you that doing something is harder than saying something. It reminds you to teach or show anytime you can to pay back so the help you ask of others. It reminds you that no one does it alone. It reminds you to celebrate small victories.

Last week I wanted to setup a clean Linux distribution virtual machine to enable practicing packet capture and analysis with an operating system different than my host machine. Again, the concepts are understandable, implementing in an environment you’re comfortable with is a challenge, and trying in a less comfortable environment is like writing with your not dominant hand: ugly unless you do it repeatedly.

When you can’t complete your original plan, recalibrate and regroup!

Short story long, I ran into hiccups with my Linux vm install, had to start over twice, and ended up putting hours into what should have been as easy as ‘start program’. Packets practice was an after thought to establishing a solid virtual environment. And I’m left feeling again like I’m learning to tie my shoes with boxing gloves on my hands.

To those who can do the things in my learning list; I commend you for your mastery of trades and topics that don’t come easy to most. I also would like to take you out for a coffee sometime and pick your brain. And when you need a tip about Excel, Process Flow Diagrams, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, text me.

from buffy the vampire slayer by joss whedon

Information Security Writing

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Learn a byte at a time.

About a month into the year, I’ve completed my first planned personal training goals: Chris Sanders’ Applied Network Defense course called Effective Information Security Writing.

This course is absolutely worth the cost!

Write Now, Reference Later

I’m a firm believer in capturing information while you’re attaining it with the goal of ultimately having a polished reference page or standard operating procedure. My process involves creating a lot of short & sweet OneNote pages as things are happening that I can revisit to combine, order, and edit later.

Writing things down is not a popular pastime among my peers. Events come in high volumes and move fast.  Capturing details seems like a luxury. I never regretted having a slick wiki page to reference when I was on-call or entering an incident analysis cold. I figured no one was into using my help pages as much as me until I was contacted via LinkedIn by a colleague from a former job to thank me for writing guides five years earlier for a tool he just inherited without much time to get up to speed.

What worked for me?

The Effective Information Security Course offered a mix of videos, exercises, templates, and online discussion.  I’d recommend it to anyone who is asked to write documentation, even if it is not the exact types of reports this course covers. The course is extremely relevant if you’re already writing reports for pen tests, vulnerability compromise reports, or case notes.

Taking time to see something through another person’s point of view often reveals your own biases and blocks to help you become aware of how you can improve. I learned that the executive summary is typically the last section of a report you write – not the first as I had been doing.  This makes total sense. Get out the long parts first and then condense it down into the highlights.  Seems so obvious but since it was logistically first int he report, it never occurred to me to write it at the end. Simple and impactful.

Completion Note

 

I thrive on courses that are flexible, and that don’t require me to be sitting a a computer the entire duration.  I could take a walk and listen to a few lectures – then settle in at my desk to try the exercises. I finished the course in roughly 10 hours over a month of nights and weekends. I started both EISW and Practical Packet Analysis at about the same time since I knew the latter would require much more attention (and time).  I had no trouble switching back and forth between the two courses while keeping track of the path and the ideas in the lessons.

Find out for yourself!

Check out the course details and consider adding this one to your own personal plan.

EXIF Interview

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I realized what I did immediately.

Upon publishing my previous blog entry and viewing the refreshed page in my browser, one of my plug-ins alerted me to a personal operational security (OPSEC) lapse. I took that picture of my visual training map on my phone and did not bother to check the image for any personal or descriptive information before posting it.

Blog Image with Browser EXIF Viewer

What is my EXIF Telling the World?

I have an EXIF viewer plug-in installed in my browser which shows me available EXIF data for any image I mouse over.  EXIF stands for exchangeable image file format (per the Wikipedia article) and is basically an image standard for digital cameras. EXIF data attached to a digital photo can include quite a lot of information about the camera settings, date and time, and image attributes.

To find out more about the EXIF in my image, I needed to dig into some Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).  I utilized the fantastic OSINT Framework site.

OSINTFramework.com for Research

The OSINT Framework led me to Jeffrey’s Image Metadata Viewer. I entered the URL for the image on my site and took a look at the results.  The results are detailed, and not particularly overwhelming except for the details about the camera itself.

Jeffrey Image Viewer Results

Hiding in Plain Sight

The EXIF data clearly shows that my camera is a Samsung, which you can extrapolate is likely a mobile phone.  In fact, if you look up the model and software on Google, it will tell you exactly which model of phone I am using and which version of firmware is installed. This might not seem like much, but if someone was looking to target me, they could certainly customize their exploit to take advantage of something I have exposed that I use.

So What’s the Learning Opportunity?

You can’t remove all EXIF metadata from images, but you certainly can cleanup some of it.  Right click on the image file o your computer and go to the properties menu, then look at the details.

  • See the listing of the data embedded in the image file.
  • Select the link to “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.
Right Click Image to Cleanup EXIF Data

I cleaned up the camera model and software from my file and replaced the initial image in my blog post.

People Are Very Creative

One of the reasons I am aware of EXIF data is because of an online project called Stolen Camera Finder. This site uses uploaded images to create a database of EXIF attributes and then crawls the web to match images taken to the EXIF data.  Let’s say you leave your camera on vacation in Key West, someone picks it up, uses it to take some photos of their friends, and posts them with a location tag to Instagram. When you upload the image EXIF from a photo on your computer taken with your camera, Stolen Camera Finder crawls Instagram and attempts to match the EXIF data.  In some cases, the match can yield location data as well.

 

Stolen Camera Finder Map

Everyone knows that once information is available online, it can and will be used.  I believe there is good in the world and that data can be used to do positive things – like helping people reunite with a lost camera.  It doesn’t take much for someone to use the same information for nefarious purposes though.

Think Before You Click

The oldest advice is the best advice.  This was an excellent reminder for me to be careful with my personal operational security.  For some reminders on ways to protect your online presence, visit the National Cyber Security Alliance’s Stay Safe Online website.

Visualizing a Plan

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Getting Somewhere

When I’m out on a long walk, I orient and motivate myself by saying “if you can see it, you can get to it”. This is particularly useful on a day when all the elements are in your favor, but holds true even when the path is less certain.

Quick, Rough, and Useful

Instead of making resolutions this year, I sketched up a quick visual map of my learning plan. Once everything was out on paper, I could see it was too much to tackle immediately, but by bringing it onto a timeline, I could start to orient and adjust. Duration, priority, and opportunity all play into when and how I can start to address some of the things I want to learn more about.

Visual Map of my Personal Plan

Seeing It is Motivation

I’ve already started acting on it and I’m open to adapting the plan when life and work and time and opportunity start having their impacts. Nothing is set in stone, but I have an idea of where I’m going.  I’m motivated to do something, so let the lessons continue and the skill set evolve.

Weak Connections

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Maybe the source of the problem is not where there is the most noise…

I’ve got an idea percolating but I’m not sure how to model it yet. Apologies up front for not being super-specific, if I can reason out enough pieces of this idea I will hopefully harness it for a paper I’m planning to write later this year.

Some types of attacks have so much human behavior in them that there is no system rule you can put in place to detect.  I was watching some videos from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and I stopped on Kathy Lavinder’s “Power of Weak Connections” on YouTube. She says that it is not always your strong, personal connections in your professional network that help you get news jobs – it is the weak connections with people who know you just enough to help move a resume or an inquiry into the right hands.

There is energy and opportunity in the kinetic connections between two sources. But what if the crux of the opportunity is in the weak connection rather than the strong connection? Does this idea carry into the cyber attacks and fraud detection?

Visualize

I’d like to analyze that data, and see the strengths of the connections.  Does the hypothesis of the weak connection providing a strong vector hold up under the math?  I’m reading about UML and graph databases to look for a way to re-categorize some existing data in order to redraw and reexamine the connections.  It seems soft to compare a fraud or cyber attack to a business process modeling method, although I am certain I will learn something and I’m looking forward to applying some old techniques in a slightly different way.

 

Learning is Living

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There are so many things I want to know…

I regularly scan for stories and use cases that will inspire good work and sharpen what I can offer.  As a result, I read about a lot of tools and theories that I am not familiar with.  Knowledge requires information and growth requires experience.  I’ve always been a fan of the idea of writing down any term or acronym you see or hear in use and if you don’t have a chance to ask about it immediately – Google it later.

Today is always a good day to start.

Personally I keep a running list of things I want to lean more about.  That way when I see an opportunity to pick up an ebook, watch some recorded convention talks on YouTube or take advantage of a training deal, I know where to start. Because the list is sometimes overwhelming, I use a priority system that keeps me focused. Chris Sanders offered a fantastic discount on his Applied Network Defense courses at the end of 2017 and I could not pass up the opportunity to learn from him.  I saw Chris speak at BSides Cincy this summer about Curiosity as a necessary analyst skill. He is intelligent and inspiring.  Plus he knows what the heck he’s doing and I love his philanthropy goals for the Rural Tech Fund.

All this is shaping my early 2018 personal learning plan around these 3 Applied Network Defense Courses:

Some of Chris Sanders’ Applied Network Defense Courses

Keep building yourself.

I know I have a lot to learn.  I keep pushing myself to ask questions, admit when I need to do more research, and listen to the inputs of my friends and colleagues.  Listen to the experts and those willing to teach, like Chris Sanders. It will stoke your curiosity and possibly even inspire you.