Next Steps in Security – What is New AND Good?

What can we use that is good for us that is not being done today?

Remember that the hacker is designing new threats every day trying to reverse engineer the technology you are using and trying to attack and defeat your defenses with these new methods.

 

So why am i bringing up a Higgins boat now?

higgins-boat_2

Because as militaryfactory.com¹ mentions the LCVP (Landing craft Vehicle Personnel) was not in its final configuration in the picture until the war started and the marines and navy wanted an assault craft  yesterday.

So what did they have to do is to redesign the 1930’s design into the successful design above. The initial design required for people(marines) to jump over the sides not out a ramp in front.  This can be a disaster in a hot(shooting) landing zone.

I bring this up to get you to think like you need to redesign your network defenses into NEW ways. Don’t stay static, at least update your hardware and software to new devices.

Updating your firmware is important too.  Today  I increased Internet speed for someone on AT&T Uverse, one of the items the tech talked about is that sometimes there are 2-4 firmware upgrades (depending on what device you have and whether you allowed an upgrade in the past). This firmware upgrade allowed me to configure a PSK2  wifi encryption where I could not have that before.

 

So increasing speed forced AT&T to download new firmware which happens to have the capability to be more secure as well.  Who would have thought that? And it is not even an option as far as technical specs.  The likely reason is that it depends on the state of the hardware on premise. Still it would have been nice to have known this, as this change would have been done earlier.

Personally as far as WW2 on the fly changes go my favorite one is the hedgehog cutters. Unfortunately when the Allies were on the beaches and tried to move inland they bumped into high “hedges” which were dense tall brush undergrowth and was near impossible for troops and even tanks to go through. But an ingenious Sergeant (Curtis Culin)²  was able to outfit a Sherman Tank with the modified Czech surplus beach beams.  eventually 500 were assembled before a major offensive (Operation Cobra)  which allowed Patton to run around all over France.   The hedgehog cutter (also called the Rhino) is the ultimate in battlefield “make it work ” thinking. They used steel that was available to them at first, only after a couple proved their value did the commanders order hundreds of tanks to be modified as well.

hedgehogcutter-rhino

The key for me is the offense team can take stuff that is “lying around” and design a new way to fix a problem.

 

So how do we stay ahead of these wily hackers? That is the real question.

We have to have our own red (attack ) team which tries to also create new tools to bypass our defenses.

I knew someone with a Palo Alto firewall which happens to be one of the better NGFW’s (Next Generation FireWall) out there.

A security researcher  reverse engineered one of the smaller Palo Alto machines (PA-500). One of my posts from April 4th³ has more details, but the same situation occurs.

 

I will come back to this topic in the future, as the general concept is not going away, we have to keep up with changes and have to try to make tools to help us run more efficiently.

Contact me so I can help you understand with some real world examples (cant go into details).

 

 

  1. http://www.militaryfactory.com/ships/detail.asp?ship_id=Higgins-Boat-LCVP
  2. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ac8_1411492104
  3. http://oversitesentry.com/i-have-next-gen-firewall-safe-now-right/

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