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On Sat, Dec 15, 2001 at 04:11:13AM -0600, Tina Bird wrote:
> Hi all -- I've spent some of my time on airplanes reading
> the US Dept. of Justice report on Evidence Quality Computer
> Data (the link is on the Web site). I won't go into great
> detail (I'm >loving< European central heating), but the thing
> I found the most interesting is that, despite all the great
> discussions about how easy it is to modify log data,
> >unless< there's reasonable proof that logs have been
> modified, they can be admitted as evidence.
>
> Even better, they're generally held to be reliable evidence
> if the business submitting them collects them as part of
> normal practice and relies upon their information for its
> day-to-day activity.
Exactly.
What's important (from what I'm learning from @Stake, an imho great
security organization) is that the company has what's recognized as a
baseline of what's "normal".
One @stake staffer wrote to me in an e-mail on this exact topic:
--snip--
The first goal any conscious
security professional should achieve is a aperture database. An aperture
into your technical and corporate environment, that is captured by a matrix
of what a corporation has and the "cause" (function) vs. "reaction" for
each of the respective assets. In doing so one has established a baseline
for what normal is. On a network, a high level example would be ...2
exchange mail servers : pop mail protocol (110) , internal and external
uses. For auditing purposes, one can accumulate 12 months of logs filtered
on the mail server that outline only port 110 was used from the following
internal IP addresses over the course of the last year. As you have defined
what is normal, then justified the statement with substantial evidence
(time stamped logs that were protected and uncorrupted {the security
measure put in place to protect the logging server was ample}), now when an
incident happens and one is scrubbing through sanitized data and isolates
an invalid IP address that accessed the mail server on port 22 at the same
time that your router's logs, firewalls, etc...noticed anomalies compared
to your aperture...the information is painted in a different light.
--snip--
Hope this helps a little.
jamie
--
jamie rishaw
sr. wan/unix engineer/ninja // playboy enterprises inc.
[opinions stated are mine, and are not necessarily those of the bunny]
"UNIX was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because
that would also stop them from doing clever things." -- Doug Gwyn
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