CERT Blogs

This index page displays the ten most recent entries across all of our blogs. The links to the right allow you to subscribe to this master list, search all of the blogs, or visit an individual blog.

Clicking a link for an entry takes you to an individual blog. From there, you can subscribe to that blog and explore more information about that area of work.

The Insider Threat Center at CERT recently released a new insider threat control that is specifically designed to detect the presence of a malicious insider based on key indicators to Information Technology (IT) sabotage activity.  This blog post provides an overview of the control and the rationale behind its development.  For more details describing the development of the control and the statistical analysis used and applied in this signature please refer to the technical report: http://www.cert.org/archive/pdf/SIEM-Control.pdf

Hello this is Jonathan Spring. Recently, Leigh Metcalf and I uncovered some interesting results in our continuing work on properties of the Domain Name System (DNS). Our work involves an unconventional use of CNAME (canonical name) records.  Besides an IP address, CNAME records are the only other location a domain may have in the DNS. Instead of an IP address, a CNAME record is a redirection or alias service that points to another name. 

Hello, this is Randy Trzeciak, technical team lead for the Insider Threat Research Team at the CERT^® Insider Threat Center. This blog post is intended to serve as a reminder to organizations about the impact that an organization’s actions can have on employees. Additionally, I want you to ask yourself the following question, what are you doing to manage employee expectations during negative workplace events?

The mission of the CERT^® Insider Threat Lab, sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security Federal Network Security Branch, is to create new technical controls and standards based on our research, as well as to determine lessons learned from our hands-on work doing assessments, workshops, and working with technical security practitioners.

Hi, this is George Silowash and recently, I had the opportunity to review our insider threat database looking for a different type of insider threat to the enterprise…paper. Yes, paper. In particular, printouts and devices that allow for extraction of digital information to paper or the management of paper documents. This area is often overlooked in enterprise risk assessments and I thought I would share some information regarding this type of attack.

Recently George Jones, Jonathan Spring, and I attended USENIX Security '11. We hosted an evening Birds of a Feather (BoF) session where we asked a question of some significance to our CERT^® Network Situational Awareness (NetSA) group:

Is Large-Scale Network Security Monitoring Still Worth Effort?

Hi, this is Randy Trzeciak, technical team lead for the Insider Threat Outreach & Transition group at the Insider Threat Center at CERT. Since 2001, our team has been collecting information about malicious insider activity within U.S. organizations. In each of the incidents we have collected, the insider was found guilty in a U.S. court of law.

One of the most damaging ways an insider can compromise an organization is by stealing its intellectual property (IP). An organization cannot underestimate the value of its secrets, product plans, and customer lists. In our recent publication, An Analysis of Technical Observations in Insider Theft of Intellectual Property Cases, we took a critical look at the technical aspects of cases in which insiders who stole IP from their organization. Insiders commit these crimes for various reasons such as for the benefit of another entity, to gain a competitive business advantage, to start a competing organization or firm, or for the personal financial gain. By understanding the specific technical methods that insiders use to steal information, organizations can consider gaps in their network implementation and can identify ways to improve controls that protect their IP.

This entry is part of a series of “deep dives” into insider threat. The previous entry focused on IT sabotage.

Hi, this is Chris King. From our research, we realized that malicious insiders do not all fit into a single category. We found that there are individuals who steal or commit fraud for financial gain, others who steal intellectual property because of a sense of entitlement or to obtain a position with a competitor, and some who want to exact revenge against an organization because they are angry. We noticed a pattern in the ways insiders acted and were able to separate them into three main categories of crime: IT sabotage, theft of intellectual property (IP), and fraud. This update focuses on theft of IP.

A few years ago, I published a blog entry called Signed Java Applet Security: Worse than ActiveX? In that entry, I explained the problems that arise when a vulnerability is discovered in a signed Java applet. Let's see how the Cisco AnyConnect vulnerability is affected.