The Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Beyond Intrusion Detection (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

"The book you are about to read will arm you with the knowledge you need to defend your network from attackers—both the obvious and the not so obvious....If you are new to network security, don't put this book back on the shelf! This is a great book for beginners and I wish I had access to it many years ago. If you've learned the basics of TCP/IP protocols and run an open source or commercial IDS, you may be asking 'What's next?' If so, this book is for you."

—Ron Gula, founder and CTO, Tenable Network Security, from the Foreword "Richard Bejtlich has a good perspective on Internet security—one that is orderly and practical at the same time. He keeps readers grounded and addresses the fundamentals in an accessible way."

—Marcus Ranum, TruSecure "This book is not about security or network monitoring: It's about both, and in reality these are two aspects of the same problem. You can easily find people who are security experts or network monitors, but this book explains how to master both topics."

—Luca Deri, ntop.org "This book will enable security professionals of all skill sets to improve their understanding of what it takes to set up, maintain, and utilize a successful network intrusion detection strategy."

—Kirby Kuehl, Cisco Systems Every network can be compromised. There are too many systems, offering too many services, running too many flawed applications. No amount of careful coding, patch management, or access control can keep out every attacker. If prevention eventually fails, how do you prepare for the intrusions that will eventually happen? Network security monitoring (NSM) equips security staff to deal with the inevitable consequences of too few resources and too many responsibilities. NSM collects the data needed to generate better assessment, detection, and response processes—resulting in decreased impact from unauthorized activities. In The Tao of Network Security Monitoring, Richard Bejtlich explores the products, people, and processes that implement the NSM model. By focusing on case studies and the application of open source tools, he helps you gain hands-on knowledge of how to better defend networks and how to mitigate damage from security incidents. Inside, you will find in-depth information on the following areas. The NSM operational framework and deployment considerations. How to use a variety of open-source tools—including Sguil, Argus, and Ethereal—to mine network traffic for full content, session, statistical, and alert data. Best practices for conducting emergency NSM in an incident response scenario, evaluating monitoring vendors, and deploying an NSM architecture. Developing and applying knowledge of weapons, tactics, telecommunications, system administration, scripting, and programming for NSM. The best tools for generating arbitrary packets, exploiting flaws, manipulating traffic, and conducting reconnaissance. Whether you are new to network intrusion detection and incident response, or a computer-security veteran, this book will enable you to quickly develop and apply the skills needed to detect, prevent, and respond to new and emerging threats.

From the Back Cover

"The book you are about to read will arm you with the knowledge you need to defend your network from attackers—both the obvious and the not so obvious.... If you are new to network security, don't put this book back on the shelf! This is a great book for beginners and I wish I had access to it many years ago. If you've learned the basics of TCP/IP protocols and run an open source or commercial IDS, you may be asking 'What's next?' If so, this book is for you."

         —Ron Gula, founder and CTO, Tenable Network Security, from the Foreword

"Richard Bejtlich has a good perspective on Internet security—one that is orderly and practical at the same time. He keeps readers grounded and addresses the fundamentals in an accessible way."

         —Marcus Ranum, TruSecure

"This book is not about security or network monitoring: It's about both, and in reality these are two aspects of the same problem. You can easily find people who are security experts or network monitors, but this book explains how to master both topics."

         —Luca Deri, ntop.org

"This book will enable security professionals of all skill sets to improve their understanding of what it takes to set up, maintain, and utilize a successful network intrusion detection strategy."

         —Kirby Kuehl, Cisco Systems

Every network can be compromised. There are too many systems, offering too many services, running too many flawed applications. No amount of careful coding, patch management, or access control can keep out every attacker. If prevention eventually fails, how do you prepare for the intrusions that will eventually happen?

Network security monitoring (NSM) equips security staff to deal with the inevitable consequences of too few resources and too many responsibilities. NSM collects the data needed to generate better assessment, detection, and response processes—resulting in decreased impact from unauthorized activities.

In The Tao of Network Security Monitoring, Richard Bejtlich explores the products, people, and processes that implement the NSM model. By focusing on case studies and the application of open source tools, he helps you gain hands-on knowledge of how to better defend networks and how to mitigate damage from security incidents.

Inside, you will find in-depth information on the following areas.

• The NSM operational framework and deployment considerations.
• How to use a variety of open-source tools—including Sguil, Argus, and Ethereal—to mine network traffic for full content, session, statistical, and alert data.
• Best practices for conducting emergency NSM in an incident response scenario, evaluating monitoring vendors, and deploying an NSM architecture.
• Developing and applying knowledge of weapons, tactics, telecommunications, system administration, scripting, and programming for NSM.
• The best tools for generating arbitrary packets, exploiting flaws, manipulating traffic, and conducting reconnaissance.

Whether you are new to network intrusion detection and incident response, or a computer-security veteran, this book will enable you to quickly develop and apply the skills needed to detect, prevent, and respond to new and emerging threats.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 832 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (July 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321246772
• ISBN-13: 978-0321246776
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #146,760 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb and exclusive security book!, August 4, 2004

By	Dr Anton Chuvakin (CA, USA) - See all my reviews

Here is a really cool security book, that made me lose half a nigh sleep when I first got it. Richard Bejtlich "Tao of Network Security Monitoring" ("Tao of NSM") covers the process, tools and analysis techniques for monitoring your network using intrusion detection, session data, traffic statistical information and other data. Here are some of the book highlights.

The book starts from a really exciting and fun background on security, risk and the need to monitor networks and systems. Topics such as the classic "threat x vulnerability x value = risk" formula to threat modeling and limitation of attack prevention technologies are included. A nice thing on the process side is the "assess -> protect -> detect -> respond" loop, that defines a security process for an organization on a high level. Threat analysis material seems to have military origin, but is enlightening for other types of organizations as well.

NSM is introduced as being 'beyond IDS' with some coverage on why IDS deployments fail and what else is needed (NSM process and tools, that is).

A great and rarely appreciated idea expressed in the book is that the intruders are often smarter than defenders. It presents a stark contrast to all this "staying ahead of the hackers", which makes no sense in many cases as the attackers are in fact far ahead. NSM approach will indeed work against the advanced attackers, albeit a high resource cost to the defending organization. Such 'worst case' scenario preparations are extremely rare in other security books. Detecting such intruder is covered during their five phases of compromise (from reconnaissance to using/abusing the system).

Another gem is an idea of a "defensible network"; not 'secure' or 'protected', but defensible. 'Defensible network' can be watched, is configured to limit possible intruder actions, can be kept up to date and runs only the minimum necessary services, that assures that if bad things happen there, they can be handled effectively.

I also liked how the tools are covered in the book. It is not a tool manual rephrased, but rather the whole tool use context related to the rest of the NSM. While the paradigm 'products perform collection, people perform analysis' might be faulty as the products are getting smarter, having training analysts still is one of the best investments in security. On the process side, the book covers complete analyst training. People are indeed the critical component of NSM, since most of the decision-making relies on trained analysts and their investigation, classification and escalation of alerts.

A chapter on netflow and other types of session/connectivity data presents considerable interest to those monitoring networks. Example case studies show how such data helped identify intrusion action that did not directly product IDS alerts. Same applies to traffic visualization and statistical tools that enrich the IDS data and can sometimes provide early anomaly indications as well.

Of course, NSM event-driven analysis is centered on Sguil - a new GUI frontend to NIDS, session and other context data, facilitating easy and effective event classification and escalation (if needed).

Emergency NSM vs ongoing monitoring NSM procedures are also covered in the book. Even if the organization does not maintain an ongoing security monitoring program, it can still benefit from NSM that is deployed after a suspected intrusion.

Attacks against NSM processes and technologies also fill dedicated section. Such attacks include intruder tools as well as attacks against the human (such overwhelming the analysts) and process components of the NSM.

Overall, the book is a required reading for any security professional and those wishing to become one. It helps to broaden the horizons of seasoned professionals as well as educate the beginners in monitoring techniques. While value of NSM as an approach can be debated in modern organizations where tuned sensors and skilled analysts are an exception rather than the rule, the book is a superb security resource even for those who do not choose to implement NSM at the moment.

Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH is a Senior Security Analyst with a major security information management company. He is the author of the book "Security Warrior" (O'Reilly, 2004) and a contributor to "Known Your Enemy II (AWL, 2004). His areas of infosec expertise include intrusion detection, UNIX security, forensics, honeypots, etc. In his spare time, he maintains his security portal http://www.info-secure.org

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent and comprehensive security book, November 12, 2004

By	Johannes Faustus - See all my reviews

Richard Bejtlich hits one out of the park with this terrific book. In one stroke, he moves the art and science of intrusion detection out of the little leagues and into the majors. If you've already run through articles and books with advice like "just load SNORT and start tuning", this book will shift you to an all-star level in which thousands of machines across enterprise networks can be monitored and protected.

Network security monitoring (NSM) is the discipline of collecting and interpreting detailed network traffic to find and foil attackers. Although it may seem like Intrusion Detection (and IDSs), the relationship between IDSs and NSM is like that between Bonzo the chimp and King Kong. Almost anybody could handle a chimp for a few hours - or you'd think so from watching the movies - but bringing King Kong into your neighborhood means you really have to know what you're doing. He'll take a lot of feeding and special care. On the other hand, he does much more than Bonzo can to protect your assets. Network security monitoring is the King Kong of intrusion detection techniques.

The author presents detailed information on a large variety of network traffic capture and analysis tools, techniques, and topologies. Nearly all are public domain and open source. The few exceptions are tools specialized for industry-dominating Cisco and its proprietary formats and protocols. A few hours on the Internet with this book in hand can give you just about all the tools needed to follow his examples and to build your own network security monitoring environment.

Basic network activity capture is addressed through packages like the fundamental libpcap libraries, and the tools Tcpdump, Tethereal, Ethereal, and Snort (in its packet-capture mode). Tools for converting, combining, and subsetting captured data receive equal attention, with working examples based on editcap, mergecap, tcpslice, the Berkeley packet filter (BPF) language, tcpflow, ngrep and others. GUI tools are touched on as well, including EtherApe and NetDude. For the more advanced topic of session data or "flow" capture (using the Cisco NetFlow data format), there are equally-detailed discussions of the Flow-Tools package, the Argus analysis tools, tcptrace, and others.

Statistical reporting and analysis gets a chapter, while alert processing (the classic IDS functions of Snort) get two, covering Bro, Prelude, and Sguil. (Although the book mentions Snort briefly, it assumes you have access to sufficient information to load and use Snort without assistance.) Much of the remainder of the book addresses the practical issues of installing, operating, and administering network security monitoring in the environment of an enterprise or Internet service provider.

It's refreshing that the software tools are not just mentioned, they are shown in operation in several scenarios each. The reader can see why they are important to the craft of network security monitoring, and can follow the examples on their own computer once the tools are installed. The author's style is not quite a tutorial, but it's easy to learn from him.

Most striking, perhaps, is the author's focus on completely professional installation and operation of this sensitive security function. He talks about network topologies and their effect on sensor placement. He provides alternative designs for the collection of data and for its analysis, usually on separate workstations. His stated experience is on large and very busy networks, so he addresses some difficult techniques (such as merging data from separate sensors to simulate a real-time data flow on a single machine) that are valuable and often mandatory in distributed enterprises. At the same time, his advice supports smaller networks and more limited security goals - you just have to pick and choose the items you need from the very large smorgasbord he presents.

So impressive is the technical detail, you could forgive it for being less than polished. But the writer is not just competent, he is entertaining and enjoyable to read. Between Bejtlich's skills and those of the editors, this book has no bizarre jumps of topic, no dead space, none of the clanging infelicities and groaners that haunt most of the technical books we read each month.

We should be clear about this book's audience: it is not an executive overview or a manager's guide. This is a manual for practitioners. It is pitched toward those who are comfortable purging a desktop machine and converting it into a single-purpose network sensor, those who can download source code and compile tools in multiple operating systems, those who will find it worthwhile to put their hands on and their hearts into a challenging and open-ended endeavor. But for those whom it suits, this will be an indispensable guide, the complete play-book of a fascinating new security specialty.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book - covers topic in detail, January 19, 2005

By	James E. Affeld (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a great book. With most geek books, I browse and grab what I need. With this one, I even read the apendices!

At first, the author's tone put me off. He spends the introductory chapters talking about the "Way" of Network Security Monitoring, (capitalized) and how it's much better than other approaches. It felt a little like, "My Burping Crane Kung-Fu will defeat your Shining Fist techniques!" I really didn't see much difference between what he was talking about and other approaches. I admit to being much newer to this discipline than the author, and he has an impressive appendix on the intellectual history of intrusion detection (uncapitalized). So it may be that the lessons he advocates have already been internalized; my exposure may have been to a field that has already moved up to his standard. But I have a hard time imagining that intrusion analysts have ever been satisfied with a single approach with no correlation. As I understand what he means by upper-case NSM, it's basically the efficient use of multiple techniques to detect intrusions. I can't see trying to argue the contrary position.

Ah, but then we get to the good stuff. He goes through the major types of indicators and the means of reviewing them. He covers the use of a number of important tools, but doesn't rehash what is better covered elsewhere. For example, he doesn't bother covering Snort, because there are plenty of books on Snort already. If you are reading the book, it's almost a certainty that you are familiar with Snort. Good call to skip over that. Instead, he covers some other tools that might be useful in the same area. He also refers to tons of other books. I made a lengthy wish-list based on his recommendations and they've been good. (He also reviews exhaustively here on Amazon). So this book is like the first stone in an avalanche- it triggers the acquisition of many other books.

The book provided many 'light bulb' moments. For example, he talks about giving up on source-based focus. In a world where a DDoS attack is currently using 23,000 separate bots, we may exhaust our resources tracking low-value drones. So focus on the targets they are after: light-bulb! In spite of my earlier resistance, I was soon going through it as eagerly as I did with the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels. It's fun to read such clear, authoritative writing.

One quibble - he trashes the SANS intrusion detection course, which I took and thought was terrific. He has taught the class, and considered the course material out of date. Maybe they have updated, but his book didn't contradict anything in the course as I took it 1.5 years ago.