Live from the 20th Annual FIRST Conference

I've been at the FIRST conference in Vancouver, BC this week presenting, attending great presentations, and meeting a fantastic group of people.
I'd like to applaud some great presenters I've seen so far, including Par Osterberg Medina (Detecting Intrusions), Anton Chuvakin (Log Analysis), Raffael Marty (Applied Security Visualization), and Steve Mancini (RAPIER).
I've also been advised of some tools for your consideration, to aid in the security analysis / incident response cause, as well as possible topics for toolsmith.
Take a look at these, if you aren't already familiar with them:
BitBlaze - Binary Analysis for COTS Protection and Malicious Code Defense
F-Response - The First Truly Vendor Agnostic Solution for Remote Forensics and eDiscovery
Maltego - Maltego is an open source intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.
The Volatility Framework - Volatile memory artifact extraction utility framework
Thanks to Richard Bejtlich for pointing out F-Response and Volatility and Steve Mancini for BitBlaze and Maltego.

On another front, in support of Eva Chen's (Trend Micro) recent claim that the anti-virus industry sucks, John Stewart of Cisco, in his keynote this morning, reiterated the premise that the fight against malware is a lost cause. The point he was really driving at is the downfall of blacklisting and that whitelisting is essential given that "the total good is smaller than the total unknown and bad". This, as his fourth postulate of many good postulates this morning, truly supports my own beliefs. I'm more focused on whitelisting in the web application security space, but the premise is the same. If the vast majority of requests to secured elements of your applications are bad, then simply deny all, and allow only that which you trust.

More to come...

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