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Senior Manager, Professional Services at Neustar
Joined on August 16, 2005
Total Post Views: 99,220
| About |
Brett has been designing, deploying, and sustaining critical infrastructure for universities, enterprises, and ISPs/carriers for 24 years which also included 4 years of network operations, and 3 years of product management experience. Brett’s experience spans large-scale IP networking, optical networking, network/system administration and design, and security architecture including high level security policy and architecture, as well as vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. Brett’s current position at Neustar is Senior Manager of Professional Services for the Enterprise Services group and has a team of experts that focus on network assessments, vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing.
Brett has a published book in the security space titled Extreme Exploits, Advanced Defenses Against Hardcore Hacks, published by Mcgraw-Hill/Osborne.
Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Brett Watson on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
As noted in my first article of this series (see part one, two and three), security and reliability encompass holistic network assessments, vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. This month I'd like to go deeper into penetration testing; however, first, let's go back for a quick refresh before getting started. more
Building on my last article about Network Assessments, let's take a closer look at vulnerability assessments. (Because entire books have been written on conducting vulnerability assessments, this article is only a high level overview.) What is a vulnerability assessment? more
As noted in the first part of this series, Security and Reliability encompasses holistic network assessments, vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing. In this post I'd like to go deeper into network assessments. I stated last time that the phrase "network assessment" is broad. more
I co-authored a book in 2005, titled "Extreme Exploits: Advanced Defenses Against Hardcore Hacks." My chapters focused on securing routing protocols such as BGP, and securing systems related to DMZs, firewalls, and network connectivity. As I look back over those chapters, I realize that the basic fundamentals of network security really haven't changed much even though technology has advanced at an incredible pace. "Defense in depth" was a hot catch phrase seven years ago, and it still applies today. more
Everyone is probably well aware of the Kashpureff-style DNS cache- poisoning exploit (I'll call this "classic cache poisoning"). For reference, see the original US-CERT advisory prompted by this exploit. Vendors patched their code to appropriately scrub (validate) responses so that caches could not be poisoned. For the next 7-8 years, we didn't hear much about cache poisoning. However, there was still a vulnerability lurking in the code, directly related to cache poisoning. ...On April 7, 2005, the SANS ISC (not to be confused with Internet Systems Consortium) posted an update detailing how Microsoft Windows DNS servers were still being poisoned, even though the "Secure cache against pollution" option was set. The SANS ISC found that Windows DNS servers using BIND4 and BIND8 servers as forwarders were being poisoned. But how could this be? more
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