Open (Source) Your Mind

Incident Response

John Locke — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:45:36 +0000

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.

Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

Limit the damage

John Locke — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:43:57 +0000

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

Secure the environment

John Locke — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:41:45 +0000

It amazes me that still in 2011, the standard way web designers upload code to a server is FTP ("File transfer protocol"), a protocol that is completely insecure, easy to snoop, slow, hard to use, and often problematic through firewalls. There are many better ways.

Security Updates

John Locke — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:40:22 +0000

Backups are the safety net and an absolute requirement. But the next most important part is doing what you can to stay out of trouble. We've all become accustomed to security updates on our computers. Today every operating system has an update system, and a huge number of attacks are on vulnerabilities that have fixes released but people have neglected to apply.

Backups

John Locke — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:34:30 +0000

At Freelock, we don't think one backup is enough. All kinds of things can, and often do go wrong. Murphy was an optimist, after all.