From: Kohlenberg, Toby (toby.kohlenberg@intel.com)
Date: Tue Jan 20 2004 - 18:24:14 EST
<all opinions are my own and in no way reflect the views of my employer>
There is one point that I haven't seen mentioned yet in this discussion
(though I may have missed it). Whether you think all your information
security
officers/consultants/technologists/wizards/priests should know how to
write
buffer overflows or not, a one-week "hacking course" isn't going to
teach
them that. Years of experience as a programmer and system administrator
may
give them the background to be effective at it but all you are going to
get from
a one-week course is a review of the current tools and a glorified
script-kiddie.
People talk about knowing "how to hack" but that's a really big area. Do
you
mean having some general experience thinking like an attacker? Or do you
mean
you want someone with experience writing Assembly for overflows? Or
writing
SQL for insertion attacks? Or do you want someone who can social
engineer their
way into anywhere?
It may be harder to write a buffer overflow than to manage a firewall
but I'd
argue that it's much harder to develop a complete information security
approach
that is balanced and feasible for a company than it is to enumerate a
system,
find a vulnerability and exploit it. And it's much harder to teach the
first task
than the second.
toby
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Shein [mailto:shoten@starpower.net]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 10:47 AM
Subject: RE: Ethical Hacking Training
As much as I think that it's valuable for security personnel to know how
their attackers think and operate, I think this particular analogy is
flawed. Hacking is not part of the job, necessarily, any more than
flying
is part of the programmers job in this example. I have known many
excellent
security officers who couldn't run an exploit (and never had), but who
really knew their stuff and put it to use in real-world environments.
It is
possible to know how to defend a network without knowing the details of
how
to break into it; you're defending against concepts, not keystrokes.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim,,, [mailto:tim@spang.org] On Behalf Of Tim Gurney
> Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 5:10 PM
> Subject: Re: Ethical Hacking Training
>
> Mostly i lurk on thsi list, this this is a topic i feel
> strongly about.
>
> Let me give you an example, would you employ someone to write
> code for a real time fly by wire system who had no experience
> of doing it ? NO!
>
> So why employ a security officer who has no idea how to hack.
> If you dont know how to do it, you wont know how others do it
> and you wont know how to stop it.
>
> you need to have "played the game" to know where to look, and
> how to read between the lines and have contacts in the
> underground groups.
>
> Yes i am speaking from experience, i am a free lanse security
> consultant, and i have played the other side of the fence
> while at uni, and i dont trust any security specialist who
> hasnt done the same.
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