New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series.

The new book is The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship.

It's available now for Kindle, and I'm working on the print edition.

I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up.

I described the new title thus:

Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich.
In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.
In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives.
Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or policy audiences. It features posts from other blogs or news outlets, as well as some of his written testimony from eleven Congressional hearings. For the first time, Mr. Bejtlich publishes documents that he wrote as part of his abandoned war studies PhD program. This last batch of content was only available to his advisor, Dr. Thomas Rid, and his review committee at King's College London.
Read how the security industry, defensive methodologies, and strategies to improve national security have evolved in this new book, written by one of the authors who has seen it all and survived to blog about it.

This will likely be my final collection of writings. I've discovered some documents that may be of interest to historians, so I may contribute those to a national security archive like my friend Jay Healey did a few years ago.

The only other work I might do for these four volumes is to record Audible editions. That would take a while, but I'm thinking about it.

Zeek in Action Videos

This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project . Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on. I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot . Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti