Chapter 21. Conclusions

In this book, I have discussed techniques for collecting, processing, and applying data to deal with information security problems, and specifically ways to use that data to inform security decisions. This discussion is only half the story, though; every network is different, and every insecure network is insecure in its own way.

I encourage you, more than anything else, to look at the data. Constructs are good, statistics are good, but the fundamental tool for data analysis is data. Whatever you start with will be terrible: the first result of any data collection effort is finding out how bad the data collection was. However, until you collect that data, until you poke at your network, and until you understand what weirdness is going on—the ancient developer who insists that USENET is part of his essential workflow, the guy who thought putting the timeserver on .123, the web server on .80, and the HTTPS server on .187—life is going to be confusing. Well, more confusing—the internet is really weird.