He Say She Say ...The Quest for Credible Information

There’s a running joke for students working on assignments; “if you do a Google search and you need to click on the 2^nd page, you are in trouble”. This concept is further emphasized by digital synopsis with their joke; “The Best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results …or page 1 of Bing”. While these statements are merely jokes, they do have some truth to them and I for one rarely click on page 2 when looking up information on the Internet. Maybe my searches are just specific and I get what I need on page 1 or Google has enough analytics on my preferences that the results returned fit my profile to a T …I will go with the latter. What many people don’t know is that some of the results returned usually don’t necessarily hold the truth we seek and Google is simply ‘serving’ them to us in the order of paid services (in the case of ads) or simply what people are ‘chatting about’, aka what is popular or being clicked on the most.  

Image Courtesy of Designzzz:
Ref http://www.designzzz.com/albert-einstein-quotes/

"The Famous Quote"

We’ve all run into the famous quotes by well known, established individuals, the likes of Einstein and Lincoln. Most of these quotes weren’t even quoted by the authors attached to them; a little Photoshop magic and voila! …we have a winning quote. Not all that is published on the Internet however is fabricated. Before the Internet morphed into the ‘beast’ it is today, people would for example, go to libraries and use published books for their research or they would reach out to subject matter experts like professors for guidance. All these information is now available in the digital space and while it co-habits this space with a lot of other ‘junk’ information, credible information can still be found and used for our day to day research and knowledge adventures.

For this blog post, we will focus on how to identify credible sources of information for threats, vulnerabilities, updates, and security news in general. 

My ‘primary’ go to resources however, are as follows:

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It publishes security standards and guidelines plus other security-related information that can be used to support decisions by individuals all the way up to industry and government. If you are looking for a ‘how to guide on securing your home wireless network’, NIST will have it. If it’s a business thinking about ‘how to protect their confidential data’, NIST has that too.

National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE): If I want to know what vulnerabilities exist on my system, my two go to resource are NVD (sponsored by DHS/NCCIC/US-CERT) and MITRE’s CVE. both these sites provide valuable information on known vulnerabilities with recommendations on how to mitigate them.

SANS Internet Storm Center and United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) both provide up to date news and advisories for most computer security topics. If you want to know about the latest patch, security news, bulletins, or a security update; both of these resources are credible.

Other than the resources mentioned above, I also use Information Technology & Security websites that publish peer reviewed articles. Packet storm security for example provides information on exploits, advisories, tools and whitepapers on various cyber related topics. CSO Online, Dark Reading, How-to-geek and many more provide useful information, tips and tricks and just general cyber-related information. Bloggers like Lenny Zeltser or Krebs on security are also credible and their posts can be used as resources given their expertise in the cyber realm. 

In conclusion

There are plenty of credible resources of information out there and this blog would not be enough to list them all out. When looking up information, we should not trust everything presented to us without verifying the source and backing that information up with other sources. Timelines and who wrote the article also matter; some authors hold more weight than others by virtue of being subject matter experts in their processional fields. Outdated articles may lose credibility due to changes over time; an issue that was critical 10 years ago, may not be viewed the same today. When you have a conflict of information, evaluate the sources and use the aforementioned logic; at the end of the day we can always learn from our mistakes …even misinformation.  

As a footnote, while I agree that Wikipedia should always be taken with a grain of salt, I think it does provide some basic information that can be useful in quickly determining definitions and finding well known information. For example, if you want to know what service runs on a given port based on a firewall report you just received, wiki could come in handy. However, an alternative and more credible source for that scenario would be IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). If there was a conflict in information between those 2 resources, IANA would take precedence over Wiki given IANA is an authority when it comes to protocol addresses and Internet Architecture.