A. Sources for Mining Security Patterns

Abstract

The intention of this Appendix is to introduce some information sources which were observed while looking for representative case studies as examined in Chapter 4. Alternatively, we could enumerate representative incidents which occurred recently. However, Bruce Schneier motivated his book “Secrets & Lies” that way keeping logs of security events from different sources [194]. The introduction of his books covers a time period from seven days (in March 2000) and contains only the “highlights” (about 16 announcements with news character, 13 severe vulnerabilities and 65 defaced Web sites). He came to the conclusion that “the first seven days of March 2000 were not exceptional.” Furthermore, he presumed that the situation will get worse. In fact, he was right – there is no week without alarming security news. Therefore, we abandoned the idea of keeping similar logs in order to motivate the hypothesis in Chapter 4. Instead we selected two representative case studies and analyzed them thoroughly. We also decided to introduce some interesting information sources. Once more this underlines several statements we made before (e.g. in Section 7.5.2): first, it is very time consuming to observe all relevant source. Second, a published security incident is usually very embarrassing for the victim, maybe the loss of reputation can never be regained. This holds especially when errors are tolerated or security aspects are ignored in a negligent way.