After attending the talk given by Mike Murray at RSA Conference in San Francisco last week on “Tweeting for Dollars: UsingSocial Media to Enhance your Career in Security” I found myself even more intrigued by some people’s message in the social media spectrum. One of the major points that Mike made during his talk was that not only do organizations need to have a social media strategy, but each person who is engaging in social media should think about theirs as well. Regardless of any intent, each person in social media has a brand. It is our responsibility to ensure that this brand is reflective of what we desire it to be. Some brands are easier to spot then others, but what is your brand saying about you?

The best question that someone asked in the presentation was that of a gentleman ‘screwing up’ his twitter account. By his definition of screwing up, it meant that he wasn’t focused on tweeting about his career only, he was tweeting about everything and talking to people. This wasn’t a screw up at all, this gentleman was having a conversation, he was doing social media right! The humanity of social media is what makes it so attractive to readers. People have been using the internet for years to read press releases, and some even use RSS feeds on a daily basis to keep up on those news articles. They don’t need Twitter or Facebook to keep up on that, Social Media let’s us all know that every celebrity, industry pundit, and random people you met at a convention all have something else going on outside of their career, or hobby that they are known for.

As an organization, it is also very important to decide on how the corporate brand is going to be reflected by the employees. Compose a social media policy stating if employees are allowed to share corporate information, or if that is going to be left only to be executed by the corporate social media accounts and team. If employees are allowed to share certain corporate data, it is very important to identify and classify what information is never to be shared in the social media space. The organization is also responsible to educate the employees of these policies to ensure a clear, unified message.

So how would a person or an organization drive their brand while engaging their audience? Have a conversation! Read whatyour followers are doing, and engage them. Sure, throw out important information that is self-serving as well (ie. Blog Post announcement, PR release links, etc.), but also retweet and share other contributors information. Know who you audience is, and get to know them!

Sharing is caring!

<Fade IN:>

A few weeks back, I was sitting in my office in the middle of a meeting with one of my Directors and my phone rings. It came through as one of our trunk lines, so I knew it was a transfer form the receptionist, I was in a good mood, so I answered it. Low and behold it was my first call from a Rapid7 Sales representative (First that I actually answered that is). Knowing that Rapid7 recently acquired Metasploit, I gave the gentleman a listen. He talked up the RSA party, HD Moore, and the products that Rapid7 is currently marketing compared to some of the competitors. All in all, it was a perfectly fine conversation and I did walk away with some value add. My only critique was that it was pretty long, and I’m pretty busy to spend that much time talking about a product that we aren’t yet seeking a new vendor for.

<Announcers Voice:> Later the same day

I receive another call from a Rapid7 sales representative who had no idea that I had just spoken with a gentleman earlier! I might have been a little curt on the phone, but please refer back to the fact that I am actually extremely busy, and had already invested 40 minutes on the phone with the previous representative.

Later the same day I asked my twitterverse for information about Rapid7 products, because I trust my colleagues who have used them more then I could EVER trust a demo. Thanks to the great social community of Security Twits I gathered a great deal of information. Additionally, I learned from someone close to internal Rapid7 that Rapid7 follows all the Rapid7 mentions on twitter... what fun would a day be without throwing a #Rapid7 after some tweets?

<evil-grin>

In all seriousness, Rapid7 is doing some very positive things for the industry in regards to sponsorship of the SecurityTwits event at SourceBoston, employing some AMAZING researchers, and advancing the MetaSploit project with commercial funding!

Rapid7, please work on a sales team lesson in positive versus negative social media networking. Here are my examples of Rapid7 Negative Social Media Marketing:

LinkedIN

• Requests to professionals who they have never met or never worked with:

TwitterNames Ommited: “ Anybody know what’s the bright idea with Rapid7‘s sales team suddenly trying to join people’s networks on linkedin??”

“ Ok @Rapid7, your salespeople’s newfound relentless addition of my linkedin have grown irritating & bothersome. Please DIAF.<- Ah :”

• The February 16th slew of LinkedIN Spam from “Business Developers” that most of my colleagues received. Not cool!

Twitter:

• Rapid7 twitter feed is just a Press Release reel, there is no interaction with the community, same can be said for the Facebook page!

Notable mention:

Having the “JR” account reps monitor twitter for Rapid7 mentions — Boiler Room meets Rapid7!

+

The RSA Party!

I’m sure everyone is thrilled that Rapid7 is hosting a party at RSA. But again, this is another marketing fail. They might not want to use the acronym “VIP” as it generally doesn’t mean invite everyone in the world, post it on twitter, then brag about having 1,000+ people at the party.

In case you didn’t RSVP… you can do so here http://www.rapid7.com/forms/rsarsvp.jsp

Come on Rapid7, you can do better then this!

I’m sure you are a great organization, it sure looks as if your employees have fun working there, but I have to say that Rapid7 Sales and Marketing gets the *first ever* Official SecBarbie FAILBarbie award of the month for doing bad all by themselves!

For those of you that have weathered the test of technological time, then the outage that occurred yesterday on Twitter was nothing out of the ordinary. Sure, the stakes have changed, but this event brought me back to the days of BBS’s and how it always seemed like when you really wanted or needed to send an email or get onto a conference that the BBS was down or all lines were busy.

We had DDoS attacks of sorts back then, just not nearly as sexy as botnets, mostly it was people trying to load up the modem banks and toggle the auto-answer off. Back then it was thought to just be comical to deface the ASCII page of the a friend’s site, and all-in-all it was good fun, but we sure didn’t make CNN back then. What has all this new media adaption done in regards to our dependance on communication? I believe it just has expanded it to a new cross-section of the world. The society of today is built upon 99% availability, and dependancy on the newest communication outlet is mind-blowing! Yesterday, one of the top news stories internationally was TWITTER BEING DOWN!

Amazing.

After the ceremonious un-boxing of the Sourcefire 3D-1000 IPS in my bedroom (hey, it’s saturday morning, give me a break!) I did what any good techie would do, discard the fine-print manuals for the big shinny slick ‘Quick Start Guide’. In this lovely document everything seemed pretty rudimentary all except one section.

Safety and Regulatory Compliance: The 3D sensor should be installed and maintained by a qualified personnel only. Hmmm, I’ve been doing this stuff for some time now, but how qualified am I? I guess we were about to see.

After quickly running through the setup instructions on my secondary ethernet connection, adding the license file, and setting up the management port on my DMZ range (not necessarily in that order), I was set to put in in-line  in passive and start watching some data flow. REALLY? Wait, this only took me a few minutes to get to this point, why was this so simple? Should I be concerned. Not at all, Bravo to the folks at Sourcefire for compiling and producing a hardware IPS that is so straight forward! I was able to get this fully functional in passive mode with default settings reconfigured in less then 5 minutes. Bravo!

Equipment Used:

• Cisco PIX 515E Firewall
• Cisco 2800 Router
• Private T1 Internet Circuit
• Sourcefire 3D-1000 IPS

A new page has been added to SecSocial, finally the Mac OS X Tools page is up (see top right corner)! This is a list that is comprised of favorite tools for security assessments as well as tools needed for OS X Reversing. With any luck this compilation will be dynamic, and everyone is encouraged to contact me if I have left out any fantastic tools.