About the Book

Computer Incident Response
and Product Security

The practical guide to building and running incident response and product security teams

Damir Rajnovic

Organizations increasingly recognize the urgent importance of effective, cohesive, and efficient security incident response. The speed and effectiveness with which a company can respond to incidents has a direct impact on how devastating an incident is on the company's operations and finances. However, few have an experienced, mature incident response (IR) team. Many companies have no IR teams at all; others need help with improving current practices. In this book, leading Cisco incident response expert Damir Rajnovi´c presents start-to-finish guidance for creating and operating effective IR teams and responding to incidents to lessen their impact significantly.

Drawing on his extensive experience identifying and resolving Cisco product security vulnerabilities, the author also covers the entire process of correcting product security vulnerabilities and notifying customers. Throughout, he shows how to build the links across participants and processes that are crucial to an effective and timely response.

This book is an indispensable resource for every professional and leader who must maintain the integrity of network operations and products--from network and security administrators to software engineers, and from product architects to senior security executives.

-Determine why and how to organize an incident response (IR) team

-Learn the key strategies for making the case to senior management

-Locate the IR team in your organizational hierarchy for maximum effectiveness

-Review best practices for managing attack situations with your IR team

-Build relationships with other IR teams, organizations, and law enforcement to improve incident response effectiveness

-Learn how to form, organize, and operate a product security team to deal with product vulnerabilities and assess their severity

-Recognize the differences between product security vulnerabilities and exploits

-Understand how to coordinate all the entities involved in product security handling

-Learn the steps for handling a product security vulnerability based on proven Cisco processes and practices

-Learn strategies for notifying customers about product vulnerabilities and how to ensure customers are implementing fixes

This security book is part of the Cisco Press Networking Technology Series. Security titles from Cisco Press help networking professionals secure critical data and resources, prevent and mitigate network attacks, and build end-to-end, self-defending
networks.

About the Author: Damir Rajnovic finished his education in Croatia where, in 1993, he started his career in computer security. He started at the Croatian News Agency Hina, then moved on to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and finally to the Ministry of Science and Technology. During that time, Damir became involved with the Forum of Incident Response Teams (FIRST) and established the Croatian Academic and Research Network Computer Incident Response Team (CARNet CERT), which, until recently, was not only handling computer incidents for CARNet but was also acting as the Croatian national CERT. Damir then moved to the United Kingdom to work in EuroCERT which was a project that aimed to coordinate CERTs within the European region. After EuroCERT, Damir moved to the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (Cisco PSIRT), where he is still working. Cisco PSIRT is the focal point for managing security vulnerabilities in all Cisco products.

Damir remains active in FIRST, where he created Vendor SIG, and currently serves as liaison officer to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Damir was an invited lecturer for the MSc Information Technology Security course at Westminster University, London. He was one of the core people who dreamed up and formed the Industry Consortium for the Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI).

His nonsecurity-related work includes working as a sound engineer on Radio 101 (http: //www.radio101.hr) while living in Zagreb, Croatia. Damir lives with his family in Didcot, UK.