Brewers CAP Theorem

Computer Scientist, Eric Brewer, stipulated in the theorem that carries his name that you can have two out of three guarantees in distributed data storage with the guarantees being consistency, availability and partition tolerance. The limitations in Brewer’s “CAP” Theorem are not only key in solving modern big-data challenges, they also are critical in solving big-business issues.

Business as a Data Lake

It may be that 6 years running hundreds of experiments across different data philosophies and platforms have created long-term trauma that makes every problem in life look like a big-data problem but I cannot help but notice some parallel lessons between data lakes and organizations.

Raspberry Pi is a fantastic tool for learning and experimentation. To assist our trainers, students and partners, we have created a build of Precinct to run on a Raspberry PI4. The WitFooPi is not supported as a production appliance but is great way to have Precinct in the palm of your hand for capture the flag, session training and lab testing.

Build Requirements

WitFooPi has the following requirements. Precinct performs advanced analysis on data and will stretch the ARM architecture to its limits. Active cooling is a must to prevent overheating the unit. You will also need a 128GB SD Card, a Pi enabled Precinct license and the Pi image file.

WitFoo Precinct persists and replicates data on big-data NoSQL platform Apache Cassandra. Precinct 6.1.3 is built on Cassandra 3.11. In preparation for upgrade to Cassandra 4.0, the following lab & production testing was conducted.

Lab Appliances

WitFoo Precinct clusters consisting of 1 Management, 1 Streamer and 3 Data nodes were deployed in AWS using the official Marketplace images. The instances were configured to use AWS GP2 SSD drives (the recommended default) and were running on c5d.2xlarge hardware (16GB RAM, 8 CPU Cores.)

When we founded WitFoo five years ago, we wanted to analyze data in SIEM and other data stacks to provide craft knowledge that would stabilize communications within cybersecurity teams and between those teams and their organizations. A few months into that journey we realized there were fundamental problems in how existing SIEM and log aggregators collected and stored data which prompted us to add big data processing to the scope of our venture.

Cybersecurity expert, Chris Roberts, lamented earlier today in a LinkedIn post that he was offered a cybersecurity award for the low price of $1,200. His outrage prompted me to realize that most cybersecurity professionals and decision makers do not get the opportunity to see the evidence many of the “awards” in cybersecurity are bogus. I took a few minutes to search my email archives for some of the pay to play awards we have received in recent months.

Searching for the TLD of the Solarwinds DGA will quickly reveal any hits reported to Precinct. The TLD to search is avsmcloud.com. Months of incident data can be searched in moments and full, big-data search can run as a job.

Note, there have been no reports of matches from WitFoo customers at this time. IOC’s associated with the breach have not been submitted to WitFoo Library.

If you require assistance in running these searches, please reach out to WitFoo Support.

On Emergency Leave on 9/11

In September of 2001, I had been on active duty in the US Navy for 6 years. I was stationed with the World-Famous Golden Dragons of VFA-192 in Atsugi, Japan, running the night shift of the Integrated Weapons Team. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was in South Carolina on emergency leave from my squadron-mates because my mother was in intensive care. It was already a traumatic time in my life before the news of the Twin Towers woke me from my sleep. A few minutes later, my division officer called to see how much time I needed before getting on the first plane back to Japan. I fully expected to join my squadron on another tour of the Persian Gulf on the USS Kitty Hawk and extend my tour overseas. I had no idea how much my life was about to change and how different it would be from what I had planned.

Bio

CHARLES HERRING

WitFoo Chief Technology Officer

By the end of 2015 it was clear to me that the craft of cybersecurity was broken. My mind continuously compared SECOPS with other mature crafts that I had observed and executed, and it bothered me to the point of stealing peace and sleep. I decided I was going to start a revolution to “Build the tools and data needed to enable the craft of cybersecurity operations to mature.” This focus formed the mission of WitFoo and the battle cry for the revolution. Most revolutions fail because there is a myriad of devious factors stacked against them. Most Davids are murdered by Goliath. It is very rare for bold, underdog revolutions to succeed. We knew that even before we filed Articles of Incorporation. We knew to deliver sustainable, healthy change into a toxic market, we were going to have to have a set of plans resilient to the dangers and evils that existed.

Rock On

For the last 4-5 years of running with the WitFoo revolution, I have constantly had to defend our small team. In the early days, potential investors would remark, “You can’t get all this done with such a small team.” Now that we have accomplished building the product, the go-to-market strategy, have many happy customers we are still told, “I don’t see how you can get so much done with such a small team.” I want to respond with “that seems to be a problem with your ability to see since we’ve already done it and you are looking at it,” but I realize that is not going to help the situation.

In dealing with customers, analysts, partners and investors I am regularly faced with having to decide whether I should acquiesce and deliver what they want or try to teach them why they should change their minds and accept what I believe they need.