Posting my long comment here because the Disqus bot and I don't get along for some reason.

Troy,
I think you have done a lot of good for infosec. Thank you. Here are my thoughts: You will be in a room full of lawyers. Examples that they understand are important. For example, (Full credit to @strandjs 2017 DerbyCon keynote) in the Crowdstrike v. NSS labs case, they sued to prevent "third parties to access or use the products" and prohibited "any competitive analysis on the product".

Sorry to get into the weeds here, but the TL/DR is the following.

- Delaware District court Judge Gregory Sleet's ruling supporting product performance assessments.

- Government funding to support projects like ModSecurity that contribute to US economic security.

- Whitelisting (that works) is the future.

Today's security vendor marketing seems to have a free pass to lie. Thankfully, on 2017-02-13, Judge Gregory Sleet of the Delaware District court ruled against Crowdstrike writing "The consumer review fairness act of 2016 underscores the public's interest in performance assessments. The new law voids provisions of form contracts that restrict a party to that contract from conducting a performance assessment of or other similar analysis of..." "The court finds the public has a very real interest in the dissemination of information regarding products in the marketplace." It goes on to say if NSS's data is inaccurate, Crowdstrike could publicly rebut that data with evidence and the public would benefit from the exchange helping inform the public if they should trust future NSS reports. He concludes "the public interest weighs strongly in favor of denying Crowdstrike's motion."
https://www.csoonline.com/a...

Security is hard. I have been researching the Apache Struts2 exploits that Equifax was hit by. Assume another vulnerability like this exists right now. It could be Struts or some other web framework. Webshells used in the Struts hack are really hard to stop for many reasons. As far as I understand, if ModSecurity's open source web application firewall was installed and properly configured (not a simple task), the CRS (core rule set) would have prevented the Apache Struts2 exploit from working. Open source projects that make major contributions to protect United States national and economic security should receive more support and funding.

As a recognition for the contribution of all open source, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds should be recommended to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

ModSecurity works by looking for known malicious patterns and blocks them. I hope one day we can get web application firewalls to work well using a whitelist setup. Instead of trusting everything and blocking things that look bad, on highly sensitive systems like Equifax, I hope to see a way to trust nothing and allow traffic that is known good. For example..

import re

def findWords(string1):

return re.findall(r"\b[^\d\W]+\b",string1)

f = open("apache2-access.log", "r")

data = f.read()

data = data.upper()

answer = findWords(data)

for a in answer:

print(a)

Now use bash to sort and get count..

$ python3 words.py | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

The next step is to create a modSecurity rule that uses the same regex "\b[^\d\W]+\b" to only allow REQUESTS that contain words that are on an approved list using the @pmf parameter file as in this following example. Note I just started looking into this, so I will leave the rest as an exercise for the reader :)

SecRule
REQUEST_COOKIES|!REQUEST_COOKIES:/__utm/|REQUEST_COOKIES_NAMES|ARGS_NAMES|ARGS|XML:/*
"@pmf windows-powershell-commands.dat

See github owasp-modsecurity-crs/rules/REQUEST-932-Application-ATTACK-RCE