http://www.wired.com/2014/10/facebook-builder-osquery/
By Cade Metz
Enterprise
Wired.com
10.29.14
Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan says that people like Mike
Arpaia are hard to find.
Arpaia is a security engineer, but he’s not the kind who spends his days
trying to break into computer software, hoping he can beat miscreants to
the punch. As Sullivan describes him, he’s a “builder”—someone who creates
new tools capable of better protecting our computer software—and that’s
unusual. “You go to the security conferences, and it’s all about breaking
things,” Sullivan says. “It’s not about building things.”
Facebook hired Arpaia in January, and in the nine months since, he and a
small team of other engineers built a tool called OSquery, which aims to
identify attacks on the thousands of machines used across the company,
including both the servers that underpin Facebook’s vast online empire and
the personal computers used by employees. OSquery is still under test at
Facebook—and only on employee machines—but on Wednesday, the company
open-sourced the tool, sharing the underlying code with the world at
large. It’s another way of saying that people like Mike Arpaia are hard to
find.
On today’s internet, as Sullivan explains, you can’t buy your way to good
security. If you run a large online operation like Facebook, you need more
than just off-the-shelf hardware and software to protect the thing. “You
can’t just install three appliances and go back to work,” he says. Today’s
online operations are so complex, you’re forced to build your own security
tools, tailoring software to your particular setup. In open sourcing
OSquery, Facebook aims to help others do that—and in the process, help
itself. Outside companies can use the tool—as some already do, according
to Arpaia—but they can also help Facebook improve it.
[...]
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