This time of year neighborhoods are overrun with “Graduation 2013” signs. The banners hang at the entrance of every subdivision congratulating this year’s high school graduates. It’s a major milestone and they should celebrate. Three kids on our street are graduating, and two are youngests. So we will have a few empty nests on our street.
In the first post updating our research on Network-based Malware Detection, we talked about how attackers have evolved their tactics, even over the last 18 months, to defeat emerging controls like sandboxing and command & control (C&C;) network analysis. As attackers get more sophisticated defenses need to as well. So we are focusing this series on tracking the evolution of malware detection capabilities and addressing issues with early NBMD offerings – including scaling, accuracy, and…
Even after being in this business 20 years I still get surprised from time to time. When I saw this morning that Blue Coat is acquiring Solera Networks I was surprised, and not with a childlike sense of wonder. It was a WTF? type surprise.
It’s funny how certain data points get manipulated to bolster the corporate message. At least how the trade press portrays they anyway. If you read infosecurity-magazine.com’s coverage of Veracode’s State of Software Security report, you will see the subhead that the CISO is really the Chief Information Scapegoat Officer.
Mood music: Abandono by Amalia Rodrigues…
Wendy blogged about not renewing her CISSP. I never had one myself, but as Wendy said it is much less important if you’re not going through the cattle call HR process, which is majorly gebrochen in infosec… but that’s another post.
In the sad but true files, the industry has become focused on advanced malware, state-sponsored attackers, and 0-day attacks, to the exclusion of everything else. Any stroll around a trade show floor makes that obvious. Which is curious because these ‘advanced’ attackers are not a factor for the large majority of companies. It also masks the fact that many compromises start with attacks against poorly-coded brittle web sites.
The Washington Post says US Officials claimed Chinese hackers breached Google to determine who the US wanted Google to spy on. In essence the 2010 Aurora attack was a counter-counter-espionage effort to determine who the US government was monitoring. From the Post’s post:
Websense announced today that they are being acquired by Vista Equity Partners and will be going private when the transaction closes. From the press release:
Trustwave’s Nicolas Percoco wrote an interesting article at boardmember.com describing a targeted attack at a senior executive. Who’dathunk sites catering to board members (and other mahogany row folks) would publish stuff from security folks. Oh, how the times have changed, eh?
In our recent little ditty on Network-based Threat Intelligence, we mentioned how resilience has become a major focus for command and control networks. The Pushdo botnet’s recent rise from the ashes (for the fourth time!) illustrates this perfectly.