Skipped out of town for a much needed vacation Friday, and spent the weekend in a very remote section of desert. I spent my time hiking to the top of several peaks and overlooking vast areas of uninhabited country. I rode quads, wandered around a perfectly intact 100 year old mine shaft, did some target practice with a new rifle, built giant bonfires, and sat around BSing with friends. A total departure from everyday life. So I was in a semi-euphoric state, and trying to ease my way back into…
As we all get ready for the turkey-induced food coma awaiting us Yanks in two days, let me expand a bit on an incomplete thought put forth by the Hoff. His Cloudiness wonders aloud if Compliance is the Autotune of the Security Industry.
I had an insanely early flight this morning for some client work in the Bay Area, so last night I hopped out to fill up on gas and grab some pizza for family movie night (The Muppets Take Manhattan, in case you were wondering).
Now that the media has feasted on the Stuxnet carcass, it gives me a moment of pause. What of a different perspective? I know – madness, right? But seriously, we have seen the media in a lather over this story for some time now. Let’s be honest – to someone who has worked in the SCADA community, this really is nothing new. It’s just one incident that happened to come to light.
Rich makes the case that A Is Not for Availability in this week’s FireStarter. Basically his thinking is that the A in the CIA triad needs to be attribution , rather than availability. At least when thinking about security information (as opposed to infrastructure). Turns out that was a rather controversial position within the Securosis band.
It’s drilled into us as soon as we first cut our help-desk umbilical cords and don our information security diapers:
Lin Mun Poo of Malaysia sounds like a pretty bad-ass criminal hacker. He cracked into the Federal Reserve, and snagged hundreds of thousands of card numbers from a bank in Cleveland. But perhaps his intellectual skills don’t extend quite as far as they should for criminal survival.
As I continue working through the nuances of my 2011 research agenda, I’ve been throwing trial balloons at anyone and everyone I can. I posted an initial concept I called Vaults within Vaults and got some decent feedback. At this point, I’ve got a working concept for the philosophies we’ll need to embrace to stand a chance moving forward.
I got distracted by email. The Friday Summary was going to be about columnar databases. I think. Maybe it’s the flu I have had all week, or my memory is going, or just perhaps the subject was not all that interesting to begin with. But the email that distracted me was kind of funny and kinda sad. A former friend and co-worker contacted me for the first time is something like 10 years. Out of the blue.
I’m hanging out in the Red Carpet Club at the Orlando airport, waiting to head home from the Cloud Security Alliance Congress. Yesterday Chris Hoff and I presented a three part series – first our joint presentation on disruptive innovation and cloud computing (WINnovation), then his awesome presentation on cloud computing infrastructure security issues (and more: Cloudinomicon), and finally Quantum Datum, my session on information-centric security for cloud computing.