As mentioned last week, we’ve pulled the NSO Quant posts out of the main feed because the volume was too heavy. So I have been doing some cross-linking to let you who don’t follow that feed know when new stuff appears over there.
It’s been a while since I waded in on one of these government-related privacy thingies, but a report this morning from the New York Times reveals yet another profound, and fundamental, misunderstanding of how technology and security function. The executive branch is currently crafting a legislative proposal to require Internet-based communications providers to support wiretap capabilities in their products.
We are wrapping up a pretty difficult summer here at Securosis. You have probably noticed from the blog volume as we have been swamped with research projects. Rich, Mike, and I have barely spoken with one another over the last couple months as we are head-down and researching and writing as fast as we can. No time for movies, parties, or vacation travel. These Quant projects we have been working on make us feel like we have been buried in sand. I have been this busy several times during my…
General Keith Alexander heads the U.S. Cyber Command and is the Director of the NSA. In prepared testimony today he said the government should set up a secure zone for themselves and critical infrastructure, walled off from the rest of the Internet.
We had a great comment by Dan on one of the metrics posts, and it merits an answer with explanation, because in the barrage of posts the intended audience can certainly get lost. Here is Dan’s comment:
I don’t give a crap about my hair. Yeah, it’s gray. But I have it, so I guess that’s something. It grows fast and looks the same, no matter what I do to it. I went through a period maybe 10 years ago where I got my hair styled, but besides ending up a bit lighter in the wallet (both from a $45 cut and all the product they pushed on me), there wasn’t much impact. I did get to listen to some cool music and see good looking stylists wearing skimpy outfits with lots of tattoos and piercings. But at…
We kick off our discussion of additional monitoring technologies with a high-level overview of file integrity monitoring. As the name implies, file integrity monitoring detects changes to files – whether text, configuration data, programs, code libraries, critical system files, or even Windows registries. Files are a common medium for delivering viruses and malware, and detecting changes to key files can provide an indication of machine compromise.
Around the beginning of the year Adrian and I released our big database encryption paper: Understanding and Selecting a Database Encryption or Tokenization Solution. We realized pretty quickly there was no way we could do justice to tokenization in that paper, so we are now excited to release Understanding and Selecting a Tokenization Solution.
We realized last week that we may have hit the saturation point for activity on the blog. Right now we have three ongoing blog series and NSO Quant. All our series post a few times a week, and Quant can be up to 10 posts. It’s too much for us to keep up with, so I can’t even imagine someone who actually has to do something with their days.
There’s a lot of hype in the press (and vendor pitches) about APT – the Advanced Persistent Threat. Very little of it is informed, and many parties within the security industry are quickly trying to co-opt the term in order to advance various personal and corporate agendas. In the process they’ve bent, manipulated and largely tarnished what had been a specific description of a class of attacker. I’ve generally tried to limit how much I talk about it – mostly restricting myself to the occasional…