As we continue building out coverage on more traditional security topics, it’s time to focus some attention on the endpoint. For the most part, many folks have just given up on protecting the endpoint. Yes, we all go through the motions of having endpoint agents installed (on Windows anyway), but most of us have pretty low expectations for anti-malware solutions. Justifiably so, but that doesn’t mean it’s game over. There are lots of things we can do to better protect the endpoint, some of…
Update - Lanscope posted some new information positioning this as a compliment, not substitute, to DLP. Looks like the marketing folks might have gotten a little out of control.
One of our readers recently emailed me with a major dilemma. They need to keep their website PCI compliant in order to keep using their payment gateway to process credit card transactions. Their PCI scanner is telling them they have vulnerabilities, while their hosting provider tells them they are fine. Meanwhile our reader is caught in the middle, paying fines.
There are people who suck the air out of the room. You know them – they rarely have anything good to say. They are the ones always pointing out the problems. They are half-empty type folks. No matter what it is, it’s half-empty or even three-quarters empty.
Palo Alto Networks just released their latest Application Usage and Risk Report (registration required), which aggregates anonymous data from their client base to analyze Internet-based application usage among their clients. For those of you who don’t know, one of their product’s features is monitoring applications tunneling over other protocols – such as P2P file sharing over port 80 (normally used for web browsing). A ton of different applications now tunnel over ports 80 and 443 to get…
It seems the Jericho Forum is at it again. I’m not sure what it is, but they are hitting the PR circuit talking about their latest document, a Self-Assessment Guide. Basically this is a list of “nasty” questions end users should ask vendors to understand if their products align with the Jericho Commandments.
It’s been a bit of a busy week. We finished up 2 major projects and I made a quick out of town run to do a little client work. As a result, you probably noticed we were a bit light on the posting. For some silly reason we thought things might slow down after RSA.
There was a great level of discourse around Rich’s FireStarter on Monday: There is No Market for Security Innovation. Check out the comments to get a good feel for the polarization of folks on both sides of the discussion.
I’m currently out on a client engagement, but early results over Twitter say that Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, Firefox on Windows 7, Safari on Mac OS X, and Safari on iPhone were all exploited within seconds in the Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest conference. While these exploits took the developers weeks or months to complete, that’s still a clean sweep.
The lack of credible and relevant network security metrics has been a thorn in my side for years. We don’t know how to define success. We don’t know how to communicate value. And ultimately, we don’t even know what we should be tracking operationally to show improvement (or failure) in our network security activities.