In what remains a down economy, you may be suspicious when I tell you to think about leaving your job. But ultimately in order to survive, you always need to have Plan B or Plan C in place, just in case. Blind loyalty to an employer (or to employees) died a horrendous death many years ago.
I was in the car the other day with my oldest daughter. She’s 9 (going on 15, but that’s another story) and blurted out: “Dad, I don’t want to go to Georgia Tech.” Huh? Now she is the princess of non-sequiturs, but even this one was surprising to me. Not only does she have an educational plan (at 9), but she knows that GA Tech is not part of it.
To state the obvious (as I tend to do), we all have too much to protect. No one gets through their list every day, which means perhaps the most critical skill for any professional is the ability to prioritize. We’ve got to focus on the issues that present the most significant risk to the organization (whatever you mean by risk) and act accordingly. I have’t explicitly said it, but the key to network security fundamentals is figuring out how to prioritize. And to be clear, though I’m…
The Securosis team is proud to announce the availability of our latest white paper: Understanding and Selecting a Database Assessment Solution.
It’s tough to talk about securing database access methods in a series designed to cover database security basics, because the access attacks are not basic. They tend to exploit either communications media or external functions – taking advantage of subtleties or logic flaws – capitalizing on trust relationships, or just being very unconventional and thus hard to anticipate. Still, some of the attacks are right through an open front door, like forgetting to set a TNS Listener password on…
Chris was kind enough to forward me Game Development in a Post-Agile World this week. What I know about game development could fit on the the head of a pin. Still, one of the software companies I worked for was incubated inside a much larger video game development company. I was always very interested in watching the game team dynamics, and how they differed from the teams I ran. The game developers did not have a lot of overlapping skills and the teams were – whether they knew it or not –…
As a security practitioner, it has always been difficult to select the ‘right’ product. You (kind of) know what problem needs to be solved, yet you often don’t have any idea how any particular product will work and scale in your production environment. Sometimes it is difficult to identify the right vendors to bring in for an evaluation. Even when you do, no number of vendor meetings, SE demos, or proof of concept installations can tell you what you need to know.
We are in the process of finalizing some research planning for the next few months, so I want to see if there are any requests for research out there.
So it’s probably apparent that Mike and I have slightly different opinions on some security topics, such as Monitoring Everything (or not). But sometimes we have exactly the same viewpoint, for slightly different reasons. Correlation is one of these later examples.
You may not know it, but lots of folks you know are zombies. It seems that life has beaten them down, and miraculously two weeks later they don’t say ‘hi’ – they just give you a blank stare and grin as the spittle drips out of the corners of their mouths. Yup, a sure sign they’ve been to see Dr. Feelgood, who heard for an hour how hard their lives are, and as opposed to helping to deal with the pain, they got their friends Prozac, Lexapro, and Zoloft numb it. These billion dollar drugs build on…