During my first two weeks at Securosis, I’ve gotten soundly thrashed for being too “touchy-feely.” You know, talking about how you need to get your mindset right and set the right priorities for success in 2010. So I figure I’ll get down in the weeds a bit and highlight a couple of tactics that anyone can use to ensure their existing equipment is optimized.
In Mike’s post this morning on network security he made the outlandish suggestion that rather than trying to fix your firewall rules, you could just block everything and wait for the calls to figure out what really needs to be open.
Good Morning:
Now that I’m two months removed from my [last] corporate job, I have some perspective on the ‘quarterly’ mindset. Yes, the pressure to deliver financial results on an arbitrary quarterly basis, which guides how most companies run operations. Notwithstanding your customer’s problems don’t conveniently end on the last day of March, June, September or December – those are the days when stuff is supposed to happen.
Over the past 7 years or so I’ve talked with thousands of IT professionals working on various types of data security projects. If I were forced to pull out one single thread from all those discussions it would have to be the sheer intimidating potential of many of these projects. While there are plenty of self-constrained projects, in many cases the security folks are tasked with implementing technologies or changes that involve monitoring or managing on a pretty broad scale. That’s just the…
Guess what, folks – not only is industrial espionage rampant, but sometimes it’s supported by nation-states. Just ask Boeing about Airbus and France, or New Zealand about French operatives sinking a Greenpeace ship (and killing a few people in the process) on NZ territory.
Yesterday’s FireStarter was one of the two concepts we discussed during our research meeting last week. The other was to get folks to revisit their priorities, as we run headlong into 2010.
A few years back I worked on a database password checker at the request of my employer. A handful of customers wanted to periodically audit passwords, verifying that they complied with their password policies. As databases can use internal password management – outside the scope of primary access control systems like LDAP – they wanted auditing capabilities across the database systems. The goal was to identify weak passwords for service and general database user accounts. This was purely a…
The FireStarter is something new we are starting here on the blog. The idea is to toss something controversial out into the echo chamber first thing Monday morning, and let people bang on some of our more abstract or non-intuitive research ideas.
Dino Dai Zovi (@DinoDaiZovi) posted the following tweets this Saturday:
Food for thought: What if
didn’t patch bugs that weren’t proven exploitable but paid big bug bounties for proven exploitable bugs?
I was over at Rich’s place this week while we were recording the network security podcast. When finished we were just hanging out and Riley, Rich’s daughter, came walking down the hall. At 9 months old I was more shocked to see her walking than she was at seeing me standing there in the hall. She looked up at me and sat down. I extended my hand thinking that she would grab hold of my fingers, but she just sat there looking at me. I heard Rich pipe up … “She’s not a dog, Adrian. You don’t need…