Securosis Blog

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At lunch last week, location-based privacy came up. I actively opt in to a monitoring service, which gets me a discount on insurance for a vehicle I own. My counterpart stated that they would never agree to anything of the sort because of the inherent breach of personal privacy and security. I responded that the privacy statement explicitly reads that the device does not contain GPS, nor does the company track the vehicle’s location. But even if the privacy statement said the opposite – should…

Reading Bill Brenner’s PCI Security a Devil, ‘Like No Child Left Behind’, I had the impression Brenner’s summary of Joshua Corman’s presentation would be: Joshua was %#!*$ crazy. In a nutshell:

I was playing around with Google Dashboard this morning. After reading the cnet post on Google’s Data Liberation Project, and Google’s announcement of DataLiberation.org, I could not help but get a excited about what they were doing. Trying to be ‘open’ and ‘liberate’ data sounds great!

1. Do not expect human behavior to change. You can affect habits, but not behavior.
2. No security problem ever goes away. People have always hit each other over the heads with rocks and cracked safes since they existed (which is why safes were invented, of course), and will continue to hit each other with rocks and crack safes. Problems get better or worse, but never disappear.

When I was in college, I figured every professor assumed I had only one class: the one they were teaching. They seemed to assume I dedicated days and nights solely to their coursework, and was no less interested in the subject they had dedicated their lives to. And they allocated my time accordingly, giving me enough work to do to consume 40 hours a week. But I was taking 5 classes! WTF! Berkeley was especially bad this way. By noon each Monday I felt like I was a week behind the curve. For the…

A major flaw has been found that enables a man-in-the-middle attacks against SSL connections. Several other media outlets are reporting, but Kelly Jackson Higgins has a nice summary over at Dark Reading, and betanews has a much more detailed discussion. According to Marsh Ray at PhoneFactor:

Last week Verizon Business announced that they now offer web application vulnerability assessment software as a service. Specifically, they are reselling a full version of WhiteHat Security’s offering, customized for Verizon business customers.

Every now and again I run into an article that totally baffles me. It’s as if the author had a bunch of somewhat related quotes sitting around, and then stitched a Frankenstein article together. In this case the article was in the October 5th edition of eWeek, and the topic was “Databases: The next big virtualization thing”. The intention seems to be sketching out some hazy future projections about virtualized databases, and what wonderful things virtualization can do for you. But if you…

This week’s Friday Summary is sponsored by Evilsquirrel Enterprises, your World Domination Specialists.

My absolute favorite holiday of the year is Halloween. More than Christmas (possibly because I’m a non-practicing Jew), more than my birthday, and even more than Talk Like a Pirate Day.