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.
It seems as though lately a lot of heated conversations revolve around X.509. Whether it’s implementations using IPsec or SSL/TLS certificates, someone always ends up frustrated. Why? Because it really does suck when you think about it.
With last week’s acquisition of Metasploit by Rapid7, I thought it might be a good time to do a review of the penetration testing market and the evolving role of pen testing in the security arsenal. We’ve seen a few different shifts over the past few years in how organizations use pen testing, and I believe this acquisition – combined with changes in enterprise infrastructure – indicates that pen testing is becoming more essential, more closely tied to vulnerability assessment, and generally…
This is part 2 of a series, click here for Part 1
I’m not exactly sure when Core Security Technologies and Immunity started business, but before then there were no dedicated commercial penetration testing tools. There were a number of vulnerability scanners, and plenty of different “micro” tools to help with different parts of a pen test, but no dedicated exploitation tools. Metasploit also changed this on the non-commercial side. For those who…
This morning Dan Goodin over at The Register dropped me a line to get my take on a new tool from Microsoft that lets you apply anti-exploitation controls to existing applications. Here’s Dan’s article with my quote, and more information directly from Microsoft.
Amazon announced a Relational Database Service today:
Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period.
For Adam after harassing me on irc:
Calling ‘accounts’ ‘identities’ is broken. Discuss.
The First 90 Days.
When you take a new position, what is it you will do in the first 90 days? What do you want to learn? What do you wish to accomplish? Is it enough to plan a course of action or do you immediately need to fix something? “What is your plan for your first 90 days?” is a common interview question for executives. The candidate’s answer tells the prospective employer a few things about the person’s grasp of the challenges ahead, how they operate typically, the efficiency of their…
This story begins early last week with a phone call from a bank I hold accounts with. I didn’t actually answer the call but a polite voice mail informed me of possible fraudulent activity and stated I should call them back as soon as possible. First and foremost I thought this part of my story was a social engineering exercise, but I quickly validated the phone number as being legit, unless of course this was some fantastic setup that was either man-in-the-middling the bank’s site (which would…