This is part 2 of our series on skepticism in security. You canread part 1 here.
Being a bit of a science geek, over the past year or so I’ve become addicted to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, which is now the only one I never miss. It’s the Skeptics’ Guide that first really exposed me to the scientific skeptical movement , which is well aligned with what we do in security.
Last week, Mike Rothman of eIQ wrote a thoughtful piece on the struggles of the SIEM industry. He starts the post by saying the Security Information and Event Management space has struggled over the last decade because the platforms were too expensive, too hard to implement, and (paraphrasing) did not scale well without investing a pound of flesh. All accurate points, but I think these items are secondary to the real issues that plagued the SIEM market.
A good friend of mine has, for many years, said “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” She has led a very interesting life and has thousands of funny anecdotes, but is known to embellish a bit. She always describes real life events, but uses some imagination and injects a few spurious details to spice things up a little bit. Not false statements, but tweaking the facts to make a more engaging story. Several of the comments on the blog in regards to our series on Database…
Rich forwarded me this article on Boing Boing regarding “Kindle Books having download caps” on content. That just shattered my enthusiasm.
I’ve spent way too much time surfing the Internet over the last few evenings. I have read just about everything I can on AT&T pricing, new iPhone features, 3.0 software updates, SIM cards, jailbreaking, smart phone reliability & customer satisfaction surveys, SIM card compatibility, different cellular technologies, cellular service provider customer satisfaction in different regions of the country, Skype on the iPod, and just about every other thing I could find. I have spent more time…
In this post we will detail the other half of the decision tree for selecting a database encryption strategy: securing data from credentialed database users. Specifically, we are concerned with preventing misuse of data through individual or group accounts that provide access to data either directly or through another application. For the purpose of this discussion, we will be most interested in differentiating between accounts assigned users who use the data stored within the database, from…
I am starting to hear stories from friends in the Phoenix area more and more about identity theft and account hijacking. Two weeks ago we got a phone call from a friend in the wee hours of the morning. She called to ask if we knew if a mutual friend, we’ll call her ‘Stacy’ for the purpose of this post, was in England. Our friend had received an email from Stacy stating she was in trouble and asking for money. We know Stacy pretty well and we assured out friend that she was not in England and…
In our previous post in this Database Encryption series (Introduction, Part 2) we provided a decision tree for selecting a database encryption strategy. Our goal in this process is to map the encryption selection process to the security threats to protect against. Yes, that sounds simple enough, but it is tough to wade through vendor claims, especially when everyone from network storage to database vendors claims to provide the same value. We need to understand how to deal with the threats…
Back before Jerry Garcia moved on to the big pot cloud in the sky, I managed security at a couple of Dead shows in Boulder/Denver. In those days I was the assistant director for event security at the University of Colorado (before a short stint as director), and the Dead thought it would be better to bring us Boulder guys into Denver to manage the show there since we’d be less ‘aggressive’. Of course we all also worked as regular staff or supervisors for the company running the shows in Denver,…
There’s a bit of debate brewing in the comments on the latest post in our database encryption series. That series is meant to focus only on database encryption, so we weren’t planning about talking much about other options, but it’s an important issue.