Someone has finally captured my vision of what a data centric society without privacy rights looks like. This video is really funny … and scary. Law enforcement and drug companies have been doing this for years. And even if it is not public knowledge, many insurance companies are doing this as well. Orwell had no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
A lot of security related news this week in the mainstream press. What with Nuclear Secrets being a fringe benefit to eBay shopping. Other big names like McAfee exposing users to a CSRF and MI-6’s operations nixed on a missing memory stick. With security this bad, who needs Chinese hackers? What gets me is the simple stuff that gets missed. Unencrypted hard drives and memory sticks. WTF? Fighter jet plans and power grid control systems on networks, directly or indirectly attached to the…
It’s kind of Apple Day here. Rich has been stuck in a ‘Genius Bar’ time warp all morning with a handful of dead Mac minis (Probably died from processor envy when the new Mac Pro arrived). Despite the recession, if you lose your appointment slot, you are going to be waiting a long time, as the AZ Apple stores are always packed. I would gladly have switched places with him, as I have spent all morning trying to decipher alien runes AT&T iPhone pricing plans. My cell phone provider, Quest…
I was reading the Network World coverage last night of the McAfee Spam Report stating spam rates were down 20%. While McAfee’s numbers are probably accurate, my initial reaction was “Bull$#(&”, because I personally am not seeing a drop in spam. If the McAfee report, as well as Brian Krebs’ posts, show the totals are down, why am I getting a lot more spam, increasing weekly to the point where I am becoming actively annoyed again? I was wondering how much was due to the launch of the new…
It’s been a bit of a strange week on the security front, with good guys hacking a botnet, a major security vendor called to the carpet for some vulnerabilities, and yet another set of Adobe 0days. But being Cinco de Mayo, we can just margarita our worries away.
Kelly at Dark Reading posted an interesting article today, based on a survey done by BT around hacking and penetration testing. I tend to take most of the stats in there with a bit of skepticism (as I do any time a vendor publishes numbers that favor their products), but I totally agree with the first number:
If you’ve been following this series, we’ve highlighted some of the breaches of trusted sites that were, or could have been, used to attack visitors. There’s nothing like hitting a major media or financial site and using it to hack anyone who wanders by that day.
On Monday at the RSA conference I learned that Oracle is purchasing Sun Microsystems. I was so busy/exhausted from the conference that I forgot about it until this week. This is pretty exciting! Whether it’s really a good or a bad thing depends upon your perspective. Technology-wise it’s a good match, but the corporate cultures are very dissimilar. I have spoken with a few current Sun employees who are really worried about what life will be like at the Big-O. However I heard very much the same…
Last week I posted an outline for a patch management cycle to base Project Quant metrics on. Based on some feedback, I think we need to hear from those of you who actually do this for a living (you really don’t want to know the crappy process we used back in my sysadmin days).
On Thursday at the RSA Conference, I had the opportunity to attend a lunch with the conference advisory board: Benjamin Jun of Cryptography Research, Tim Mather of RSA, Ari Juels of RSA Laboratories, and Asheem Chandna of Greylock Partners. It was an interesting event, and Alex Howard of TechTarget did a good job of covering the discussion in a recent article.