A couple of people forwarded me this interview, and if you have not read it, it is really worth your time. It’s an amazing interview with Matt Knox, a developer with Direct Revenue who authored adware during his employ with them. For me this is important as it highlights stuff I figured was going on but really could not prove. It also exposes much of the thought process behind the developers at Micosoft, and it completely altered my behavior for ’sanitizing’ my PC’s. For me, this all started a…
Brian Krebs of the Washington Post dropped me a line this morning on a new article he posted. Heartland Payment Systems, a credit card processor, announced today, January 20th, that up to 100 Million credit cards may have been disclosed in what is likely the largest data breach in history. From Brian’s article:
Where do the policies in your security product come from? With the myriad of tools and security products on the market, where do the pre-built policies come from? I am not speaking of AV in this post- rather looking at IDS, VA, DAM, DLP, WAF, pen testing, SIEM, and many others that use a set of policies to address security and compliance problems. The question is who decides what is appropriate? On every sales engagement, customer and analyst meeting I have ever participated in for security…
Last week Jeremiah Grossman asked if I’d be willing to be a judge to help select the Top Ten Web Hacking Techniques for 2008. Along with Chris Hoff (not sure who that is), H D Moore, and Jeff Forristal.
I just read a great article on the Heartland breach, which I’ll talk more about later. There is one quote in there that really stands out:
I spent a lot of time debating with myself if I should wade into this topic. Early in my analyst career I loved to talk about national cybersecurity issues, but I eventually realized that, as an outsider, all I was doing was expending ink and oxygen, and I wasn’t actually contributing anything. That’s why you’ve probably noticed we spend more time on this blog talking about pragmatic security issues and dispensing practical advice than waxing poetic about who should get the Presidential CISO…
I managed to constrain my rants this week, staying focused on the issue as Martin and I covered our usual range of material. I think we were in top form in the first part of the show where we focus on the economics of breaches and discussed loss numbers, vs. breach notification statistics.
Man, nothing feels better than finishing off a few major projects. Yesterday we finalized the first draft of the Business Justification paper this series is based on, and I also squeezed out my presentation for IT Security World (in March) where I’m talking about major enterprise software security. Ah, the thrills and spills of SAP R/3 vs. Netweaver security!
In our last post, we mentioned that we’d be giving a few examples for data valuation. This is the part of the post where I try and say something pithy, but I’m totally distracted by the White House press briefing on MSNBC, so I’ll cut to the chase:
I’m consistently impressed with the stupidity of certain financial institutions. Take credit card companies and the issuing banks. We’re in the middle of a financial meltdown driven by failures in the credit system and easy credit, yet you still can’t check out at Target (or nearly anyplace else) without the annoying offer for your 10% discount if you just apply for a card on the spot.