One of the sessions I enjoyed at DefCon was Nathan Hamiel and Shawn Moyer’s, “Satan is on My Friends List”. Aside from directly hacking the security of some of these sites, they experimented with creating fake profiles of known individuals and seeing who they could fool. Notably, they created a profile (with permission) for Marcus Ranum on LinkedIn, then tried to see how many people they could fool into connecting to it. Yes, folks, I fell for it.
I ran across this article last week in the Arizona Republic regarding redesign of the Internet. This was very much in line with one of the recurring topics that seemed to be discussed in the halls at Caesars Palace during Black Hat: how might we change the Internet if we were to start from a clean slate? There are clearly many motivating factors to do so, from the fragility and dependency issues of the Internet on DNS as discussed by Kaminisky , email spam , DDOS, use of a basically insecure…
A bit of a different episode this week. Since Martin is traveling, rather than a guest host this week we’re posting the last of the interviews recorded at DefCon- but this one is a doozy. David Mortman, Dave Maynor, Chris Hoff, Robert “Rsnake” Hanson, and Larry Pesce join us immediately after we all finished our DefCon panel. Martin, as the sober one, interviews us as we record what is our first clearly explicit podcast. Yes folks, we hit all 7 dirty words plus a few bonuses. Not to worry, we…
During a recent eBay auction, when clicking the “Pay Now” button for an item I had won, I was taken off the eBay site, to a third party merchant site. The merchant site was attempting to verify address information and shipping options, and then forward me to PayPal. I tried going back into my eBay account and making the payment directly to PayPal several times, in an attempt to avoid the third-party site, without success. It appears that eBay is allowing third party merchants to insert their…
During the second day at Black Hat, somewhat depressed by yet another futile attempt to locate coffee and fighting human gridlock, I decided that it was no longer worth the effort and simply sat down in the nearest conference. And I am glad I did as that random selection of presentations turned out to be one of my favorites of the week. The presentation was called Visual Forensic Analysis and Reverse Engineering, presented by Gregory Conti and Erik Dean. I would offer a link for you, but I have…
Perusing my blogs this morning I caught a post by Anton on DLP and compliance. That’s the blogging equivalent of chaining a nice fat bunny to a stake in the middle of coyote territory here in Phoenix (in other words, the park behind our house). I, as the rabid coyote of DLP-ness, am compelled to respond.
There’s been a bit of debate on the blogs recently over the role of analysts, and how they pay their bills. It started with the Hoff, and Alan Shimel followed up (no link right now due to Alan’s blog issues). I know Chris wasn’t calling me out on this one (because he told me), but I do recognize I put a lot of content out there that people trust to help make decisions, and it’s only fair they know of any potential conflicts of interest I might have.
We’re proud to announce a new whitepaper dedicated to best practices in endpoint DLP. It’s a combination of our series of posts on the subject, enhanced with additional material, diagrams, and editing. The title is (no surprise) Best Practices for Endpoint Data Loss Prevention. It was actually complete before Black Hat, but I’m just getting a chance to put it up now.
No, we didn’t hack any networks or laptops, but we absolutely dominated when it comes to podcast coverage. This was our second series of microcasts since RSA, and we really like the format. Short, to the point interviews, posted nearly as fast as we can record them.
So we took the plunge at the Lane household and bought an iMac. That is the good news. The bad news: it was my wife, and not me, who made the purchase.