When my wife an I were a young couple looking for a place in the hills of Berkeley, we came across an ad for an apartment with “Views of the Golden Gate Bridge”. The price was a bit over our budget and the neighborhood was less than thrilling, but we decided to check it out. We had both previously lived in places with bay views and we felt that the extra expense would be worth it. But after we got to the property the apartment was beyond shabby, and no place we wanted to live. What’s more, we…
We are happy to announce the release of our Identity and Access Management for Cloud Services research paper.
Identity, access management, and authorization are each reasonably complicated subjects, but they all reside at the center of most on-premise security projects. Cloud computing and cloud security are both very complex subjects. Mix them all together, in essence federating your on-premise identity systems into the cloud, and you have complexity soup! Gunnar and I agreed that in light of…
We are pleased to put the finishing touches on our Database Denial of Service (DB-DoS) research and distribute it to the security community. Unless you have had your head in the sand for the past year, you know DoS attacks are back with a vengeance. Less visible but no less damaging is the fact that attackers are “moving up the stack” to the application and database layers. Rather than “flooding the pipes” with millions of bogus packets, we now see cases where a single request topples a…
This week marks the end of one year and the beginning of the next. For a long time I took this opportunity around the holidays to revisit my goals and ensure I was still on track. I diligently wrote down my life goals and break those into 10, 5, and 1 year increments. Just to make sure I was making progress toward where I wanted to be. Then a funny thing happened. I realized that constantly trying to get somewhere else made me very unhappy. So I stopped doing that.
I am in a bit of a pickle, and could use some advice.
Over the time I have been an analyst, I have learned that it is important to have the right distribution of research. My rule of thumb is 80-90% of it should be practical research to help people get their jobs done on a daily basis. Then you can spend 10-20% on future research that I promise not to call thought leadership.
It starts right there in PCI-DSS Requirement 1. Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data. Since it’s the first requirement, firewalls must be important, right? Not that PCI is the be all, end all of security goodness, but it does represent the low bar of controls you should have in place to defend against attackers. As the line of first defense on a network, it’s the firewall’s job to enforce a set of access policies that dictate what traffic should be allowed…
Brian Krebs is digging into the SEA and trying to out individuals:
A hacking group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has been getting an unusual amount of press lately, most recently after hijacking the Web sites of The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. But surprisingly little light has been shed on the individuals behind these headline-grabbing attacks. Beginning today, I’ll be taking a closer look at this organization, starting with one of the group’s core…
FierceCIO’s Derek Slater offers an interesting perspective on why W. Edwards Deming hates your approach to IT security. I was educated as an industrial engineer, so we had to study Deming left, right, and center in school. Of course when I graduated and went into programming, nobody realized that Deming’s concepts also apply to software development. But that’s another story for another Six Sigma.
It’s nice that my kids are still at a stage where they don’t want to disappoint me or the Boss. They need our approval and can be crushed if we show even the slightest measure of dissatisfaction in what they do. My ego-centric self likes that, but the rest of me wants them to learn to stop worrying about what everyone thinks and do what they think is right. Of course, that involves having enough life experience to understand the difference between right and wrong.
Few things make me happier than getting to publicly disagree with one of my coworkers.
Earlier today Mike suggested that security is too reactive and tactical to succeed. Then we hear the usual platitudes about treating security as a risk management function, better metrics, blah blah blah. Not that there is anything wrong with all that, but it needs to be discussed in context of the fundamental nature of security.