I think we can firmly declare December 2010 the Month of Pwnage.

Between WikiLeaks, Gawker, McDonalds, and Anonymous DDoS attacks, I’m not sure infosec has been in the news this much since the early days of big data breaches. Heck, I haven’t been in the news this much since I got involved with the Kaminsky DNS thing. To be honest, it’s a little refreshing to have a string of big stories that don’t involve Albert Gonzales.

But here’s the thing I find so fascinating. In a very real sense, most of these high profile incidents are meaningless compared to the real compromises occurring daily out there. Our large enterprise clients are continuously compromised and mostly focusing on minimizing the damage. While everyone worries about Gawker passwords, local bad guys are following delivery trucks and stealing gifts off doorsteps – our local police nailed someone who hit a dozen houses and 50 gifts, and Pepper also had a couple incidents. I can no longer tell someone my profession without hearing a personal – generally recent – story of credit card or bank fraud. Heck, this week my bank teller described how a debit card she cut up months earlier was used for online purchases.

But I guess none of that is nearly as interesting as Gizmodo and Lifehacker account compromises. Or DDoS attacks that don’t cause any real damage. And even that story became pretty darn funny when they tried to attack Amazon… which is sort of like trying to deflect the course of the Sun with a flock of highly-motivated carrier pigeons.

I love my job.

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Remember, for every comment selected, Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. This week’s best comment goes to Marisa, in response to Get over it.

Only my dad calls it The BayThreat, Rich. :p

Gal Shpantzer had a great talk at DojoCon also this weekend about the “Security Outliers” and using analogies from other health and safety industries to tackle the subjects of infosec education and adoption. Seems like there is hope out there, and when the security industry is as old as sterilization practices in hospitals we’ll be seeing more trickle down adoption.

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