I hate to admit it, but I have a bad habit of dropping administrative tasks or business development to focus on the research. It’s kind of like programmer days – I loved coding, but hated debugging or documentation. But eventually I realize I haven’t invoiced for a quarter, or forgot to tell prospects we have stuff they can pay for. Those are the nights I don’t sleep very well.

Thus I’ve spent a fair bit of time this week catching up on things. I still have more invoices to push out, and spent a lot of time editing materials for our next papers, and my contributions to the next version of the Cloud Security Alliance Guidance report. I even updated our retainer programs for users, vendors, and investors. Not that I’ve sent it to anyone – I sort of hate getting intrusive sales calls, so I assume I’m annoying someone if I mention they can pay me for stuff. Probably not the best trait for an entrepreneur.

Thus I’m looking forward to a little downtime next week as my wife and I head off for vacation. It starts tonight at a black tie charity event at the Phoenix Zoo (first time I’ll be in a penguin suit in something like 10 years). Then, on Monday, we head to Puerto Vallarta for a 5 day vacation we won in a raffle at… the Phoenix Zoo. It’s our first time away from the baby since we had her, so odds are instead of hanging out at the beach or diving we’ll be sleeping about 20 hours a day.

We’ll see how that goes.

And with that, on to the Friday Summary:

Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences

Favorite Securosis Posts

Other Securosis Posts

Favorite Outside Posts

Top News and Posts

Blog Comment of the Week

This week’s best comment comes from Slavik in response to SQL Injection Prevention:

Hi Adrian, good stuff.

I just wanted to point out that the fact that you use stored procedures (or packages) is not in itself a protection against SQL injection. It’s enough to briefly glance at the many examples on milw0rm to see how even Oracle with their supplied built-in packages can make mistakes and be vulnerable to SQL injections that will allow an attacker to completely control the database. I agree that if you use only static queries then you’re safe inside the procedure but it does not make your web application safe (especially with databases that support multiple commands in the same call like SQL server batches). Of course, if you use dynamic queries, it’s even worse. Unfortunately, there are times when dynamic queries are necessary and it makes the code very difficult to write securely.

The most important advice regarding SQL injection I would give developers is to use bind variables (parametrized queries) in their applications. There are many frameworks out there that encourage such usage and developers should utilize them.

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