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Dark Reading Column: Attack Of The Consumers (And Those Pesky iPhones)

Rich July 9, 2008 No Comments

I have a sneaking suspicion my hosting provider secretly hates me after getting Slashdotted twice this week. But I don’t care, because in less than 48 hours it’s iPhone Day!!! Okay, so I already have one and all the new one adds is a little more speed, and a GPS that probably isn’t good enough for what I need. But I use the friggen thing so darn much I can definitely use that speed. It’s been up for a few days, but with everything else going on I’m just now getting back to my latest Dark Reading column. This month I take a look at what may be one of the most disruptive trends in enterprise technology- the consumerization of IT. Here’s an excerpt: That’s the essence of the consumerization of IT. Be it laptops, cellphones, or Web services, we’re watching the walls crumble between business and consumer technology. IT expands from the workplace and permeates our entire lives. From home broadband and remote access, to cellphones, connected cars, TiVos, and game consoles with Web browsers. Employees are starting to adapt technology to their own individual work styles to increase personal productivity. The more valued the knowledge worker, the more likely they are to personalize their technology — work provided or not. Some companies are already reporting difficulties in getting highly qualified knowledge workers and locking them into strict IT environments. No, it’s not like the call center will be running off their own laptops, but they’ll probably be browsing the Web, sending IMs, and updating their blogs off their phones as they sit in front of their terminals. This is far from the end of the world. While we need to change some of our approaches, we’re gaining technology tools and experience in running looser environments without increasing our risk. There are strategies we can adopt to loosen the environment, without increasing risks: Share:

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More On The DNS Vulnerability

Rich July 9, 2008 No Comments

Okay- it’s been a crazy 36 hours since Dan Kaminsky released his information on the massive multivendor patch and DNS issue. I want to give a little background on how I’ve been involved (for full disclosure) as well as some additional aspects of this. If you hate long stories, the short version is he just walked me through the details, this is a very big deal, and you need to patch immediately. Dan contacted me about a week or so ago to help get the word out to the CIO-level audience. As an analyst, that’s a group I have more access to. I was involved with the initial press conference and analyst briefings, and helped write the executive overview to put the issue in non-geek terms. At the time he just gave me the information that was later made public. I’ve known Dan for a few years now and trust him, so I didn’t push as deeply as I would with someone I don’t have that relationship with. Thus, as the comments and other blogs dropped into a maelstrom of discontent, I didn’t have anything significant to add. Dan realized he underestimated the response of the security community and decided to let me, Ptacek, Dino, and someone else I won’t mention into the fold. Here’s the deal- Dan has the goods. More goods than I expected. Dino and Ptacek agree. Tom just issued a public retraction/apology. This is absolutely one of the most exceptional research projects I’ve seen. Dan’s reputation will emerge more than intact, although he will still have some black eyes for not disclosing until Black Hat. Here’s what you need to know: You must patch your name servers as soon as possible. This is real, it’s probably not what you’re thinking. It’s a really good exploit (which is bad news for us). Ignore the “Important” rating from Microsoft, and other non-critical ratings. You have to keep in mind that for many of those organizations nothing short of remote code execution without authentication will result in a critical rating. That’s how the systems are built. Dan screwed up some of his handling of this, and I’m part of that screwup since I set my cynical analyst hat aside and ran totally on trust and reputation. Now that I know more, I stand behind my reaction and statements, but that’s a bad habit for me to get into. This still isn’t the end of the world, but it’s serious enough you should break your patch cycle (if you have one) on name servers to get them fixed. Then start rolling out to the rest of your infrastructure. CERT is updating their advisory on an ongoing basis. It’s located here. Next time something like this happens I’ll push for full details sooner, but Dan is justified in limiting exposure of this. His Black Hat talk will absolutely rock this year. Share:

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