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Friday Summary – October 16, 2009

Rich October 16, 2009 1 Comment

All last week I was out of the office on vacation down in Puerto Vallarta. It was a trip my wife and I won in a raffle at the Phoenix Zoo, which was pretty darn cool. I managed to unplug far more than I can usually get away with these days. I had to bring the laptop due to an ongoing client project, but nothing hit and I never had to open it up. I did keep up with email, and that’s where things got interesting. Before heading down I added the international plan to my iPhone, for about $7, which would bring my per-minute costs in Mexico down from $1 per minute to around $.69 a minute. Since we talked less than 21 minutes total on the phone down there, we lose. For data, I signed up for the 20 MB plan at a wonderfully fair $25. You don’t want to know what a 50 MB plan costs. Since I’ve done these sorts of things before (like the Moscow trip where I could never bring myself to look at the bill), I made sure I reset my usage on the iPhone so I could carefully track how much I used. The numbers were pretty interesting – checking my email ranged from about 500K to 1MB per check. I have a bunch of email accounts, and might have cut that down if I disabled all but my primary accounts. I tried to check email only about 2-3 times a day, only responding to the critical messages (1-4 a day). That ate through the bandwidth so quickly I couldn’t even conceive of checking the news, using Maps, or nearly any other online action. In 4 days I ran through about 14 MB, giving me a bit more space on the last day to occupy myself at the airport. To put things in perspective, a satellite phone (which you can rent for trips – you don’t have to buy) is only $1 per minute, although the data is severely restricted (on Iridium, unless you go for a pricey BGAN). Since I was paying $3/minute on my Russia trip, next time I go out there I’ll be renting the sat phone. So for those of you who travel internationally and want to stay in touch… good luck. -rich On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading post on Getting Around Vertical Database Security. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich, Mort, and Adrian: Which Bits Are the Right Bits. We all independently picked this one, which either means it’s really good, or everything else we did this week sucked. Meier: It Isn’t Risk Management If You Can’t Lose. Other Securosis Posts Where Art Thou, Security Logging? IDM: Reality Sets In Barracuda Networks Acquires Purewire Microsoft Security Updates for October 2009 Personal Information Dump Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Michael Howard’s post on the SMBv2 bug and the Microsoft SDL. This kind of analysis is invaluable. Adrian: Well, the entire Protect the Data series really. Mortman: Think, over at the New School blog. Meier: Security Intelligence: Attacking the Kill Chain. (Part three of a series on security principles in network defense.) Top News and Posts Mozilla Launches Plugin Checker. This is great, but needs to be automatic for Flash/QuickTime. Adobe recommends turning off JavaScript in Acrobat/Reader due to major vulnerability. I recommend uninstalling Acrobat/Reader, since it’s probably the biggest single source of cross platform 0-days. Air New Zealand describes reason for outage. Not directly security, but a good lesson anyway. I’ve lost content in the past due to these kinds of assumptions. Google to send information about hacked Web sites to owners. Details of Wal-Mart’s major security breach. Greg Young on enterprise UTM and Unicorns. Microsoft fixes Windows 7 (and other) bugs. Delta being sued over email hack. 29 Bugs fixed by Adobe. California County hoarding data. Mozilla Plugin Check. Paychoice Data Breach. Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment comes from Rob in response to Which Bits are the Right Bits: Perhaps it is not well understood that audit logs are generally not immutable. There may also be low awareness of the value of immutable logs: 1) to protect against anti-forensics tools; 2) in proving compliance due diligence, and; 3) in providing a deterrent against insider threats. Share:

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