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I’ve always been pretty competitive. For instance, back in high school my friends and I would make boasts about how we’d have more of this or that, and steal the other’s wife, etc. Yes, it was silly high school ego run rampant, but I thought life was a zero sum game back then. Win/win was not in my vocabulary. I win, you lose, that’s it. I carried that competitive spirit into the first 15 years or so of my working career. At META, it was about my service selling more than yours. About me being able to stake out overlapping coverage areas and winning the research battle. In the start-up world, it was about raising the money and beating the other companies with similar stories & models. Then in a variety of vendor gigs, each in very competitive market spaces, it was about competing and winning and having a better story and giving the sales team better tools to win more deals. Nothing was ever good enough – not at work, not at home, and not in my own head. Yeah, I was frackin’ miserable. And made most of the people around me miserable as well. When I was told my services were no longer needed at CipherTrust, I saw it as an opportunity to go in a different direction. To focus on helping folks do better, as opposed to winning whatever ‘needed’ to be won. It wasn’t exactly a conscious decision, but I knew I needed a change in focus and attitude. For the most part, it worked. I was much happier, I was doing better, and I was less grumpy. Then I stepped back into corporate life, but to be honest, my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t care if we lost a specific deal because we should be able to get into a lot of deals and statistically we’d be OK. Of course, I had to mask that indifference, but ultimately for a lot of reasons it didn’t make sense for me to continue in that role. So I left and got back to where I could help folks, and not worry about winning. But you can’t entirely escape competition. Now I play softball on Sundays with a bunch of old guys like me. But some of them still have that competitive fire burning and to be honest it gets annoying. When someone boots a ground ball or lines out with runners on, these guys get all pissed off. We lost a one-run game last Sunday, after coming back from 3 runs down in the last inning. I was happy with that effort – we didn’t give up. Others were pissed. Personally, I play softball because it’s fun. I get outside, I run around, I get my couple of at-bats and make a few plays in the field. But when guys get all uppity about not winning or someone making a mistake, it’s demotivating to me. I’ve got to find a way to tune out the negativity and still have fun playing. Or I’ll need to stop, which is the wrong answer. But I am working too hard to be positive (which is not my default mode) to hang around with negatives. Yes, I like to win. But I don’t need to win anymore. And I’m a lot happier now because of it. But that’s just me. – Mike. Photo credits: “win win” uploaded to Flickr by TheTruthAbout… Recent Securosis Posts Understanding and Selecting SIEM/LM: Deployment Models. Trustwave, Acquisitions, PCI, and Navigating Conflicts of Interest. FireStarter: Is Full Disk Encryption without Pre-Boot Secure? Return of the Security Start-up? Doing Well by Doing Good (and Protecting the Kids). Take Our Data Security Survey & Win an iPad. Incite 4 U Different NAC strokes for different folks – A few weeks ago, Joel Snyder talked about what went wrong with NAC. It was a good analysis of the market issues. Joel’s conclusion is that there isn’t really a standard set of NAC features, but rather a number of different breeds. Which basically means there is no market – not a consistent one, anyway. No wonder the category has struggled – nobody can agree on what problem the technology is supposed to solve. Joel also points out some of the political issues of deploying a solution that spans network, endpoint, and security teams. This week, NetworkWorld published the Joel’s review. He does likes some of the products (those based on 802.1X like Avenda, Enterasys, and Juniper), and has issues with some of the others (ForeScout and TrustWave). But ultimately the review highlights the reality of the market, which is that there isn’t one. – MR DRM dreams – Designing DRM systems in 1996, I had big hopes that digital lockers would be a popular choice to secure content for people to share on the Internet. I thought everyone from banking systems to media distribution could benefit. By 1998 that dream faded as nobody was really interested in secure content storage or delivery. But it turns out someone has the same dreams I did: hackers embrace DRM as a way to hide pirated content as reported on Yahoo! News. Basically pirated video is wrapped up in a protective blanket of encryption, which can then be moved and stored freely, without detection by content analysis tools. Porn, pirated movies, and whatever else, can be distributed without fear of being inspected and discovered. And this model works really freaking’ well when the buyer and seller want to keep their activity a secret. Hollywood may have complained bitterly about pirated DVDs, but this particular delivery model will be near impossible to stop. No, Cyber-nanny will not cut it. There are only a handful of ways to catch and prosecute this type of crime. Law enforcement will have to figure out how to police the exchange of decryption keys for money. – AL Disclosure is religion – I’ve been known to write and talk about the disclosure debate, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s

I am thinking about writing a guide to secure open source databases, including verification queries. Do you all think that would be useful? For the most part, when I write about database security, I write about generic approaches that apply to all database platforms. I think this is helpful for database managers, as well as security and IT professionals who have projects that span multiple database types. When writing the Database Security Fundamentals series, my goal was to provide a universal checklist of the database security basics that anyone with basic DBA skills could accomplish in a week. DBAs who work in large enterprise may have established guidelines, but small and medium sized firms generally don’t, and I wanted the series to provide an awareness on what to look for and what to do. I also find that mainstream Oracle DBAs tune out because I don’t provide specific queries or discuss native features. The downside is that the series covers what to do, but not how to do it. By taking a more abstract look at the problems to be solved across security and compliance, I cannot provide specific details that will help with Oracle, Sybase, Teradata, PostgreSQL, or others – there are simply too many policies for too many platforms for me to sufficiently cover. Most DBAs know how to write the queries to fulfill the policies I outlined. For the non-DBA security or IT professional, I recognize that what I wrote leaves a gap between what you should do and how to do it. To close this gap you have a couple of options: Acquire tools like DAM, encryption, and assessment from commercial vendors Participate on database chat boards and ask questions RTFM Make friends with a good DBA Yes, there are free tools out there for assessment, auditing, and monitoring. They provide limited value, and that may be sufficient for you. I find that the free assessment tools are pretty bad because they usually only work for one database, and their policies are miserably out of date. Further, if you try to get assessment from a commercial vendor, they don’t cover open source databases like Derby, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Open Ingres. These platforms are totally underserved by the security community but most have very large installed user bases. But you have to dig for information, and cobble together stuff for anything that is not a large commercial platform. So here is what I am thinking: through the remainder of the year I am going to write a security guide to open source databases. I will create an overview for each of the platforms (PostgreSQL, Derby, Ingres and MySQL), and cover the basics for passwords, communications security, encryption options, and so forth, including specific assessment polices and rules for baselining the databases. Every week I’ll provide a couple new rules for one platform, and I will write some specific assessment policies as well. This is going to take a little resourcefulness on my part, as I am not even sure my test server boots at this point, and I have never used Derby, but what the heck – I think it will be fun. We will post the assessment rules much like Rich and Chris did for the ipfw Firewall Rule Set. So what do you think? Should I include other databases? Should I include under-served but non-open-source such as MS Access and Teradata? Anyone out there want to volunteer to test scripts (because frankly I suck at query execution plans and optimization nowdays)? Let me know because I have been kicking this idea around for a while, but it’s not fully fleshed out, and I would appreciate your input. Share: