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Incite 8/4/2010: Letters for Everyone

Mike Rothman August 4, 2010 No Comments

As I mentioned in the Mailbox Vigil, we don’t put much stock in snail mail anymore. Though we did get a handful of letters from XX1 (oldest daughter) from sleepaway camp, aside from that it’s bills and catalogs. That said, every so often you do get entertained by the mail. A case in point happened when we got back from our summer pilgrimage to the Northern regions this weekend (which is why there was no Incite last week). On arriving home (after a brutal 15 hour car ride, ugh!) we were greeted by a huge box of mail delivered by our trusty postal worker. Given that the Boss was occupied doing about 100 loads of laundry and I had to jump back into work, we let XX1 express her newfound maturity and sort our mail. It was pretty funny. She called out every single piece and got genuinely excited by some of the catalogs. She got a thank you note from a friend, a letter from another, and even a few of her own letters to us from camp (which didn’t arrive before we left on holiday). XX2 (her twin) got a thank you note also. But nothing for the boy. I could tell he was moping a bit and I hoped something would come his way. Finally he heard the magic words: “Sam got a letter.” Reminded me of Blue’s Clues. It was from someone with an address at the local mall. Hmmm. But he dutifully cracked it open and had me read it to him. It was from someone at LensCrafters reminding him that it’s been a year since he’s gotten his glasses and he’s due for a check-up. He was on the edge of his seat as I read about how many adults have big problems with their eyes and how important it is to get an annual check-up. Guess they didn’t realize the Boy is not yet 7 and also that he sees his Opthamologist every 6 weeks. But that didn’t matter – he got a letter. So he’s carrying this letter around all day, like he just got a toy from Santa Claus or the Hanukkah fairy. He made me read it to him about 4 times. Now he thinks the sales person at LensCrafters is his pal. Hopefully he won’t want to invite her to his birthday party. Normally I would have just thrown out the direct mail piece, but I’m glad we let XX1 sort the mail. The Boy provided me with an afternoon of laughter and that was certainly worth whatever it cost to send us the piece. – Mike. Photo credits: “surprise in the mailbox” originally uploaded by sean dreilinger Recent Securosis Posts The Cancer within Evidence Based Research Methodologies Friday Summary: July 23, 2010 Death, Irrelevance, and a Pig Roast What Do We Learn at Black Hat/DefCon? Tokenization Series: Token Servers Token Servers, Part 2 (Architecture, Integration, and Management) Token Servers, Part 3 (Deployment Models) Various NSO Quant Posts: Monitoring Health Maintenance Subprocesses Monitor Process Revisited Incite 4 U We’re AV products. Who would try to hack us? – More great stuff from Krebs. This time he subjected himself to installing (and reinstalling) AV products in his VM to see which of them actually use Windows anti-exploitations technologies (like DEP and ASLR). The answer? Not many, though it’s good to see Microsoft eating their own dog food. I like the responses from the AV vendors, starting with F-Secure’s “we’ve been working on performance,” which means they are prioritizing not killing your machine over security – go figure. And Panda shows they have ostriches in Spain as well, as they use their own techniques to protect their software. OK, sure. This is indicative of the issues facing secure software. If the security guys can’t even do it right, we don’t have much hope for everyone else. Sad. – MR Mid-market basics – She does not blog very often, but when she does, Jennifer Jabbusch gets it right. We here at Securosis are all about simplifying security for end users, and I thought JJ’s recent post on Four Must-Have SMB Security Tools did just that. With all the security pontification about new technologies to supplant firewalls, and how ineffective AV is at detecting bad code, there are a couple tools that are fundamental to data security. As bored as we are talking about them, AV, firewalls, and access controls are the three basics that everyone needs. While I would personally throw in encrypted backups as a must have, those are the core components. But for many SMB firms, these technologies are the starting point. They are not looking at extrusion prevention, behavioral monitoring, or event correlation – just trying to make sure the front door is locked, both physically and electronically. It’s amazing to think, but I run into companies all the time where an 8-year-old copy of Norton AV and a password on the ‘server’ are the security program. I hope to see more basic posts like this that appeal to the mainstream – and SMB is the mainstream – on Dark Reading and other blogs as well. – AL Jailbreak with a side of shiv – Are you one of those folks who wants to jailbreak your iPhone to install some free apps on it? Even though it removes some of the most important security controls on the device? Well, have I got a deal for you! Just visit jailbreakme.com and the magical web application will jailbreak your phone right from the browser. Of course any jailbreak is the exploitation of a security vulnerability. And in this case it’s a remotely exploitable browser vulnerability, but don’t worry – I’m sure no bad guys will use it now that it’s public. Who would want to remotely hack the most popular cell phone on the planet? – RM A pig by a different name – SourceFire recently unveiled Razorback, their latest open source framework. Yeah, that’s some kind of hog or something,

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