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Friday Summary: June 13, 2014

Adrian Lane June 13, 2014 No Comments

As Rich said in last week’s Summary, the blog will be quiet this summer because we are busier than we have ever been before. The good news is that new research and Securosis offerings are usually the result. But that does not stop us from feeling guilty about our lack of blogging. With that, I leave you with a couple thoughts from my world this week on a Friday the 13th: Picture an older Formula 1 car. Blindingly fast. Pinnacle of design in its day. Maybe Stirling Moss or Ayrton Senna drove it to victory. It’s still beautiful and fast, but you can’t race it today because it’s not competitive. It can’t be. In some cases the rules of F1 change so great technologies can no longer be used (i.e., ground effects). In other cases the technologies are longer state-of-the-art. You cannot – and should not – retrofit an old chassis. So what do you do with the car? Seems a shame to relegate an F1 car to the dustbin, but you can’t compete with it any longer. As part of our day jobs we get asked to review products and make suggestions on the viability of platforms going forward. Sometimes product managers want us to vet their roadmaps; sometimes we are asked to support a due diligence effort. Whatever the case, we occasionally find cases where a great old product simply cannot compete or be retrofitted to be competitive. Don’t get emotionally attached because it was the S#!$ in its day, and best not think too much about sunk costs – just go back to the drawing board. A fresh start is your only answer. There are many alternatives to passwords. Some outfits, like nospronos.com have recycled an old idea to do away with user passwords on their World Cup web site. Users each get a ‘secret’ URL to their web page, and a public URL to share with friends. Sound familiar? Public key crypto is the gist here: the user gets a private account, the web site does not need to store or manage user passwords, and they can still share content with friends. Good idea? In the short term it’s great, because by the time the users lose or leak passwords the World Cup will be over. It’s fragile, but likely just secure enough to work just long enough. Well, it would have if they had only remembered to issue HTTPS URLs. Oh well… sans passwords and sans privacy means sans security. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Mortman quoted in “The 7 skills Ops pros need to succeed with DevOps”. Adrian quoted on Gazzang acquisition by Cloudera. Adrian to present on the Open Source and Application Security Survey next week. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: Open Source development Analysis. Actually – we all selected the Open Source development Analysis this week. Wonder why? Other Securosis Posts Take our IT practices survey and win cool stuff (and free data). Incite 6/11/2014: Dizney. Summary: Summer. Cloudera acquires Gazzang. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: After Heartbleed, We’re Overreacting to Bugs That Aren’t a Big Deal. Our job isn’t to fix everything, but to manage risk and fix things in the right order. Mike Rothman: The CSO’s Failure to Lead. Is the inability to execute on a security program the fault of the CISO? Maybe. Maybe not. Causation is not correlation. Dave Lewis: ISS’s View on Target Directors Is a Signal on Cybersecurity. If you are keeping score at home we have a number of firsts: CIO dismissal, credit rating downgrade, CEO dismissal, and boardroom shakeup. That is a lot of firsts – this is a Sputnik moment for security. David Mortman: Here’s How You Pick the “Unpickable” Bike Lock. Adrian Lane: 10 things: #1 Parameterize Database Queries. Jim Bird is going through the OWASP Top 10 and explaining the whys and hows to protect against these issues. It’s a series, and this is the first post. Research Reports and Presentations Defending Against Network-based Distributed Denial of Service Attacks. Reducing Attack Surface with Application Control. Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Security Monitoring. The Future of Security: The Trends and Technologies Transforming Security. Security Analytics with Big Data. Security Management 2.5: Replacing Your SIEM Yet?. Defending Data on iOS 7. Eliminate Surprises with Security Assurance and Testing. What CISOs Need to Know about Cloud Computing. Defending Against Application Denial of Service Attacks. Top News and Posts GameOver Zeus botnet disrupted by FBI, Microsoft 14-Year Olds Hack ATM With Default Password More Fun with EMV Adobe, Microsoft Push Critical Security Fixes iOS 8 to stymie trackers and marketers with MAC address randomization ‘NSA-proof’ Protonet server crowdfunds $1m in under 90 minutes SSL/TLS MITM vulnerability CVE-2014-0224 TweetDeck wasn’t actually hacked, and everyone was silly Can You Track Me Now? Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment goes to Marco Tietz, in response to the Open Source Development and Application Security Analysis. That is pretty cool, looking forward to your coverage. As I’m working with Sonatype right now on a couple of things, I can confirm that they know what they are doing and that they are in fact in a pretty unique position to provide insights into open source usage and possible security implications. Share:

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