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Incite 8/12/2015: Transitions

Mike Rothman August 12, 2015 2 Comments

The depths of summer heat in Atlanta can only mean one thing: the start of the school year. The first day of school is always the second Monday in August, so after a week of frenetic activity to get the kids ready, and a day’s diversion for some Six Flags roller coaster goodness, the kids started the next leg of their educational journey. XX1 started high school, which is pretty surreal for me. I remember her birth like it was yesterday, but her world has got quite a bit bigger. She spent the summer exploring the Western US and is now in a much bigger school. Of course her world will continue to get bigger with each new step. It will expand like a galaxy if she lets it. The twins also had a big change of scene, starting middle school. So they were all fired up about getting lockers for the first time. A big part of preparing them was to make sure XX2’s locker was decorated and that the Boy had an appropriately boyish locker shelf. The pink one we had left over from XX1 was no bueno. Dark purple shelves did the trick.   Their first day started a bit bumpy for the twins, with some confusion about the bus schedule – much to our chagrin, when we headed out to meet the bus, it was driving right past. So we loaded them into the car and drove them on the first day. But all’s well that ends well, and after a couple days they are settling in. As they transition from one environment to the next, the critical thing is to move forward understanding that there will be discomfort. It’s not like they have a choice about going to the next school. Georgia kind of mandates that. But as they leave the nest to build their own lives they’ll have choices – lots of them. Stay where they are, or move forward into a new situation, likely with considerable uncertainty. A quote I love is: “In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.” If you have been reading the Incite for any length of time you know I am always moving foward. It’s natural for me, but might not be for my kids or anyone else. So I will continue ensuring they are aware that during each transition that they can decide what to do. There are no absolutes; sometimes they will need to pause, and other times they should jump in. And if they take Dad’s lead they will keep jumping into an ever-expanding reality. –Mike Photo credit: “Flickrverse, Expanding Ever with New Galaxies Forming” originally uploaded by cobalt123 Thanks to everyone who contributed to my Team in Training run to support the battle against blood cancers. We have raised over $5,000 so far, which is incredible. I am overwhelmed with gratitude. You can read my story in a recent Incite, and then hopefully contribute (tax-deductible) whatever you can afford. Thank you. The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the 2014 conference. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour and check it out. Your emails, alerts and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and.. hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. Aug 12 – Karma July 13 – Living with the OPM Hack May 26 – We Don’t Know Sh–. You Don’t Know Sh– May 4 – RSAC wrap-up. Same as it ever was. March 31 – Using RSA March 16 – Cyber Cash Cow March 2 – Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there) February 16 – Cyber!!! February 9 – It’s Not My Fault! January 26 – 2015 Trends January 15 – Toddler December 18 – Predicting the Past November 25 – Numbness October 27 – It’s All in the Cloud October 6 – Hulk Bash September 16 – Apple Pay Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Building a Threat Intelligence Program Gathering TI Introduction EMV and the Changing Payment Space Mobile Payment Systemic Tokenization The Liability Shift Migration The Basics Introduction Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Recently Published Papers Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices Cracking the Confusion: Encryption & Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers & Applications Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security Securing Enterprise Applications Secure Agile Development Trends in Data Centric Security Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Incident Response/Management The Future of Security Incite 4 U Business relevance is still important: Forrester’s Peter Cerrato offers an interesting analogy at ZDNet about not being a CISO dinosaur, and avoiding extinction. Instead try to be an eagle, whose ancestors survived the age of the dinosaurs. How do you do that? By doing a lot of the things I’ve been talking about for, um, 9 years at this point. Be relevant to business? Yup. Get face time with executives and interface with the rank and file? Yup. Plan for failure? Duh. I don’t want to minimize the helpfulness or relevance of this guidance. But I do want make clear that the only thing new here is the analogy. – MR The Dark Tangent is right: What did I learn at Black Hat? That people can hack cars. Wait, I am pretty sure I already knew this was possible. Maybe it was the new Adobe Flash bugs? Or IoT vulnerabilities? Mobile hacks or browser vulnerabilities? Yeah, same old parade of vulnerable crap. What I really learned is that Jeff Moss is right: Software liability is coming. Few vendors – Microsoft being the notable exception – have really put in the effort to address vulnerable software. Mary Ann Davidson’s insulting rant reinforces that vendors really don’t want to fix vulnerabilities –

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MAD Karma

Rich August 12, 2015 No Comments

Way back in 2004 Rich wrote an article over at Gartner on the serious issues plaguing Oracle product security. The original piece is long gone, but here is an article about it. It lead to a moderately serious political showdown, Rich flying out to meet with Oracle execs, and eventually their move to a quarterly patch update cycle (due more to the botched patch than Rich’s article). This week Oracle’s 25-year-veteran CISO Mary Ann Davidson published a blog post decrying customer security assessments of their products. Actually she threatened legal action for evaluation of Oracle products using tools that look at application code. Then she belittled security researchers (for crying wolf, not understanding what they are talking about, and wasting everybody’s time – especially her team’s), told everyone to trust Oracle because they find nearly all the bugs anyway (not that they seem to patch them in a timely fashion), and… you get it. Then, and this is the best part, Oracle pulled the post and basically issued an apology. Which never happens. So you probably don’t need us to tell you what this Firestarter is about. The short version is that the attitudes and positions expressed in her post closely match Rich’s experiences with Oracle and Mary Ann over a decade ago. Yeah, this is a fun one. Share:

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