I have never been a fan of large gatherings of people. You would never find me at a giant convention center listening to some evangelist, motivational speaker, politician, or business ‘guru’ tell me how to improve my life. I don’t stalk celebrities; participate in “million man marches”, tea party gatherings, promise-keepers, or any something-a-palooza to support a cause. I don’t have a cult-like appreciation of ‘successful’ people. It has nothing to do with a political or religious bent and I…
Today’s big news is the hack against banking systems to pre-authenticate thousands of ATM and pre-paid debit cards. The attackers essentially modified debit card databases in several Middle Eastern banks, then leveraged their virtual cards into cash. From AP Newswire:
There is no single right way to pick the best encryption option. Which is ‘best’ depends on a ton of factors including the specifics of the cloud deployment, what you already have for key management or encryption, the nature of the data, and so on. That said, here are some guidelines that should work in most cases.
Most folks think you need to be a day trading financial junkie to have any interest in quarterly earnings releases and/or conference call transcripts. But you can learn a lot from following the results of your strategic security vendors and companies you don’t do business with, but who would like to do business with you. You can glean stuff about overall market health, significant problem spaces, technology innovation, and business execution.
Do you ever look at your To Do list and feel like you want to just run away and hide? Me too. I talk a lot about consistent effort and not trying to hit home runs, but working for a bunch of singles and doubles. That works great for run rate activities like writing the Incite and my blog series. But I am struggling to move forward on a couple very important projects that are bigger than a breadbox and critical to the business. It is annoying the crap out of me, and I figure publicly airing my…
In hindsight we should have seen this coming. I mean it’s not like McAfee even showed up for the most recent NSS Labs next-generation firewall (NGFW) test. They made noise about evolving their IPS, I mean Network Security Platform, to offer integrated firewall capabilities. But evidently it was either too hard or would have taken too long (or both) to provide a competitive product. So McAfee solved the problem by writing a $389MM check for Stonesoft.
Dennis Fisher writes in Finger-Pointing on Cyberespionage does little good without a plan:
The acknowledgement from the Pentagon, in truth, feels fairly anticlimactic. It’s the equivalent of Mark McGwire admitting to using steroids-10 years after every fan in the country had already accepted that fact. At some point it becomes sort of silly to even mention it. Water is wet, ice cream is delicious and China is attacking our networks. It just is.
Sorry, but the title is a bit of a bait and switch. Before we get into object storage encryption we need to cover using proxies for volume encryption.
Japanese Coast Guard ship (indirectly) sold to North Korea:
“The vessel was sold in a state in which information regarding operational patterns of the patrol vessel could have been obtained by some party,” an official told the paper. “We were on low security alert at that time.” That is certainly not the case these days, with heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula and the Japanese coast guard regularly involved in patrols around the disputed Diaoyu (Senkaku) islands.
The tactics we have described so far are very useful for detecting and disrupting advanced attackers – even if used only in one-off situations. But you can and should establish a more structured and repeatable process – especially if you expect to be an ongoing target of advanced attackers. So you need to evolve your existing security program, including incident response capabilities. But what exactly does that mean?