I was perplexed by the wording of many initial reports on the recent attacks ‘against’ Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. Sure, maybe they were targeted, but it seems just as likely that the attackers just picked popular developer sites and harvested some big fish.
Shiny technology objects make us happy. Admit it – you want to believe the buzzword du jour will make things better. Or less crappy. But if the capabilities and value of new technology are contingent on humans, eventually you run into the most debilitating of constraints: expertise limitations. It seems like everyone wants to talk about Big Data Analytics, but the inconvenient truth is that without the math folks Big Data doesn’t do much.
Threat Intelligence comes in many shapes and sizes, all of which are helpful for Early Warning of imminent attack. After introducing the initial Early Warning concepts, we recently delved into how network telemetry and other information about your pipes can help to identify compromised devices in Network-based Threat Intelligence. We continue discussing all sorts of threat intel by focusing on phishing in our new series, Email-based Threat Intelligence. We stay true to our naming conventions.
Thales released a 2012 survey on encryption spending trends today. In a nutshell, spending was up a modest amount for the first time in several years. From the Deep Dive post:
One trend we see coming on like a freight train is the rebirth of security awareness training. Folks are working on content that doesn’t suck and enterprises are finally starting to gather data about how stupid mistakes (such as clicking phishing messages) are decreasing after training sessions. NetworkWorld recently ran an article (in their Insider section, which requires registration – boo!) providing some tips to deal with phishing.
I think I’m finally waking up. After a week at RSA where I basically don’t sleep – not all bad, mind you – it takes a while to recover. In fact Monday might as well not have happened – I certainly got nothing done. It was not for lack of trying, but I was simply part of the zombie apocalypse – but I don’t want brains, just some Captain Crunch and sleep. Today I had the ‘Oh crap!’ realization – I promised people things last week, and I need to deliver. As much as I’d like to shuffle this stuff…
With our last post in this series on Understanding and Selecting Cloud Identity and Access Management, we want to help guide you through product selection. No two customer environments or lists of requirements are the same, but key decision criteria will help you narrow down the field to suitable platforms. We will provide questions to help determine which vendors offer solutions that fit your architecture, a set of criteria to measure the appropriateness of a vendor solution to your design…
As if the IBM Security Systems folks weren’t busy enough with the RSA Conference last week, they flew directly from San Francisco to Vegas for their annual Pulse Conference. Sure it’s a lot of back-patting and antennae rubbing, but there is usually a good nugget or two from their customer presentations.
We all knew the Flash was fast. But it seems Apple has made Flash so fast you can’t even use it on your Macs. Well, actually, they put some new protections in to ensure only the latest version of Flash runs on Mac OS X 10.6 and later.
My career has been turbulent at times. I know that’s shocking to those of you who know me personally. When I was invited not to come to work at my last job in VA, I already had a good position at a hot start-up in Atlanta lined up. They were well aware of my situation, and once I was a free agent the deal got done quickly. I had one real estate agent selling a house in VA, and another looking for property in Atlanta. Full speed ahead.