Securosis Blog

Good versus bad FAIL

Mike Rothman · October 11, 2011

On reflection I talk about failure a lot. As I look back at my own career experience, FAIL has commonly appeared at inopportune times. Though it’s hard to say you can pinpoint a good time to fail. It’s part of both the business and human experience, so to me failure can be positive and productive, and position you for future success. But not always, and a lot depends on the form it takes.

Isolated Computing

Adrian Lane · October 11, 2011

IBM, with researchers at North Carolina State University, has annnounced an effective way to protect information and processes in multi-tenant environments – such as cloud and virtual deployments. In what they are calling the Strongly Isolated Computing Environment, installed below the hypervisor. The teaser is that the code is a mere 300 lines – a very small footprint means simplicity, which in turn implies both performance and security.

New Series: Tokenization Guidance

Adrian Lane · October 10, 2011

Tokenization Guidance. I have wanted to write this post since the middle of August. Every time I started writing another phone phone call came in from a merchant, payment processor, technology vendor, or someone loosely associated with a Payment Card Industry (PCI) task force or steering committee (SIG). And every conversation yielded some new sliver of information that changed what I wanted to say, or implied some research work had already been conducted that was far more interesting and…

What should you do right now? That’s one of the toughest questions for any security professional to answer. The list is endless, the priorities clear as mud, the risk of compromise ever present. But doing nothing is never the answer. We have been working with practitioners to answer that question for years, and we finally got around to documenting some of our approaches and concepts.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to head out for my first run since my August health scare (which turned out to be pretty much nothing). I grabbed my iPhone, and as I was putting it into my armband case a news alert popped up.

Incite 10/5/2011: Time waits for no one

Mike Rothman · October 5, 2011

Time is a funny thing. You don’t really think about it until it’s running out. Deadlines. Mortality. It’s all the same. Time just sneaks up on you, and then it’s gone. Yeah, I’m a little nostalgic this week because my birthday is Friday. And yes, there is some fodder for you social engineers out there. The kids get more excited about my birthday than I do. They want to know about cakes, parties, and the like. Personally, I’d take a day to sleep in, but who has time for that? There are things to…

As I mentioned in the Incite yesterday, Symantec announced DLP support for the iPad. I have been meaning to talk about this for a while, as various products have been popping onto the market, and now seems like the time.

This week Amazon announced that S3 now supports server side encryption. You can encrypt S3 items through either the API or web management console, or you can require encryption for S3 buckets. A few details:

It must be SIEM acquisition Tuesday. McAfee hit first by announcing their expected deal with Nitro Security. But then IBM surprised pretty much everyone by acquiring Q1 Labs. Don’t blink or you may miss another 2-3 SIEM/Log Management vendor acquisitions. Obviously we have been talking about consolidation in the SIEM/Log Management space for quite a while – there are about 20 vendors left now – but it’s strange that deals involving the two most significant independent vendors happened on the…

Introducing the Securosis Nexus

Mike Rothman · October 3, 2011

Rich, Adrian, and I have been hinting about our sekret plans to launch a new research ‘product’ for a while. Today we are finally ready to let you guys in on our the scoop. We are very excited about this next step in the evolution of Securosis.