As far back as I can remember, I have been a fan of testing your defenses. Some people call it pen testing, others refer to it as an assurance process, but the point is the same either way. The bad folks test your defenses every day, and if you aren’t using the same tactics to find out what they can get, you’re going to have a bad day. Maybe not today, maybe not even tomorrow. But the clock is ticking.
Matt Miller, Tim Burrell, and Michael Howard from the Microsoft Security Engineering Center published a paper last week on Mitigating Software vulnerabilities. In a nutshell, they advocate a set of tactics that limit – or outright block – known and emerging attack techniques. Rather than play catch-up and patch the threat du jour, they outline use cases for the technologies that Microsoft employs within their own products to make it much harder to compromise code with canned attacks.
I’m going to keep this short. Dave Lewis (@gattaca)’s wife was diagnosed with leukemia yesterday. Dave is one of our Contributing Analysts and a hell of a great guy, and while I haven’t met her, everyone says his wife is even better (seems to be a common trend).
Some days I think that in fitness, I’m getting wrong everything I advise people in security.
I’ve been an athlete all my life – including some stints competing at a reasonably high (amateur) level. Like the time I went to nationals for my martial art. Cool, eh? Other than the part about getting my butt whipped by a 16-year-old. It seems cutting weight in a sport where knockouts aren’t the goal isn’t necessarily a good thing (me strong… me slow… puny teenager stand still so Hulk can kick in…
Every time I see the phrase “reduce your risk by X%,” I break out in hives. I agree that it is critical to think about risk (which to me is really about economic loss), but everyone has a different definition of risk. And to say anyone can reduce risk by a certain percentage triggers my bullcrap filter.
With the two girls at sleepaway camp, the Boss and I weren’t sure how the Boy would handle it. After all, he’s pretty much always surrounded by someone. Having a twin sister will do that to you. If he’s not at school, with his buddies, or doing an activity, he’s usually playing with one of his sisters. In fact, we think his ability to tune out almost everything directly correlates to always being around people.
Securing Personal Health Records (PHR) for healthcare providers is supposed to be the next frontier for many security technologies. Security vendors market solutions for Protected Health Information (PHI) because HIPAA and HITECH impose data security and privacy requirements. Should a healthcare provider fail in their custodial duty to protect patient data, they face penalties – theoretically at least – so they are motivated to secure the data that fuels their business. Tokenization is one of…
Every company I have worked for has had some degree of friction between sales and marketing teams. While their organizational charters are to support one another, sales always has some disagreement about how products are positioned, the quality of competitive intelligence, the quality of leads, and the lack of
A few weeks ago I posted on different methods for encrypting IaaS volumes, which tends to be one of the top questions I get about data security in the cloud. Also high on that list is encrypting (or tokenizing) for SaaS and (some) PaaS. I call this the “Salesforce.com Problem”, because more often than not I’m talking to someone on the larger side, specifically about Salesforce.com.
In my last post I discussed how tokenization is being deployed to solve payment data security issues. It is a niche technology used almost exclusively to solve a single problem: protecting credit card data. As a technology, data tokenization has yet to cross the chasm, but our research indicates it is being used to protect personal information. In this post I will talk about using tokens to protect PII – Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and other sensitive personal…