I got distracted by email. The Friday Summary was going to be about columnar databases. I think. Maybe it’s the flu I have had all week, or my memory is going, or just perhaps the subject was not all that interesting to begin with. But the email that distracted me was kind of funny and kinda sad. A former friend and co-worker contacted me for the first time is something like 10 years. Out of the blue.
I’m hanging out in the Red Carpet Club at the Orlando airport, waiting to head home from the Cloud Security Alliance Congress. Yesterday Chris Hoff and I presented a three part series – first our joint presentation on disruptive innovation and cloud computing (WINnovation), then his awesome presentation on cloud computing infrastructure security issues (and more: Cloudinomicon), and finally Quantum Datum, my session on information-centric security for cloud computing.
We all need some way to measure ourselves. Are we doing better? Worse? Are we winning or losing? What game are we playing again? It’s all about this mentality of needing to beat the average.
Security is broken. Captain Obvious here. We all know that but it doesn’t really help, does it? I came across a good post by Bobby Dominguez, who I met through Shimmy (but I won’t hold that against Bobby), which talks about rethinking security. To provide the proper context check out this excerpt, which beautifully highlights our futility:
You did well. You followed your incident response plan and the fire is out. Too bad that was the easy part, and you now get to start the long journey from ending a crisis all the way back to normal. If we get back to our before, during, and after segmentation, this is the ‘after’ part.
As I mentioned in my PCI 2.0 post, one of the new version’s most significant changes is that organizations now must not only confirm that they know where all their cardholder data is, but document how they know this and keep it up to date between assessments.
When we came up with the Friday Summary, the idea was we’d share something personal that was either humorous or relevant to security, then highlight our content from the week, the best thing’s we read on other sites, and any major industry news. The question is always where to draw the line on the personal stuff. I mean, it isn’t like this is Twitter.
I fancy myself to have significant willpower. I self-motivate to work out pretty religiously, and in the blink of an eye gave up meat two and a half years ago – cold turkey (no pun intended). But I’m no superhero – in fact over the past few weeks I’ve been abnormally human. You see I have a weakness for chips. Well I actually have a number of food weaknesses, but chips are close to the top of the list. And it’s not like a few potato chips or tortilla chips will kill me in moderation. But that’s…
It’s never a good day when you lose control over a significant account. First, it goes to show that none of us are perfect and we can all be pwned as a matter of course, regardless of how careful we are. This story has a reasonably happy ending, but there are still important lessons.
In our last post, we covered the first steps of incident response – the trigger, escalation, and size up. Today we’re going to move on to the next three steps – containment, investigation, and mitigation.