Research

Like many of you, for a long time I really couldn’t see the use of those URL shortener service thingies. Sure, when I was designing sites I tried to avoid long, ugly URLs, but I never saw slapping some random characters after a common base URL as being any more useful. I considered my awareness of the existence of these obscure services as an aberration induced by my geek genes, rather than validation of their existence or popularity. Then came Twitter, and the world of URLs was never the same. Twitter firmly swapped URL shorteners out of the occasionally useful into the pretty darn essential column. That magical 140 character limit, combined with the propensity of major sites to use URLs nearly as long as their software user agreements, thrust shorteners in front of millions of new eyeballs. One issue, pointed out by more than a few security pundits and rickrolling victims, is that these shorteners completely obscure the underlying URL. It’s trivial for a malicious attacker to hide a link and redirect a user to any sort of malicious site. It didn’t take long for phishers and drive-by malware attacks to take advantage of the growing popularity of these obfuscation services. Some of the more popular Twitter clients, like Tweetie, added optional URL previews to show users the full link before clicking through to the site. In part, this was enabled by shorteners like bit.ly enabling previews through their APIs. A nice feature, but it’s not one that most users enable, and it isn’t available in most web interfaces or even all standalone Twitter clients. Bit.ly announced today that they are taking things one major step further and will soon be scanning all links, in real time, using multiple security services. Bit.ly will be using a collection of databases and scanning services to check both new and existing links as users access them. Websense’s cloud-based scanner is one of the services (the one that pre-briefed me), and bit.ly will use at least one other commercial service as well as some free/open databases. Update: according to the bit.ly blog, VeriSign and Sophos are the other scanning/database engines. In the case of Websense, bit.ly will tie directly into their content scanning service to check links in real time as they are added to the bit.ly database. Websense uses a mix of real time scans (for things like malware and certain phishing techniques) and their database of known bad sites. The system won’t rely only on the database of previously-detected bad sites, but will also check them at access time. If a link is suspected of being malicious, Websense marks it and bit.ly will redirect users to a warning page instead of directly to the site. Users can still click through, and I’m sure plenty will, but at least those of us with a little common sense are less likely to be exploited. Bit.ly won’t only be scanning new links added to the database, but will be checking existing links in case they’ve become compromised. This also reduces the chances of the bad guys gaming the system by adding a clean version of their site for an initial scan, then sneaking in malware for future visits. I like bit.ly’s approach of checking existing links in case they get compromised, rather than only scanning new links as they are added. This will make it harder for bad guys to game the system. This solution is a lot better than the anti-phishing built into browsers and some search engines, since those rely only on databases of previously-discovered known bad sites. It’s also a two-way system, and although Websense is being paid for the scanning, they gain the additional benefit of now leveraging the results once millions of new (and old) links start flowing through their service. Every bad website Wensense finds when a user submits a link to bit.ly is added to the database used by all their other products. Finally, there’s nothing that says we’re only allowed to use bit.ly for Twitter. The entire Internet now gains a real-time security scanning service… for free. Have a questionable link? Shorten it through bit.ly and it’s scanned by Websense and at least one other commercial service, as well as all the free/open/cheap databases bit.ly uses (sorry, I don’t know what they are). This isn’t to say that any of the individual scans, or all of them together, can identify every malicious link they encounter, but this is a significant advance in web services security. It’s a perfect example of cloud computing enhancing security, rather than creating new risks. Links sent through bit.ly will now be safer than the original links viewed directly. This isn’t live yet, but should be by the end of the year. Share:

Tel Aviv newspaper TheMarker reports that IBM will complete its acquisition of database activity monitoring company Guardium Monday, November 30th. While it is early, and I have yet to confirm the number with anyone at IBM or Guardium, the sale price is being listed at $225 million. This is by far the largest acquisition in the DAM space to date! I had estimated Guardium’s revenue for 2008 at $35-38M, and $38-40M for 2009. If the $225M acquisition price is accurate, at a standard 5x multiple, it would suggest that they were closer to $45M. But my guess is, with an impressive customer list like Citigroup and BofA, the bookings multiple is a little higher than standard. Rumors have been circulating for over a year that large firms have approached Guardium and Imperva about being acquired. These two firms are the unquestioned leaders in database activity monitoring, and for larger technology firms looking to fill gaps in their data security portfolio, these discussions made sense. IBM has been interested in DAM for many years, with multiple divisions playing footsie with different DAM vendors, but most didn’t fit IBM’s business. Guardium is one of the only firms still standing with a mainframe monitoring solution, which is a major prerequisite for much of IBM’s customer base. From the IBM perspective, the functionality makes sense and fits well into some of their existing security products. From an architectural standpoint, integration (as opposed to just sharing data and events) will be a challenge. I do not know which section of IBM will own this product or how it will be sold, but those are certainly questions I will ask when I get the chance. Last year around this time I predicted, based upon the harsh economic climate, that several vendors in this space would be acquired or out of business by now. Tizor was sold for $3.1 million, and as predicted the remnants of IPLocks disappeared. From the rumors I thought Guardium would be next and it was. I was dead wrong, though, in that many security vendors – such as in the SIEM space – were seeing revenue growth despite the miserable economic climate. The impressive $225M figure really surprised me. I had estimated the DAM market at $70-80 million last year, the wide range resulting from the many smaller firms with unknown revenue. For 2009, I estimate revenue has climbed into the $85M range, and that’s with fewer players overall. Where does that leave us? With Guardium & Tizor now sold to IBM & Netezza respectively, and the list of viable competitors having thinned out, I think that Imperva, Sentrigo, AppSec, and Secerno just became a little more valuable. I hate to call it validation, but this is the first time we have seen a big dollar buy. There remain a lot of firms like EMC, McAfee, Oracle, Symantec, and others who would really benefit from gaining DAM technology, so I expect additional acquisitions in the next 6 months. I spoke with some security product vendors who are building their own DAM variants in house, with anticipated launch this coming year. Still others, like Fortinet, launched a DAM product based upon a combination of in house product development in conjunction licensed code. Rich and I still consider DAM more a collection of markets and tools than a single market, but regardless, IBM is betting on the value DAM can provide their customers. I must add a personal note regarding this sale, having competed against the Guardium product and team head to head for four years. In 2004, I thought they had a terrible product. I used to tell them as much, which made me a very popular guy! I also remember a particular ISSA meeting where the Guardium presenter was ridiculed mercilessly by the audience for what was perceived as a failed implementation (honestly, I was not one of the hecklers!), but it showed that at that time security professionals did not believe Guardium’s proxy model would work. But Guardium is the only vendor to have truly focused on their monitoring product and offer significant improvement quarter over quarter, year over year. By 2006 they were consistently beating their competition in head to head evaluations of database activity monitoring. While they started with a product that was barely good enough, I have to applaud their staff for being responsive to market trends, for consistently addressing customer complaints, and for systematically outstripping most of their competition in performance and out-of-the-box functionality. I still think the product is hard to deploy and the appliance based model has scalability and large deployment manageability issues, but hey, no one’s perfect. They have stayed focused better than anyone else in this space, and most importantly, have the most tenacious and omnipresent sales force I have ever seen in a small company. This is a personal ‘Congratulations!’ to the Guardium team on a job well done! You guys deserve it. Share:

I admit it’s not even 2:00 in the afternoon and my mind has already gone on vacation. Apple pies are in the oven, and pumpkin pies are queued up and waiting to go in. We decided to forgo the Friday summary this week because we are pretty sure no one would read it even if we wrote one, so we decided on a pre-Thanksgiving “What are we thankful for in security?” post instead. Rich: “I’m thankful for good, old-fashioned human behavior; especially its propensity to never change. Without it, I’d have to find a real job.” Adrian: “I am thankful most attackers exploit well known defects to penetrate defenses … they are so much harder to detect when they are clever. I am thankful for Mordac, Preventer of Information Services, who has created a face for our industry.” Mortman: “I’m thankful for people who think our capabilities are far better then they actually are and as a result don’t do certain things under the assumption that they’d get caught. Without them, I’d have to work much harder.” Chris: “I am thankful that I can get away with spending so little attention on personal security as a Mac user. I am pretty paranoid, but if I’d spent the same attention on securing Windows systems over the past 10 years, I would have been compromised many times. I’m thankful national breach disclosure laws are on the table.” Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! We’ll be back Monday. Share:

Given how much PR email I get on a daily basis – which does help keep me up to date on what’s happening in the market segments I cover – I seldom miss newsworthy security events. On occasion I totally miss something of interest, like the M86 acquisition of Finjan … three freakin’ weeks ago! For those of you interested in email and web security, big firms don’t offer a lot of interesting tidbits to write about, which makes the smaller firms more fun to watch. In a mature market segment like email and web security, small security businesses need to innovate with technology and sales. To compete with established players like Google and Symantec, where “follow the leader” is a bad business strategy, you need to employ creative thinking in order to survive. This acquisition makes me think M86 has a slightly different vision than their competitors. The Finjan product is an interesting mix of capabilities for web security. Primarily they sold appliances, sitting in the enterprise, acting as gateway servers for content security. Enterprise endpoints are configured to go through the gateway for screening. The product is focused on outbound content, with URL, anti-spyware and basic ‘DLP’ content screening (i.e., regular expression checks). The interesting aspects are the introduction of a proxy model not too long ago, sending remote users through a virtual gateway (in the cloud, of course) that screens and then routes requests. In essence they extend a virtual perimeter around the end point. This is sensible, as most firms will want to secure the endpoint and enforce usage policies regardless if the user is at home, on the road or in the office. Their ‘Vital Cloud’ gives users a pathway to a hybrid appliance/SaaS model, so they can leverage existing hardware while gaining access to additional features not supported by their existing hardware. This is not moving your data to the cloud, but instead offloading the service, which matters if your company worries about security of remote data storage. The remote client and SaaS feature, if I understand the technology correctly, is nothing more than a VPN connection to a virtual server with the client policies. Simple, but it should be effective. You have probably noticed that the M86 team has been aggressive with acquisitions, working to create a complete portfolio of features for web content. The merger between 8e6 and Marshal gave them the web and email security pieces needed to compete on a very basic level; those two features are the minimum requirements for entry. But the Avinti acquisition seemed out of place. Rather than a cloud or SaaS play like their competition, they bought a type of behavior analysis tool. Both a powerful and flexible approach to detecting malware in what I was calling virtual Habitrail, but certainly not a novice tool. It required some skill to use, and was not something to put into the hands of your typical 8e6/Marshal customer. What’s more, neither the deployment model nor functions quite fit market trends. But in light of the the Finjan acquisition (and I am guessing here), it looks as if M86 is trying to carve a niche as a managed service platform. For many SMB’s, content and email security is a problem they want to pay to have solved. It’s not just that they don’t want to worry about which box is the right one, but they cannot afford to hire specialists to understand threats, create policies, manage gateways, perform content analysis, create blacklists, detect malware, and all the rest. Managed service providers care less about the deployment, and more about leverage of effort. The merger of these products and deployment models would appeal to companies like Perot / Fishnet / Solutionary / SecureWorks, and so on. They would be able to deal with the complexities of Avinti and specifics of how to set up DLP. Being able to drop in an appliance and couple it with a virtual server in your data center for both monitoring and policy enforcement would be appropriate. Granted, Finjan gives M86 a hybrid deployment model previously missing (8e6 and Marshal were on-site appliance and software companies, respectively), allowing customers to stave off hardware obsolescence and still accommodate new features and overhead associated with new policies, but I still don’t think that’s where they are headed. They cannot compete head to head on uptime, pricing, SaaS options and scalability with Websense, Cisco and Proofpoint, but they can offer a depth of function that should be potent in the right hands. Share:

There was a tiny blurb in the Sunday Arizona Republic regarding a request by the Arizona Attorney General to Health Net regarding a data breach notification. It seems they delayed telling anyone that data was stolen or missing for six months or so: Attorney General Terry Goddard wants a Connecticut-based insurance company to tell Arizona policyholders whether their personal, medical or financial information was lost or stolen in a security breach six months ago. Goddard’s office says a hard drive containing personal data on 316,000 current and former Health Net policyholders from Arizona has been missing since May from the company’s headquarters in Shelton, Conn. He says the company did not notify the Arizona Department of Insurance until Wednesday. It’s not clear whether this has anything to do with the breach reported back in February, but from the details provided this appears unrelated, as that was a case of inadvertent disclosure. I did a little more digging and it appears a few other states are getting the same letter, as mentioned in this Computerworld post Health Net says 1.5M medical records lost in data breach: Connecticut A.G. calls six-month delay in reporting loss ‘incomprehensible’. A hard drive with seven years’ worth of personal financial and medical information on about 1.5 million customers of Health Net of the Northeast Inc. was reported missing to state officials yesterday – six months after the drive went missing. Excuse me, but what the $%(@ were the details of 1.5 million Health Net customers doing on a portable device? Is there really a major U.S. firm out there without laptop & media encryption mandated? This comes right on the heels of the BofA data compromise I mentioned last Friday, which also does not appear to have been disclosed. And if Health Net’s attorney’s interpreted Arizona’s law the same way I did, it’s not clear they felt compelled to. If you didn’t read Rich’s post on The Anonymization of Losses: A Market Forces Failure , or Bruce Schneier’s post Security in a Reputation Economy, now is a good time. Both are excellent and both discuss the hidden costs of lax security such as this, along with the lack of market forces necessary to avoid stupid @$$ stuff with patient data. It appears that whatever checks and balances are supposed to be in place to prod health organizations into securing personal, financial, and medical data are absent. If there is no penalty, why change? Share:

Over the weekend 0-day exploit was reported in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Both Threatpost and Heise Security posted that the getElementsByTagName() JavaScript method within Microsoft’s HTML viewer has a dangling pointer. This leaves the browser susceptible to code injection; which in the best case crashes the browser, and in a worse case directs you to a malicious site. In first tests by heise Security, Internet Explorer crashed when trying to access the HTML page. Security firm Symantec confirms that, while the current zero day exploit is unreliable, more stable exploit code which will present a real threat is expected to appear in the near future. French security firm VUPEN managed to reproduce the security problem in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP SP3, warning that this allows attackers to inject arbitrary code and infect a system with malicious code. Microsoft has not yet commented on the problem. The workaround is to disable JavaScript until the patch is available. Yeah, yeah, I know, you have heard this before. And this means half the web pages you visit won’t work and every piece of online meeting software is completely hosed, so you will leave it enabled anyway. It was worth a shot. Be careful until you have patched. Another post on the Hackademix site discusses a flaw with the IE 8 XSS filter. … it’s way worse than a simple implementation bug. Its root is a flawed design choice: when a potential XSS attack is detected, IE 8 modifies the response (the content of the target page) in order to neuter the malicious code. This is, incidentally, the only significant departure from the NoScript approach, which modifies the request (the data sent by the client) instead, and is therefore immune. … IE 8’s response-changing mechanism can be easily exploited to turn a normally innocuous fragment of the victim page into a XSS injection. I will update this post when I have additional information from Microsoft on either issue. Share:

Ironically, I was calling to activate my new credit card yesterday – as the number was considered compromised by BofA – when I read about the credit card scam in Spain. Very little information is coming out about the EU Credit Card Breach. Seems to be Visa specific; some 100k cards are being recalled in Germany, and police efforts are focused in Spain. And it seems every news agency and security blog in the country is reliant on this tiny amount of data provided by the BBC. Given this is a multi-country effort, I would have bet some tangible news would have slipped out somewhere, but nothing more than these nuggets of almost nothing yet. On the home front it is pretty much the same: no news of what happened. I was pretty sure that BofA recalling the Visa card meant a serious breach because this is a card I have not used in more than a year. Yes, I am making some assumptions here, but this was not an issue with skimming at a local restaurant or gas station. So someone was breached; going back through two years of records of very limited use, as there are two large firms who had this number in their databases (without my consent) and I am guessing one of them leaked it. This is not directly related to the Citigroup/BofA breach. I was trying to find out what their disclosure responsibilities were here in Arizona, but you could drive a big truck full o’ sensitive data through the holes in the Breach Notification Bill. And the BofA Disclosure Page basically says “we don’t know ‘nuthin ‘bout ‘nuthin’”, but don’t worry, your money will be returned to you. Let’s hope the Europeans get more data than we do. On a more lighthearted note, this video is pretty funny, but I bring it up because I want a third opinion. Do you think a crime was committed? The Mogull pointed something out to me after I watched this … that the girl in the white shirt appears to shoplift in the video. I was skeptical but I think he’s right. At 2:14 in, the girl drops a shopping bag off he shoulder, grabs something off the table, and it places into the bag. She then shoves what looks like a pad of paper on top, pulls the strap back on her shoulder, dancing the entire time. She even performs this maneuver the moment the rest of the ‘dance troupe’ has their backs turned. She is one of a few without a badge and so I assume she was not an employee. Anyway, the whole thing is a little like a car wreck … it’s hard to look away. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s post on A Peek at Transparent Database Encryption. Rich quoted on InZero launch. The dog ate my podcast. No, really! Sorry Martin! Adrian on Encryption ‘Gotchas’ that hinder implementation. (Podcast) Rich and Adrian on Truth, Lies and Fiction with Data Encryption. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: The Anonymization of Losses: A Market Forces Failure. Adrian: Why You Should Take the Adobe Flash Origin Issues Seriously. Meier: Microsoft Encryption and the Cloud Mort: Ur C0de Sux. Other Securosis Posts What the Renegotiation Bug Means to You Critical Infrastructure, 60 Minutes, and Missing the Point Three acquisitions, two visions ADMP Market Acceptance Why Successful Risk Management is Still a Failure New Thoughts On The CIO Is Your Friend Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Not security-specific, but lasers on fighter jets! Adrian: Not really a single post, but a collection of posts on Microsoft Azure. It’s probably just me, but this feels like 1997, when MS did an about-face on their acceptance of the Internet … only this time they are a little late to the Cloud party. Mort: Google Books Settlement 2.0: Evaluating the Pros and Cons. Meier: Whose customers are they? Pepper: Researcher busts into Twitter via SSL reneg hole. Top News and Posts Verizon admits employees sold private data. Most security products fail to perform. Good analysis by Larry Walsh on Fortinet IPO and some market risks, and for those of you tracking these things, the current stock price. Incite Rides Again. NIST updates infosec guidelines. Four in UK sentenced in connection to banking trojan. Inside the botnet hunters. Metasploit 3.3 released. Hoff launches A6 working group for cloud audits/assessments. Brazilian power company hacked (for real this time). Background checks in an iPhone app. Pentesting Adobe Flex Applications with a Custom AMF Client. Customers have a unique way of capturing your product’s nuances. Blog Comment of the Week It was hard to pick this week, but this week’s best comment comes from our own David Mortman’s in response to David Meier’s post What the Renegotiation Bug Means to You: Okay I tried it: openssl s_client -connect ebay.com:443 -ssl2 New, SSLv2, Cipher is DES-CBC3-MD5 Server public key is 1024 bit SSL-Session: Protocol : SSLv2 Cipher : DES-CBC3-MD5 Session-ID: D5F3FA4A3750154014CE495E96E36139 Session-ID-ctx: Master-Key: 35F5ED93B6FC890AA84EBFCE849E9EE54919C8D3FA38D35F Key-Arg : 63826612A872A6AD Start Time: 1258654301 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 21 (unable to verify the first certificate) So something thinks it can speak sslv2, however if I force my browser to use only sslv2 it loops before dying so there’s some business logic stopping it. On the other hand, yahoo and hotmail/live.com both allow ssl2 connections no problem as does twitter and lenovo. Btw, so does Bank of America and Fidelity. So while clearly some folks are getting it (because of PCI?), there are some major players who don’t. Btw even the security vendors don’t do it right, McAfee allows SSLv2 only connections (Symantec doesn’t) as does HiTrust (gotta love an organization dedicated to security that screws it up). And my all time favorite, the IRS allows SSLv2 connections and has an invalid cert. So lots of potentially vulnerable sites, which in general make MitM attacks much easier, renegotiation bug or not. Share:

I was reading PC Magazine’s recap of Ray Ozzie’s announcement of the Azure cloud computing platform. The vision of Azure, said Ozzie, is “… three screens and a cloud,” meaning Internet-based data and software that plays equally well on PCs, mobile devices, and TVs. I am already at a stage where almost everything I want to do on the road I can accomplish with my smartphone. Any heavy lifting on the desktop. I am sure we will quickly reach a point where there is no longer a substantial barrier, and I can perform most tasks (with varying degrees of agility) with whatever device I have handy. “We’re moving into an era of solutions that are experienced by users across PCs, phones and the Web, and that are delivered from datacenters we refer to as private clouds and public clouds. But I read this just after combing through the BitLocker specifications, and the dichotomy of the old school model and new cloud vision seemed at odds. With cloud computing we are going to see data encryption become common. We are going to be pushing data into the cloud, where we do know what security will be provided, and we may not have thoroughly screened the contents prior to moving it. Encryption, especially when the data is stored separately from the keys and encryption engine, is a very good approach to keeping data private and secure. But given the generic nature of the computing infrastructure, the solutions will need to be flexible enough to support many different environments. Microsoft’s data security solution set includes several ways to encrypt data: BitLocker is available for full drive encryption on laptops and workstations. Windows Mobile Device Manager will manage security on your mobile storage and mobile application data encryption. Exchange can manage email and TLS encryption. SQL Server offers transparent and API-level encryption. But BitLocker’s architecture seems a little odd when compared to the others, especially in light of the cloud based vision. It has hardware and BIOS requirements to run. BitLocker has different key management, key recovery, and backup interfaces than laptops and other mobile devices and applications. BitLocker’s architecture does not seem like it could be stretched to support other mobile devices. Given that this is a major new launch, something a little more platform-neutral would make sense. If you are an IT manager, do you care? Is it acceptable to you? Does your device security belong to a different group than platform security? The offerings seem scattered to me. Rich does not see this as an issue, as each solves a specific problem relevant to the device in question and key management is localized. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I also learned that there is no current plan for Transparent Database Encryption with SQL Azure. That means developers using SQL Azure who want data encryption will need to take on the burden at the application level. This is fine, provided your key management and encryption engine is not in the cloud. But as this is being geared to use with the Azure application platform, you will probably have that in the cloud as well. Be careful. Share:

I had to laugh when I read Alan Shimel’s post “Where does Tipping Point fit in the post-3Com ProCurve”? His comment: I found it insightful that nowhere among all of this did security or Tipping Point get a mention at all. Does HP realize it is part of this deal? Which was exactly what I was thinking when reading the press releases. One of 3Com’s three pillars is completely absent from the HP press clippings I’ve come across in the last couple days. Usually there is some mention of everything, to assuage any fears of the employees and avoid having half the headcount leave for ‘new opportunities’. And the product line does not include the all-important cloud or SaaS based models so many firms are looking for, so selling off is a plausible course of action. It was easy to see why Barracuda purchased Purewire. It filled the biggest hole in their product line. And the entire market has been moving to a hybrid model, outsourcing many of the resource intensive features & functions, and keeping the core email and web security functions in house. This allows customers to reduce cost with the SaaS service and increase the longevity of existing investments. Cisco’s acquisition of ScanSafe is similar in that it provides customers with a hybrid model to keep existing IronPort customers happy, as well as a pure SaaS web security offering. I could see this being a standard security option for cloud-based services, ultimately a cloud component, and part of a much larger vision than Barracuda’s. Which gets me back to Tipping Point and Alan’s question “Will they just spin it out, so as not to upset some of their security partners”? My guess is not. If I was king in charge, I would roll this up with the EDS division acquired earlier this year for a comprehensive managed security services offering. Tipping Point is well entrenched and respected as a product, and both do a lot of business with the government. My guess is this is what they will do. But they need to have the engineering team working on a SaaS offering, and I would like to see them leverage their content analysis capabilities more, and perhaps offer what BlueLane did for VMWare. Share:

Here’s the thing about that 60 Minutes report on cybersecurity from the other week. Yes, some of the facts were clearly wrong. Yes, there are massive political fights under way to see who ‘controls’ cybersecurity, and how much money they get. Some .gov types might have steered the reporters/producers in the wrong direction. The Brazilian power outage probably wasn’t caused by hackers. But so what? Here’s what I do know: A penetration tester I know who works on power systems recently told me he has a 100% success rate. Multiple large enterprises tell me that hackers, quite possibly from China, are all over their networks stealing sensitive data. They keep as many out as they can, but cannot completely get rid of them. Large-scale financial cybercrime is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars – and those are just the ones we know about (some of that is recovered, so I don’t know the true total on an annual basis). Any other security professional with contacts throughout the industry talks to the same people I do, and has the same information. The world isn’t ending, but even though the story has some of the facts wrong, the central argument isn’t that far off the mark. Nick Selby did a great write-up on this, and a bunch of the comments are focused on the nits. While we shouldn’t excuse sloppy journalism, some incorrect facts don’t make the entire story wrong. Share: