Securosis Blog

We are all guilty of something

Rich · June 13, 2013

Moxie Marlinspike has a must-read editorial over at Wired:

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

Incite 6/12/2013: The Wall of Worry

Mike Rothman · June 12, 2013

Anxiety is something we all deal with on a daily basis. It is a feature of the human operating system. Maybe it’s that mounting pile of bills, or an upcoming doctor’s appointment, or a visit from your in-laws, or a big deadline at work. It could be anything but the anxiety triggers our fight or flight mechanisms, causes stress, and takes a severe toll over time on our health and well being. Culturally I come from a long line of worriers. Neuroses are just something we get used to, because…

If you have nothing better to do tomorrow at 2 pm EDT, and want to learn a bit about what’s new in phishing (there is a lot of it, but that’s not new) and how to use email-based threat intelligence to deal with it, join me and the folks from Malcovery Security on a webcast tomorrow. I will be covering the content in the Email-based Threat Intelligence paper, and the folks from Malcovery will be sharing a bunch of their research into phishing trends. It should be an interesting event, so don’t…

DDoS: It’s FUD-eriffic!

Mike Rothman · June 11, 2013

FUD can be your friend when trying to get security projects funded. But it needs to be wisely used and you only have one bullet in the proverbial chamber. The folks at Prolexic just rolled out a new white paper on using FUD to make the case internally about DDoS. The paper requires registration, so I didn’t. I know all about the FUD involved in DDoS – I don’t need these guys educating me about that.

As we resume our Network-based Malware Detection (NBMD) 2.0 series, we need to dig into the malware detection/analysis lifecycle to provide some context on where network-based malware analysis fits in, and what an NBMD device needs to integrate with to protect against advanced threats. We have already exhaustively researched the malware analysis process. The process diagram below was built as part of Malware Analysis Quant.

Some of our first customer conversations about big data and SIEM centered on how to integrate the two platforms. Several customers wanted to know how they could pull data from different existing log management and analytics systems into a big data platform. Most were told by their vendors that big data was; and they wanted to know what that integration would look like and how it would affect operations. Likely you won’t be doing the integration, but you will need to live with the design choices…

We realize it has been a while, but we are insanely excited to open up the next phase of the Securosis Nexus beta test. This is an open beta but we reserve the right to kick out anyone who annoys us.

Groupthink Kills Your Security Layers

Mike Rothman · June 10, 2013

As I continue working through my reading backlog I find interesting stuff that bears comment. When the folks over at NSS Labs attempted to poke holes in the concept of security layers I got curious. Only 3% of over 606 combinations of firewall, IPS, and Endpoint Protection (EPP) actually successfully blocked their full suite of attacks?

I am in the airport lounge after attending the WWDC keynote, and here are some quick thoughts on what we saw today:

From Share and share alike? Not Quite, by Mike Mimoso at Threatpost:

“With retail, the challenge is that most of the companies we share with are direct competitors,” Phillips said. “From a security perspective, you have to get over that and share because we’re all facing the same challenges. There’s no way any of us will win the war on our own.”