Research

Technewsdaily has an interesting follow up to yesterday’s NYT article on AV effectiveness, as we covered. I agree that using VirusTotal isn’t the best approach – far from it. But I have also heard AV-Test doesn’t use good criteria. I like the NSS Labs methodology myself, which shows higher numbers than Imperva, but much lower than most other tests. Their consumer report is free. and they also offer a companion report. But consumer products are often more different from enterprise versions than you might expect, and the tests weren’t against 0-day like the Imperva ones. These reports by NSS tested effectiveness against exploits using known vulnerabilities, rather than Imperva’s test of signature recognition of new virus variants. Apples and oranges, but I am generally more interested in exploit prevention than signature recognition. Share:

Levelling up in the real world. When you are looking out for the welfare of your organization instead of focusing on what you can get for yourself, that’s when you’ll be given the chance to do more and own more. Wendy provides some hard-earned career guidance on promotions. She presents a great list on what won’t get you promoted and what you shouldn’t do. Wendy talks about the hazards of being irreplaceable, but ultimately gets back to the real secret. It’s not about you. Yeah, it’s about karma, if you believe in that kind of stuff. Do the right thing for your organization without worrying much about how it will impact your pay or title, and good things will happen. Maybe not within that specific organization, as sometimes you’ll need to switch horses if there is nowhere to move. But the point is the same. Work consistently. Stop climbing over people on your way to the top. The big jobs can be overrated. But ultimately it’s about doing the right stuff, consistently. I talked about that in yesterday’s Incite. But I will mention one key aspect of career planning. Be careful what you wish for. Don’t be ashamed if your boss’s job is not interesting to you. That’s okay. What’s not okay is to accept a promotion or added responsibility that will make you unhappy. You’ll suck at the new job. You will become the problem. You’ll be moved out. That’s the anti-promotion. So if you like what you do, then do that. Live your life without regret. Share:

2013?!? WTF?!?! I have this time dilation theory of aging. The older you get, the smaller a as a fraction of your existence each year is, so the shorter it feels. I don’t like it. Anyway, another year down, another at bat. We had a hell of a good year for the company (I’d give a growth number, but we make fun of all the other private companies for doing that), and other than illness I can’t complain about my personal year. A few weeks ago we finished up our Securosis 2013 planning, and things are looking really interesting. A lot has changed since I started this blog company, and we try to evolve with the times. The biggest change you are likely to notice is the pace and nature of our blogging. We are trying to do more linked-list style posts, which include a link or three and some short exposition. The idea is to push more of them out daily, instead of saving everything up for the Incite and Summary. This won’t affect our bigger posts – we’ll still do those – but we realized that when we are busy or working on big projects we fall back to little more than the monster posts that build research projects, and less of the lighter daily posts. We realized you don’t need 1,000 words on everything we cover, and a few sentences can cover lots of it. Some days you might see 10 posts, others you might see none – it all depends on what we are up to. This is an experiment, and we definitely need your feedback. A ton of you are on our daily email list (more than I thought) and since those compile all our posts, that mail might make a good once-a-day every morning – you can sign up. We are also now tweeting all blog content at the @securosis account, and only pushing bigger stuff through our personal accounts. Personally, I realized the blogs I tend to read daily are mostly composed of shorter posts highlighting interesting things I can dig into if I want, and we want to bring more of that flavor to Securosis.com. We are also looking at playing more with short video and maybe even audio content, but we are holding off on other changes while we work out the blog posting and pacing first. Finally, we have a ton more coming up this year. The Nexus launch is going to happen, for real, and we learned a ton in the beta test, which has driven many adjustments. It’s definitely time to ship that puppy. We are also looking at providing more end-user advisory services, but we don’t want to hire any sales execs so that will all be opportunistic. Additionally, our agendas are firming up nicely, and you will hear more on that soon. We weirdly think we can pull all this off with our little cadre of folks. Silly us. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading Post on Database Threats and Countermeasures. Rich’s excellent TidBITS post on Apple’s Security Efforts in 2012. Adrian’s Dark Reading post on Big Data Security Recommendations. Favorite Securosis Posts Mike Rothman: Best Post of 2012: Inflection. As we enter 2013, I wanted to point to probably the best piece we did in 2012, at least IMO. That’s Rich’s Inflection post. Things are always changing, and if you don’t see the change coming you can get steamrollered. Read this. Then read it again. And see whether you’ll see 2013 from the undercarriage of the bus that’s about to run you over. Or not. Mike Rothman: The CloudSec Chicken or the DevOps Egg. I had a very similar conversation regarding the impact of SDN on network security this week. It’s hard to balance being ahead of the market and showing so-called thought leadership against building something the market won’t like. Most of the network security players are waiting for VMWare to define the interfaces and interactions before they commit to much of anything. Adrian Lane: Can we effectively monitor big data?. Yes, it’s my post, but I think DAM needs re-engineering to accommodate big data. Other Securosis Posts Yes, honeypots are new again. SSLpocalypse, part XXII. Responses to AV articles. Karmic Career Advancement. Incite 1/2/13: Consistent Variety. Threatpost: What Have We Learned in 2012. The New York Times on Antivirus. Favorite Outside Posts Adrian Lane: A Pickpocket’s Tale. The use of diversion and control of the subject’s attention is the key ingredient. Fascinating story. Mike Rothman: How to Live Without Regret in 2013. It’s a new year. Folks take time to reset. But are you moving in the right direction? Interesting food for thought here… Mike Rothman: Why Collect Full Content Data? Rich: Stephen Haywood on SSH issues. With PoC code, while still debunking the hype. Excellent. James Arlen: The process myth. Incredibly useful way of thinking about process for Infosec folks. Research Reports and Presentations Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management. Defending Against Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks. Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments. Tokenization vs. Encryption: Options for Compliance. Pragmatic Key Management for Data Encryption. The Endpoint Security Management Buyer’s Guide. Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance. Understanding and Selecting Data Masking Solutions. Top News and Posts Does Your Alarm Have a Default Duress Code? How PCI Standards Will Really Die. Enhancing Certificate Security. Dell acquires Credant Technologies. Cloudpassage adds file integrity monitoring for cloud servers. Someone totally should have patented that FIM stuff. Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment goes to our friend Jack Daniels, in response to The New York Times on Antivirus. Amazing, next the NYT will discover newspapers are largely obsolete, too. Or maybe we’ll have to read that new flash on an anti-virus company’s blog to even things up. Share:

Happy 2013 everybody! At the dawn of a new year, most folks think more proactively about what they want to change – and what they don’t. I have spoken many times about the need to embrace change and even to learn to love change. Change is good. Stagnation is bad. But the trouble lies in how you achieve that change – and how you react when change is forced upon you. We were in the car the other day, and the Boss asked the kids about their New Year Resolutions. She and XX1 had some great ideas about what they resolved to do in the coming year. Everything they said was outstanding. But here’s the rub. Talk is easy. Resolutions are easy. Writing down resolutions is harder than saying them. And actually doing something consistently is infinitely harder. That’s why so many folks fail year after year regarding their resolutions. I am working on not putting a pin in every thought balloon floated in my direction. Cynics are trained to deflate ideas before they get airborne. It’s not the most positive feature of my OS. So in an attempt to do things differently, I held off from the typical interrogation that would follow a resolution. My instinct is to dig into the plan. I want everyone to lose weight or communicate better or get in shape or do whatever you’ve resolved to do. But without a plan – and more importantly an accountability partner – the odds are not in your favor. That’s not being pessimistic, it’s being realistic. You see, resolutions have to do with what you want to change. By the time we get through January, the best laid plans will be totally screwed up by external forces requiring you to adapt. Maybe it’s an injury that inhibits your exercise resolution. Or a new high profile project that gets in the way of family dinners. That’s why I largely stopped setting goals. And I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Why should I wait until the end of December to do the right thing? That doesn’t mean I plan to stagnate. I know where I want to get to. But I’m less set on how I get there. Regardless of what happens, I’ll adapt accordingly. I did a bunch of analysis at the end of last year to figure out what needs to happen every month to hit my desired economic outcome. But life will intrude and I’ll need to adapt. I know how I need to eat to maintain my desired weight and how many days I need to exercise to strengthen my body accordingly. Some days I’ll do well, other days I won’t. My plan is to look back in 12 months and feel good about what I’ve accomplished. But there are no hard or fast rules about what that means. There are no specifically defined goals. It’s about making sure I’m moving in the right direction. I’ll get there when I get there. If I get there. The only thing I specifically focus on is consistent effort. The beauty of not being tied to specific goals is that I can add variety to my actions and my activities. I get that’s an oxymoron. To me, consistent variety means to work hard every day. Be kind every day. Make good choices every day. And adapt as needed. You know, grind. Do stuff. Make mistakes. But move forward. Always. For a pessimist, I’m pretty optimistic about 2013. –Mike Photo credits: Consistency originally uploaded by Matt Hampel Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can get all our content in its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Building an Early Warning System Deploying the EWS Determining Urgency Understanding and Selection an Enterprise Key Manager Management Features Newly Published Papers Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance Incite 4 U Editors note: With great pleasure we welcome one of our two favorite Canadians as an Incite contributor. Jamie Arlen (@myrcurial for you Twitterati) will be contributing a piece each week, and his stuff will be tagged JA. So now you know where to send the hate mail… Monetizing the entire PC: Krebs’ recent post about the market for stolen passwords made me think of the huge markets the Boss and I visited in Barcelona last spring. The butchers there would sell pretty much every part of the animal. You’d look at the display case and think “WTF is that?” There is very little waste. It seems that PCs are silicon goats, and the underground markets Krebs frequents are the places where the parts get traded. By the way, it’s not much different than how Wall Street packages up pretty much everything, slices it, values it, and sells it in various tranches. Then they sell derivatives on the tranches, making transaction fees on every step of the cycle. I don’t think there is a big market for the meat of a lemming, but there is a huge market for consumer PC lemmings. That’s for sure. – MR Have fun without the echoes: 2012 is in the bag, and for some of us it couldn’t come soon enough. Oh, I had some nice highlights of the year (especially the bit about going to the Tour de France), but it seems I spent too much time sick or buried in less-interesting projects. Despite all that, one thing I avoided was getting caught up in the echo-chamber security BS that sometimes plagues Twitter, blogs, and the press. Almost none of these debates matter in any meaningful way, as Dave Shackleford says so well: “There’s been a lot of acrimonious discussion in the security community this year…and I

2012: What Have We Learned The biggest shift in 2012 was the emergence of state-sponsored malware and targeted attacks as major factors. The idea of governments developing and deploying highly sophisticated malware is far from new. Such attacks have been going on for years, but they’ve mainly stayed out of the limelight. Security researchers and intelligence analysts have seen many of these attacks, targeting both enterprises and government agencies, but they were almost never discussed openly and were not something that showed up on the front page of a national newspaper. A good read by Dennis Fisher, but I have a slightly different take. State-level cyberattacks definitely “broke out” in 2012, but I think a bigger lesson is that pretty much every organization finally realized that signature-based AV isn’t very helpful. Some of this is related to what China has been up to, but not all of it. Over the past year I couldn’t talk to any large organization, or many medium, that isn’t struggling with malware. I couldn’t say that on December 31, 2011. Share:

Outmaneuvered at Their Own Game, Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt The antivirus industry has a dirty little secret: its products are often not very good at stopping viruses. Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. Everyone in security knows this, but it is a bigger deal when the mainstream press starts covering it. Although too much of the article is a love song to various vendors who still need to prove themselves more. Share:

It’s the holiday season, people are leaving for vacation, and most people have things other than security on their minds – including me – so I’ll keep today’s Friday Summary short. It’s time to reflect on the successes – and failures – of the past year. For the most part 2012 has been a good year for the Securosis Team: Rich, Mike, Dave Mortman, Dave Lewis, Jamie Arlen, Gunnar Peterson, and I have all been active with research, conference presentations, webcasts, consulting projects, and engaging the community at large. We did more deep-dive research projects than we have ever done before. And more importantly, despite the huge amount of work, it remains fun. I believe everyone on the Securosis team loves working in the field of IT Security, and despite having seen the ugly underbelly of the profession, it is simply one of the most interesting and challenging fields imaginable. Our candid internal research debates are a genuine treat; and chat discussions are simultaneously illuminating, depressing, funny, and rewarding. I am really lucky to work with such a great team and have so many interesting projects to work on! Sure, I could do without the daily baths in vendor FUD, but I just can’t imagine doing anything else. Well, perhaps I can imagine running off to be a roadie for an AC/DC world tour, but then reality sets in and I come back here. For those of you who are wondering what we will be up to in the New Year, we will publish a full research calendar in the coming weeks. We have several projects starting on endpoint security, web applications, mobile, and cloud IAM. And several of us will be presenting at conferences early next year – notably the Phoenix ISSA meeting January 8 and the Open Group conference in Newport Beach, California on the 28th of January. This is the last Friday Summary of 2012. I would like to thank all of you who read and participate on the blog, chat with us on Twitter, and help with our Totally Transparent Research process – open public debate over content makes the research better. Happy Holidays! –Adrian On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading Post on DB Threats and Countermeasures. Rich’s excellent TidBITS post on Apple’s Security Efforts in 2012. Securosis Posts Incite 12/19/2012: Celebration. Friday Summary: December 13, 2012 – You, Me, and Twitter. The CloudSec Chicken or the DevOps Egg? Favorite Outside Posts Mike Rothman: Why Collect Full Content Data? Adrian Lane: On Puppy Farm Vendors, Petco and The Remarkable Analog To Security … Nobody works a theme like Chris. I’m just wondering which part he would play in a remake of “Best In Show”? Project Quant Posts Malware Analysis Quant: Index of Posts. Malware Analysis Quant: Metrics – Monitor for Reinfection. Malware Analysis Quant: Metrics – Remediate. Malware Analysis Quant: Metrics – Find Infected Devices. Malware Analysis Quant: Metrics – Define Rules and Search Queries. Malware Analysis Quant: Metrics – The Malware Profile. Malware Analysis Quant: Metrics – Dynamic Analysis. Research Reports and Presentations Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management. Defending Against Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks. Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments. Tokenization vs. Encryption: Options for Compliance. Pragmatic Key Management for Data Encryption. The Endpoint Security Management Buyer’s Guide. Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance. Understanding and Selecting Data Masking Solutions. Top News and Posts Dell acquires Credant Technologies. Senator introduces bill to regulate data caps. Rebooting Security Engagement at Mozilla. Adobe hasn’t yet fixed Critical Shockwave vulnerability reported in 2010. Point-of-Sale Skimmers: No Charge…Yet. CSRF Protection for Public Functionality. Delta Air Lines publishes privacy policy, but reseacher finds a fault. Living with HTTPS. An HSTS discussion – from July apparently, but interesting. Hosting Antagonist automatically fixes vulnerabilities in customers websites. Blog Comment of the Week Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. While there were no comments this holiday week, we have raised a sizable sum, which we will be donating this week. Thanks again for all your comments! Share:

As we say goodbye to Old Man 2012 and get ready to welcome Baby New Year 2013, it is time for some downtime and reflection. This will be the last Incite of the year. My focus over the next two weeks will be enjoying the accomplishments of the past 12 months. Which, by the way, is very hard for me. I came into the world with the unsatisfied gene. No matter how good it is, it can be better. No matter how much got done, I could have done more. With every accomplishment, I have already started looking towards the next goal because there are always more things to do, different windmills to tilt at, and another mountain to climb. But not this year. I will make a concerted effort to acknowledge where I’ve been and how far I’ve come. Both personally and professionally. And it will be a long time coming. The Boss and I were talking last night and she mentioned that we need to enjoy things a bit more. To have more fun. We have a great lifestyle and comforts I couldn’t have imagined, growing up in a much more modest situation, but it always seems we’re running from one place to the next. Fighting yet another fire, working on the next project, or filling up our social calendar. She is exactly right. I also need to celebrate life. We keep being reminded how fleeting it is. I will take some time to appreciate my good health and the health of my family. I will enjoy the quality time I get to spend with the people I care about. And I’ll be thankful for every day I get. At some point in the future, I will get an invitation to stop playing this game called life. Until then I plan to make the most of it. When I say ‘celebrate’, don’t expect a big blowout bash or any other ostentatious showing of prosperity. I like to celebrate in a low-key fashion. I’m not into material things, so I don’t celebrate a good year by buying things I don’t need. I’m also painfully aware that it’s still tough out there. Good fortune has overlooked many folks who have more talent and work harder than I do. These folks continue to struggle as the global economy continues its slow arduous recovery. More to the point, I know success is fleeting, and I have personally been down a lot more than I have been up. I’ll smile a bit thinking back on the last year, but I am all too aware there is more work to be done, and on January 1 the meter resets to 0. See? There I go again, moving forward even when I’m trying to stay in one place. We have wrapped up our 2013 planning at Securosis, and we have a good plan. As good as 2012 has been, it can get better. We will launch the Nexus, we will continue investing in our cloud security curriculum, and we will continue researching, using our unique Totally Transparent Research model. And there will also be a surprise or two out of us next year. It will all be a lot of work and I look forward to it. If it was easy everyone would be doing it. And I would be remiss if I didn’t thank all of you for reading our stuff, adding comments to our posts, telling us when we’re wrong, and tipping one (or ten) back when we see each other in person. Every company is built on relationships, and we at Securosis are very very fortunate to have great relationships with great folks at all levels and functions within the security ecosystem. I wake up some days and pinch myself that I get to pontificate all day, every day. Yup, that calls for a celebration. It must be beer o’clock somewhere. From all of us at Securosis, have a great holiday, be safe, and we’ll see you in 2013. –Mike Photo credits: Celebrate You – Celebrate Life! originally uploaded by Keith Davenport Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can get all our content in its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Building an Early Warning System Deploying the EWS Determining Urgency Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Key Manager Management Features Newly Published Papers Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance Incite 4 U Title fail: I got pretty excited – any article called “Information Security as a Business Enabler” is bound to give me fodder to lampoon for hours. I mean, a business enabler? C’mon, man! Normally security is a business disabler. I remember trying to position digital certificates as an enabler of new business processes back in the day, and getting laughed out of the customer’s office. So you can imagine how disappointed I was to see the article is really about doing an impact analysis and post-mortem after a breach. I mean, the article is solid and makes points we have been talking about for years. But how this has anything to do with business enablement is beyond me. So some editor is either trolling for views or didn’t read the article. Either way it’s title FAIL. – MR HP contracts small guy syndrome: In last week’s Incite, both Mike and I commented on Gartner’s criticism of Amazon’s and HP’s service level agreements (SLAs) for their respective clouds. Lo and behold, HP responded with an amusing blog post this week. Remember that the only real cloud security controls you have are those guarantee in the contract, so it’s amusing that HP first felt the need to ‘educate’ us all on what an

I am on a plane headed home after a couple days of business development meetings in Northern California, and I am starting to notice a bit of a chasm in the cloud security world. Companies, for good reason, tend to be wary of investing in new products and features before they smell customer demand (the dream-build-pray contingent exempted). The winners of the game invest just enough ahead of the curve that they don’t lose out too badly to a competitor, but they don’t pay too much for shiny toys on the shelf. Or they wait and buy a startup. This is having an interesting inhibiting effect on the security industry, particularly in terms of the cloud. Security companies tend to sell to security buyers. Security buyers, as a group, are not overly informed on the nitty-gritty details of cloud security and operations. So demand from traditional security buying centers is somewhat limited. Dev and Ops, however, are deep in the muck of cloud. They are the ones tasked with building and maintaining this infrastructure. They buy from different vendors and have different priorities, but are often still tasked with meeting security policy requirements (if they exist). They have the knowledge and tools, and in many cases (such as identity, access, and entitlement management), the implementation ball is in their court. The result is that Dev and Ops are the ones spending on cloud management tools, many of which include security features. Security vendors aren’t necessarily seeing these deals, and thus the demand. Also, their sales forces are poorly aligned to talk to the right buying centers, in the right language, which inhibits opportunities. Because they don’t see the opportunity they don’t have the motivation to build solutions. It’s better to cloudwash, spin the marketing brochures, and wait. My concern is that we see more security functionality being pushed into the DevOps tool sets. Not that I care who is selling and buying as long as the job gets done, but my suspicion is that this is inhibiting at least some of the security development we need, as cloud adoption continues and we start moving into more advanced deployment scenarios. There are certainly some successes out there, but especially on the public cloud and the programmatic/software defined security side, advancement is lacking (specifically more API support for security automation and orchestration). There are reasonable odds that both security teams and security vendors will fall behind, and there are some things DevOps simply will not do, which may result in a cloud security gap – as we have seen in application security and other fast-moving areas that broke ‘traditional’ models. It will probably also mean missed opportunities for some security vendors, especially as infrastructure vendors eat their lunch. This isn’t an easy problem for the vendors to solve – they need to tap into the right buying centers and align sales forces before they will see enough demand – and their tools will need to offer more than pure security, to appeal to the DevOps problem space. The problem is easier for security pros – educate yourself on cloud, understand the technical nuances and differences from traditional infrastructure and operating models, and get engaged with DevOps beyond setting policies that break with operational realities. Or maybe I’m just bored on an airplane, and spent too much time driving rental cars the past few days. Share:

I have an on again / off again, love/hate relationship with Twitter. Those of you who follow me might have noticed I suddenly went from barely posting to fully re-engaging with the community. Sometimes I find myself getting fed up with the navel gazing of the echo chamber, as we seem to rehash the same issues over and over again, looking for grammatical and logical gotchas in 140 characters. Twitter lacks context and nuance, and so all too easily degrades into little more than a political talk show. When I’m in a bad mood, or am drowning at work, it’s one of the first things to go. But Twitter also plays a powerful, positive role in my life. It connects me to people in a unique manner unlike any other social media. As someone who works at home alone, Twitter is my water cooler, serving up personal and professional interactions across organizational and geographic boundaries. It isn’t a substitute for human proximity, but satisfies part of that need while providing a stunning scope and scale. Twitter, for me, isn’t a substitute for physical socialization, but is instead an enhancer that extends and augments our reach. When a plane disgorges me in some foreign city, any city, it is Twitter that guarantees I can find someone to have a beer or coffee with. It’s probably good that it wasn’t invented until I was a little older, a little more responsible, and a lot married. As a researcher it is also one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal. Need a contact at a company? Done. Have a question on some obscure aspect of security or coding? Done. Need to find some references using a product? Done. It’s a real-time asynchronous peer network – which is why it is so much better for this stuff than LinkedIn or Facebook. But as a professional, and technically an executive (albeit on a very small scale) Twitter challenges me to decide where to draw the line between personal and professional. Twitter today is as much, or more, a media tool as a social network. It is an essential outlet for our digital personas, and plays a critical role in shaping public perceptions. This is as true for a small-scale security analyst as for the Hollywood elite or the Pope. What we tweet defines what people think of us, like it or not. For myself I made the decision a long time ago that Twitter should reflect who I am. I decided on honesty instead of a crafted facade. This is a much bigger professional risk than you might think. I regularly post items that could offend customers, prospects, or anyone listening. It also reveals more about me than I am sometimes comfortable with in public. For example, I know my tweet stream is monitored by PR and AR handlers from companies of all sizes. They now know my propensity for foul language, the trials and tribulations of my family life, my favorite beers, health and workout histories, travel schedules, and more. I don’t put my entire life up there, but that’s a lot more than I want in an analyst database (yes, they exist). One day Twitter will help me fill a cancelled meeting on a business development trip, and the next it will draw legal threats or lose me a deal. Tweets also have a tendency to reflect what’s on my mind at a point in time, but completely out of context. Take this morning for example: I tweeted out my frustration at the part of the industry and community that spends inordinate time knocking others down in the furtherment of its own egos and agendas. But I failed to capture the nuance of my thought, and the tweet unfortunately referred to the entire industry. That wasn’t my intention, and I tried to clarify, but additional context is a poor substitute for initial clarity. My choice was to be honest or crafted. Either Twitter reflects who I am, or I create a digital persona not necessarily aligned with my real self. I decided I would rather reveal too much about who I am than play politician and rely on a ‘managed’ image. Twitter is never exactly who I am, but neither is any form of writing or public interaction. This explains my relationship with Twitter. It reflects who I am, and when I’m down and out I see (and use) Twitter as an extension of my frustration. When I’m on top Twitter is a source of inspiration and connection. It really isn’t any different than physical social interaction. As an introvert, when I’m in a bad mood, the last thing I want is to sit in a crowded room listening to random discussions. When I’m flying high (metaphorically – I’m not into that stuff despite any legalization) I have no problem engaging in spirited debate on even the most inane subjects, without concern for the consequences. For me, Twitter is an extension of the real world, bringing the same benefits and consequences. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading post on Big Data Security Recommendations. Rich quoted on DLP at TechTarget. Favorite Securosis Posts Mike Rothman (and David Mortman): The CloudSec Chicken or the DevOps Egg. I had a very similar conversation regarding the impact of SDN on network security this week. It’s hard to balance being ahead of the market and showing ‘thought leadership’ against building something the market won’t like. Most of the network security players are waiting for VMWare to define the interfaces and interactions before they commit to much of anything. Adrian Lane: Can we effectively monitor big data?. Yes, it’s my post, but I think DAM needs to be re-engineered to accommodate big data. Rich: Building an Early Warning System: Deploying the EWS. Mike is taking a very cool approach with this series. Other Securosis Posts Selecting an Enterprise Key Manager. Incite 12/12/2012: Love the Grind. Building an Early Warning System: Determining