Research

What are you announcing? Today, we are announcing that Mike Rothman is joining Securosis as Analyst/President (Rich remains Analyst/CEO). This is a full merger of Securosis and Security Incite. Why is this a good move for Securosis? Not to sound trite, but bringing on Mike is a no-brainer. This immediately and significantly broadens Securosis’ coverage and positions us to grow materially in ways we couldn’t do without another great analyst. There are very few people out there with Mike’s experience as an independent analyst and entrepreneur. Mike proved he could thrive as a one-man operation (his jump to eIQ wasn’t a financial necessity), completely shares our values, and brings an incredible range of experience to the table. Those who read our blog and free research reports gain additional content in areas we simply couldn’t cover. Mike will be leading our network and endpoint security coverage, as well as bringing over the Pragmatic CSO (sorry, you still have to pay for it) and the Daily Incite (which we’re restructuring a bit, as you’ll see later in this FAQ). Given Rich and Adrian’s coverage overlap, adding Mike nearly doubles our coverage… with our contributors (David Mortman, Dave Meier, and Chris Pepper) rounding us out even more. Mike is also a “high producer”, which means we’ll deliver even more free content to the community. Our existing clients now gain access to an additional analyst, and Mike’s clients now gain access to all of the Securosis resources and people. Aside from covering different technical areas, Mike brings “in the trenches” strategy, marketing, and business analysis experience that neither Rich nor Adrian have, as they specialize more on the tech side. In terms of the company, this also allows us to finally execute on the vision we first started building 18 months ago (Securosis has been around longer, but that’s when we came up with our long-term vision). As we’ll discuss in a second, we have some big plans for new products, and we honestly couldn’t achieve our goals without someone of Mike’s experience. Why is this a good move for Security Incite and Mike Rothman? Mike digs a lot deeper into his perspectives in a POPE (People, Opportunity, Product, Exit) analysis, but basically there was a limitation in the impact Mike could have and what he could do as a solo practitioner. Finding kindred spirits in Rich and Adrian enables us to build the next great IT research firm. This, in turn, is a prime opportunity to build products targeting a grossly underserved market (mid-market security and IT professionals), while continuing to give back to the community by publishing free research. This allows Mike to get back to his roots as a network security analyst and enables Securosis to provide full and broad coverage of all security and compliance topics, which benefits both end user and vendor clients. But mostly it’s as Rich said: a great opportunity to work with great guys and build something great. What is the research philosophy of Securosis? Will that change now that Mike Rothman is part of the team? Securosis’ core operating philosophy is Totally Transparent Research. That says it all. Bringing Mike to the team doesn’t change a thing. In fact, he wouldn’t have it any other way. As Mike has produced (as a META analyst) and bought (as a vendor) “mostly opaque” research from the big research shops, he certainly understands the limitations of that approach and knows there is a better way. Who is your target customer? Securosis will target mid-market security and IT professionals. These folks have perhaps the worst job in IT. They have most of the same problems as larger enterprises, but far fewer resources and less funding. Helping these folks ensure and accelerate the success of their projects is our core objective for new information products and syndicated research offerings in 2010. Will all the research remain free and available on the Securosis blog? Yes, all of the Securosis primary research will continue to be published on the blog. Our research may be packaged up and available in document form from our sponsors, but the core research will always appear first on the blog. This is a critical leg of the Totally Transparent Research model. Our community picks apart our research and makes it better. That makes the end result more actionable and more effective. What kind of information products are you going to produce? We’re not ready to announce our product strategy quite yet, but suffice it to say we’ll have a family of products designed to accelerate security and compliance project success. The entry price will be modest and participating in a web-based community will be a key part of the customer experience. What about the existing retainer clients of Securosis? How will they be supported? Securosis will continue to support existing retainer customers. We’ve rolled out a new set of retainer packages for clients interested in an ongoing relationship. All our analysts participate in supporting our retainer clients. What’s going to happen to the Daily Incite? The Daily Incite is becoming the Securosis Incite and will continue to provide hard-hitting and hopefully entertaining commentary on the happenings in the security industry. Now we have 6 contributors to add their own “Incite” to the mix. We are also supplementing the Incite with other structured weekly blog posts including the “Securosis FireStarter,” which will spur discussion and challenge the status quo. We’ll continue producing the Securosis Weekly Summary to keep everyone up to date on what we’ve been up to each week. What about the Pragmatic CSO? The Pragmatic CSO is alive and well. You can still buy the book on the website and that isn’t changing. You may have noticed many of the research models Securosis has rolled out over the past year are “Pragmatic” in both name and nature. That’s not an accident. Taking a pragmatic approach is central to our philosophy of security and the Pragmatic CSO is the centerpiece of that endeavor. So you can expect lots more Pragmatism from Securosis over the coming years.

I am no fan of “security through obscurity”. Peer review and open discourse on security have proven essential in development of network protocols and cryptographic algorithms. Regardless, that does not mean I choose to disclose everything. I may disclose protocols and approach, but certain details I choose to remit. Case in point: if I were Twitter, and wanted to reduce account hijacking by ridding myself of weak passwords which can be easily guessed, I would not disclose my list of weak passwords to the user community. As noted by TechCrunch: If you’re on Twitter, that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ (cough cough) and ‘123456’ are too obvious to be picked. It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page. Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voila, there they are, all 370 of them. The common attack vector is to perform a dictionary attack on known accounts. A good dictionary is an important factor for success. It is much easier to create a good dictionary if you know for certain many common passwords will not be present. Making the list easy to discover makes it much easier for someone to tune their dictionary. I applaud Twitter for trying to improve passwords and thereby making them tougher to guess, but targeted attacks just got better as well. Because here’s a list of 370 passwords I don’t have to test. Share:

Fall of 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the start of my professional security career. That was the first day someone stuck a yellow shirt on my back and sent me into a crowd of drunk college football fans at the University of Colorado (later famous for its student riots). I’m pretty sure someone screwed up, since it was my first day on the job and I was assigned a rover position – which normally goes to someone who knows what the f&%$ they are doing, not some 18 year old, 135-lb kid right out of high school. And yes, I was breaking up fights on my first day (the stadium wasn’t dry until a few years later). If you asked me then, I never would have guessed I’d spend the next couple decades working through the security ranks, eventually letting my teenage geek/hacker side take over. Over that time I’ve come to rely on the following guiding principles in everything from designing my personal security to giving advice to clients: Don’t expect human behavior to change. Ever. You cannot survive with defense alone. Not all threats are equal, and all checklists are wrong. You cannot eliminate all vulnerabilities. You will be breached. There’s a positive side to each of these negative principles: Design security controls that account for human behavior. Study cognitive science and practical psychology to support your decisions. This is also critical for gaining support for security initiatives, not just design of individual controls. Engage in intelligence and counter-threat operations to the best of your ability. Once an attack has started, your first line of security has already failed. Use checklists to remember the simple stuff, but any real security must be designed using a risk-based approach. As a corollary, you can’t implement risk-based security if you don’t really understand the risks; and most people don’t understand the risks. Be the expert. Adopt anti-exploitation wherever possible. Vulnerability-driven security is always behind the threat. React faster and better. Incident response is more important than any other single security control. With one final piece of advice – keep it simple and pragmatic. And after 20 years, that’s all I’ve got… Share:

I just noticed this story in my feed reader from before Christmas. I don’t know why I found the Computerworld story on the Massachusetts inmate ‘hacker’ so funny, but I do. Perhaps it is because I envision the prosecutor struggling to come up with a punishable crime. In fact I am not totally sure what law Janosko violated. An additional 18 month sentence for ‘abusing’ a computer provided by the correctional facility … I was unaware such a law existed. Does the state now have to report the breach? In 2006, Janosko managed to circumvent computer controls and use the machine to send e-mail and cull data on more than 1,100 Plymouth County prison employees. He gained access to sensitive information such as their dates of birth, Social Security Numbers, telephone numbers, home addresses and employment records. That’s pretty good as terminals, especially those without USB or other forms of external storage, can require a lot of manual work to hack. I bet the prosecutors had to think long and hard on how to charge Janosko. I don’t exactly know what ‘abusing’ a computer means, unless of course you do something like the scene from Office Space when they exact some revenge on a printer. He pleaded guilty to “one count of damaging a protected computer”, but I am not sure how they quantified damages here as it seems improbable a dumb terminal or the associated server could be damaged by bypassing the application interface. Worst case you reboot the server. Maybe this is some form of “unintended use”, or the computer equivalent to ripping off mattress tags. If I was in his shoes, I would have claimed it was ‘research’! Share:

It’s easy to say that every year’s been a big year, but in our case we’ve got the goods to back it up. Aside from doubling the size of the Securosis team, I added a new member to my family and managed to still keep things running. With all our writing and speaking we managed to hit every corner of the industry. We created a new model for patch management, started our Pragmatic series of presentations, popped off a few major whitepapers on application and data security, launched a new design for the site, played a big role in pushing out the 2.0 version of the Cloud Security Alliance Guidance, and… well, a lot of stuff. And I won’t mention certain words I used at the RSA Conference (where we started our annual Disaster Recovery Breakfast), or certain wardrobe failures at Defcon. On the personal front, aside from starting my journey as a father, I met Jimmy Buffett, finally recovered enough from my shoulder surgery to start martial arts again, knocked off a half-marathon and a bunch of 10K races, spent 5 days in Puerto Vallarta with my wife, and installed solar in our home (just in time for a week of cloudy weather). It’s been a pretty great year. I’ve never been a fan of predictions, so I thought it might instead be nice to collect some lessons learned from the Securosis team, with a peek at what we’re watching for 2010. – Rich Adrian The biggest change for me over the last year has been my transformation from CTO to analyst. I love the breadth of security technologies I get to work with in this role. I see so much more of the industry as a whole and it totally changed my perspective. I have a better appreciation for the challenges end users face, even more than as a CIO, as I see it across multiple companies. This comes at the expense of some enthusiasm, the essence of which is captured in the post Technology vs. Practicality I wrote back in July. Moving forward, the ‘Cloud’, however you choose to define it, is here. Informally looking at software downloads, security product services and a few other security related activities over the last 30 days, I see ‘s3.amazon.com’ or similar in half the URLs I access. This tidal wave has only just begun. With it, I am seeing a renewed awareness of security by IT admins and developers. I am hearing a collective “Hey, wait a minute, if all my stuff is out there…”, and with it comes all the security questions that should have been posed back when data and servers were all on-premise. This upheaval is going to make 2010 a fun year in security. Meier 2009 for me wasn’t a whole lot different than the past couple of years from a consultative role. Although I probably pushed the hardest I ever have this year to build security in as architecture (not as an afterthought) I still, quite often, found myself in a remediation role. Things are changing – slowly. The enterprise (large and mid-size) is very aware of risk, but seems to still only be motivated in areas where it’s directly tied to monetary penalties (i.e., PCI and the government / defense side). I hope next year brings better balance and foresight in this regard. As for 2010 I’m going to agree with Adrian in reference to the ‘Cloud’ and its unquestionable impetus. But it will still be an interesting year of pushing the seams of these services to the limits and finding out where they don’t hold water. Mid to late 2009 showed me some examples of cloud services being pulled back in-house and the use case considerably reengineered. 2010 is going to be a good year for an oft quiet topic: secure network architecture – especially with regards to services utilizing the ‘Cloud’. The design and operation of these hybrid networks is going to become more prevalent as network and transport security are continually hammered on for weaknesses. I’m sure it’s safe to say we’ll see a few cloudbursts along the way. Rich My research moved in a bit of a different direction than I expected this year. Actually, two different directions. Project Quant really changed some of my views on security metrics, and I’m now approaching metrics problems from a different perspective. I’ve come to believe that we need to spend more time on operational security metrics than the management and risk metrics we’ve mostly focused on. Operational metrics are a far more powerful tool to improve our efficiency and effectiveness, and communicate these to non-security professionals. If after decades we’re still struggling with patch management, it seems long past time to focus on the basics and stop chasing whatever is sexy at the moment. I’ve also started paying a lot more attention to the practical implications of cognitive science, psychology, and economics. Understanding why people make the decisions they do, and how these individual decisions play out on a collective scale (economics) are, I believe, the most important factors when designing and implementing security. I learned that we shouldn’t assume everyone has the basics down, and that if we understand how and why people make the decisions they do, we can design far more effective security. On the side, I also learned a lot about skepticism and logical fallacies, which has heavily influenced how I conduct my research. Our security is a heck of a lot better when it’s mixed with a little science. In 2010 I plan to focus more on building our industry up. I’d like to become more involved in information-sharing exercises and improving the quality of our metrics, especially those around breaches and fraud. Also, like Hoff and Adam, I’m here if Howard Schmidt and our government call – I’d love to contribute more to our national (and international) cybersecurity efforts if they’re willing to have me. We need to stop complaining and start helping. I’ve been fortunate to have a few opportunities to

An interesting discussion popped up on Slashdot this Saturday afternoon about Preventing My Hosting Provider From Rooting My Server. ‘hacker’ is claiming that when he accuses his hosting provider of service interruption, they assume root access on his machines without permission. “I have a heavily-hit public server (web, mail, cvs/svn/git, dns, etc.) that runs a few dozen OSS project websites, as well as my own personal sites (gallery, blog, etc.). From time to time, the server has ‘unexpected’ outages, which I’ve determined to be the result of hardware, network and other issues on behalf of the provider. I run a lot of monitoring and logging on the server-side, so I see and graph every single bit and byte in and out of the server and applications, so I know it’s not the OS itself. When I file ‘WTF?’-style support tickets to the provider through their web-based ticketing system, I often get the response of: ‘Please provide us with the root password to your server so we can analyze your logs for the cause of the outage.’ Moments ago, there were three simultaneous outages while I was logged into the server working on some projects. Server-side, everything was fine. They asked me for the root password, which I flatly denied (as I always do), and then they rooted the server anyway, bringing it down and poking around through my logs. This is at least the third time they’ve done this without my approval or consent. Is it possible to create a minimal Linux boot that will allow me to reboot the server remotely, come back up with basic networking and ssh, and then from there, allow me to log in and mount the other application and data partitions under dm-crypt/loop-aes and friends?” Ignoring for a moment the basic problem of requesting assistance while not wishing to provide access, how do you protect the servers from remote hosting administrators? If someone else has physical access to your machine, even if you machine is virtual, a skilled attacker will gain access to your data regardless. It’s not clear if the physical machine is owned by ‘hacker’ or if it is just leased server capacity, but it seems to me that if you want to keep remote administrators of average skill from rooting your server and then rummaging around in your files, disk encryption would be an effective choice. You have the issue of needing to supply credentials remotely upon reboot, but this would be effective in protecting log data. If you need better security, place the server under your physical control, or all bets are off. Share:

This is going to be a pretty short summary. If you noticed, we were were a little light on content this week, due to out-of-town travel for client engagements and in-town client meetings. On a personal note, early this week I had a front tire blow out on my car, throwing me airborne and backwards across four lanes of traffic during the afternoon commute. A driver who witnessed the spectacle said it looked like pole vaulting with cars, and could not figure out how I landed on the wheels, backwards or not. Somehow I did not hit anything and walked away unscathed, but truth be told, I am a little shaken up by the experience. Thank you to those of you who sent well wishes, but everything is fine here. On a more positive note we are gearing up for several exciting events in the new year. New business offerings, a bunch of new stuff on Quant for databases, and a few other surprises as well. But all of this is a lot of work, and it is all going on while we are attending to family matters, so we have decided that this is the last Friday summary of the year. We will have more posts during the holidays, but the frequency will be down until the new year. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences TechTarget video with Adrian talking about email security in the cloud. Rich was quoted in Business Week regarding The Coming Cloud Catastrophe. SearchSecurity podcast with Adrian on database security strategy. Favorite Securosis Posts Akamai Implements WAF Other Securosis Posts MacBook Holiday Sales Report Project Quant for Databases: Project Quant: Database Security Planning, Part 2 (part 4 overall) Project Quant: Database Security Planning (part 3 overall) Favorite Outside Posts Adrian: A classic from Amrit Williams! David: Sockstress Vulnerabilities Patched – Nobody really talking about this which is a shame because it probably deserves much more attention. Watch it resurface in 2010. Top News and Posts Honestly, most of us did not even open our feed readers this week. But one post was making the rounds: Insurgents Hack Drones. Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment comes from our own Jeremiah Grossman in response to Adrian’s post on Akamai Implements WAF: Adrian, good post, some bits to consider… One major reason I found this announcement very important is many large website operators who utilize massive bandwidth simply cannot deploy WAFs for performance/manageability reasons. This is why WAFs are rarely found guarding major traffic points. Akamai is known specifically for their performance capabilities so may be able to scale up WAFs where current industry has not. Secondly, WAF rules will always leave some vulnerability gaps, hopefully lesser so in the future, but complete coverage isn’t necessarily a must. The vast majority of vulnerabilities (by raw numbers) are syntax in nature (ie SQLi, XSS, etc.) By mitigating these (at least temporarily) organizations may prioritize the business logic flaws for code fixes–gaps in the WAF. These approach helps getting down to zero remotely exploitable bugs MUCH easier. We’ve experienced as much in our customer-base. “Rule sets are really hard to get right, and must be updated with the same frequency as your web site content. As you add new pages or functions, you are adding and updating rules.” This implies the WAF is deployed in white list mode, which to my understanding is not how Akamai is going to go. ModSecurity Core Rules are black list style, so would not require updates when content is changed. To be fair the rules would have to be changed as the attacks evolve, which may or may be as fast as website/content code changes. Share:

Akamai announced that they are adding Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities into their distributed EdgePlatform netwok. I usually quote from the articles I reference, but there is simply too much posturing and fluffy marketing-ese about value propositions for me to extract an insightful fragment of information on what they are doing and why it is important, so I will paraphrase. In a nutshell they have ported ModSecurity onto/into the Akamai Edge Server. They are using the Core Rule Set to form the basis of their policy set. As content is pulled from the Akamai cache servers, the request is examined for XSS, SQL Injection, response splitting, and other injection attacks, as well as some error conditions indicative of tampering. Do I think this is a huge advancement to security? Not really. At least not at the outset. But I think it’s a good idea in the long run. Akamai edge servers are widely used by large commercial vendors and content providers, who are principal targets for many specific XSS attacks. In essence you are distributing Web Application Firewall rules, and enforcing as requests are made for the distributed/cached content. The ModSecurity policy set has been around for a long time and will provide basic protections, but it leaves quite a gap in meaningful coverage. Don’t get me wrong, the rule set covers many of the common attacks and they are proven to be effective. However, the value of a WAF is in the quality of the rule set, and how appropriate those rules are to the specific web application. Rule sets are really hard to get right, and must be updated with the same frequency as your web site content. As you add new pages or functions, you are adding and updating rules. I think the announcement is important, though, is because I believe it marks the beginning of a trend. We hear far too many complaints about WAF hindering applications, as well as the expense of rule set development and maintenance. The capability is valuable, but the coverage needs to get better, management needs to be easier, and the costs need to come down. I believe this is a model we will see more of because: Security is embedded into the service. With many ‘Cloud’ and SaaS offerings being offered, most with nebulous benefits, it’s clear that those who use Akamai are covered from the basic attacks, and the analysis is done on the Akamai network, so your servers remain largely unburdened. Just as with out-sourcing the processing overhead associated with anti-spam into the cloud, you are letting the cloud absorb the overhead of SQL Injection detection. And like Anti-virus, it’s only going to catch a subset of the attacks. Commoditization of WAF service. Let’s face it, SaaS and cloud models are more efficient because you commoditize a resource and then leverage the capability across a much larger number of customers. WAF rules are hard to set up, so if I can leverage attack knowledge across hundreds or thousands of sites, the cost goes down. We are not quite there yet, but the possibility of relieving your organization from needing these skills in-house is very attractive for the SME segment. The SME segment is not really using Akamai EdgeServers, so what I am talking about is generic WAF in the cloud, but the model fits really well with outsourced and managed service models. Specific, tailored WAF rules will be the add-on service for those who choose not to build defenses into the web application or maintain their own WAF. The knowledge that Akamai can gather and return to WAF & web security vendors provides invaluable analysis on emerging attacks. The statistics, trend data, and metrics they have access to offer security researchers a wealth of information – which can be leveraged to thwart specific attacks and augment firewall rules. So this first baby step is not all that exciting, but I think it’s a logical progression for WAF service in the cloud, and one we will see a lot more of. Share:

This is my MacBook sale progress report. For those of you who have not followed my tweets on the subject, I listed my MacBook for sale on Craigslist. After Bruce Schneier’s eye-opening and yet somehow humorous report on selling his laptop on eBay, I figured I would shoot for a face to face sale. I chose Craigslist in Phoenix and specified a cash-only sale. The results have been less than impressive. The first time I listed the laptop: Scammers: 6 Phishers: 2 Tire Kickers: 1 Real Buyers: 0 The second time I listed the laptop: Scammers: 5 Phishers: 4 Pranksters: 1 Tire Kickers: 1 Real Buyers: 0 I consider them scammers, as the people who responded in all but one case wanted shipment to Africa. It was remarkably consistent. The remaining ‘buyer’ claimed to be in San Jose, but felt compelled to share some sob story about a relative with failing health in Africa. I figured that was a precursor to asking me to ship overseas. When I said I would be happy to deliver to their doorstep for cash, they never responded. The prankster wanted me to meet him in a very public place and assured me he would bring cash, but was just trying to get me to drive 30 miles away. I asked a half dozen times for a phone call to confirm, which stopped communications cold. I figure this is kind of like crank calling for the 21st century. A few years ago I saw a presentation by eBay’s CISO, Dave Cullinane. He stated that on any given day, 10% of eBay users would take advantage of another eBay user if the opportunity presented itself, and about 2% were actively engaged in finding ways to defraud other eBay members. Given the vast number of global users eBay has, I think that is a pretty good sample size, and probably an accurate representation of human behavior. I would bet that when it comes to high dollar items that can be quickly exchanged for cash, the percentage of incidents rises dramatically. In my results, 55% of responses were active scams. I would love to know what percentages eBay sees with laptop sales. Is it the malicious 2% screwing around with over 50% of the laptop sales? I am making an assumption that it’s a small group of people engaged in this behavior, given the consistency of the pitches, and that my numbers on Craigslist are not that dissimilar from eBay’s. A small group of people can totally screw up an entire market, as the people I speak with are now donating stuff for the tax writeoff rather than deal with the detritus. Granted, it is easier for an individual to screen for fraudsters with Craigslist, but eBay seems to do a pretty good job. Regardless, at some point the hassle simply outweighs the couple hundred bucks you’d get from the sale. Safe shopping and happy holidays! Share:

I have had friends and family in town over the last eight days. Some of them wanted the ‘Arizona Experience’, so we did the usual: Sedona, Pinnacle Peak Steak House, Cave Creek, a Cardinals game, and a few other local attractions. Part of the tour was the big Crossroads Gun Show out at the fairgrounds. It was the first time I had been to such a show in 9 or 10 years. Speaking with merchants, listening to their sales pitches, and overhearing discussions around the fairgrounds, everything was centered on security. Personal security. Family security. Home security. Security when they travel. They talk about preparedness and they are planning for many possibilities: everything from burglars to Armageddon. Some events they plan for have small statistical probability, while others border on the fantastic. Still, the attendees were there to do more than just speculate and engage in idle talk – they train, plan, meet with peers, and prepare for they threats they perceive. I don’t want this to devolve into a whole gun control discussion, and I am not labeling any group – that is not my point. What you view as a threat, and to what lengths you are willing to go, provides an illuminating contrast between data security and physical security. Each discussion I engaged in had a very personal aspect to it. I don’t know any data security professionals that honestly sit up at night thinking about how to prepare for new threats or what might happen. For them, it’s a job. Some research late into the night and hack to learn, but it’s not the same thing. As data security professionals, short of a handful of people in capture the flag tournaments at Black Hat, the same level of dedication is not there. Then again, generally no one dies if your firewall fails. For each of the dozen or so individuals I spoke with, their actions were an odd blend of intellect and paranoia. How much planning was a product of their imagination and resources. Are they any more secure than other segments of the population? Do their cars get stolen any less, or are their homes any safer? I have no idea. But on one level I admired them for their sharing of knowledge amongst peers. For thinking about how they might be vulnerable, planning how to address the vulnerabilities, and training for a response. On the other hand I just could not get out of my head that the risk model is out of whack. The ultimate risk may be greater, but you just cannot throw probability out the window. Perhaps with personal safety it is easier to get excited about security, as opposed to the more abstract concepts of personal privacy or security of electronic funds. Regardless, the experience was eye opening. On a totally different subject, we notice we have been getting some great comments from readers lately. We really appreciate this! The comments are diverse and enlightening, and often contribute just as much to the community as the original posts. We make a point of listing those who contribute to white paper development and highlighting interesting comments from week to week, but we have been looking for a more concrete way of acknowledging these external contributors for a while know. To show our appreciation, Rich, myself and the rest of the Securosis team have decided that we are giving a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity (HFC) in the name of whoever drops the best comment each week. Make sure you check out the “Blog Comment of the Week”! On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Chris explains What is Google Voice? over at Macworld. David Mortman on Data Not Assertions over at the New School. Rich was part of the Black Hat Virtual Event. Rich was quoted on Bit.ly in The Tech Herald. Rich on the Network Security Podcast. Adrian in Information Security Magazine’s December issue on Basic Database Security. While not directly Securosis related, the RSA Security Blogger’s Meetup is on. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: David Mortman’s Changing the Game? post is now up to 37 comments. I’m voting for the entire thread, not just the original post. Adrian: Meier’s DNS Resolvers and You post. Mort: Rich’s post on Possibility is not Probability. Meier: In Violent Agreement. Other Securosis Posts Verizon 2009 DBIR Supplement Security Controls vs. Outcomes Class Action Against Express Scripts Dismissed Project Quant for Databases: Project Quant: Database Security Planning, Part 2 (part 4 overall) Project Quant: Database Security Planning (part 3 overall) Favorite Outside Posts Rich: This isn’t my “favorite” post, but it’s probably the single most important thing you need to read on the Internet this week. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, says you only need to worry about privacy if you’re doing something bad. I guess when they say, “Do no evil” they’re talking to us… with an “or else!” at the end. Adrian: Spire Security: Should we change passwords every 90 days? Chris: WPA Cracker: $17 or $34 to check a sniffed WPA(2) password against Moxie’s list. It’s a steal! Top News and Posts Hackers in the cloud! And not the ones on planes. Facebook Changes Privacy UI (and maybe reduces privacy). The Totally Awesome Frequent Flier/US Mint Loophole Put this in the category of “things I wish I had thought of”. Ending the PCI Blame Game Mike Bailey puts XSS into perspective. Amrit’s totally snarky (yet amusing) holiday gift guide Blog Comment of the Week We are going to do something a little different this week … both because we had so many excellent comments, and because we are launching the Hackers for Charity contributions. This week we have three winners! Chris Hayes in response to Mortman asking for a FAIR analysis in comments on Changing The Game ? @Mortman. Interesting request. A FAIR analysis can be used to demonstrate variance in resistance strength (formerly referred to as “control strength”). A FAIR analysis is usually done for a unique scenario. For example, password frequency change for an Internet facing app – where access to a small amount of confidential information is possible. A system password policy that requires complexity,