Congratulations to Stuart Schechter, A. J. Bernheim Brush (Microsoft Research), Serge Egelman (Carnegie Mellon University). Their paper, “It’s No Secret. Measuring the Security and Reliability of Authentication via ‘Secret’ Questions” has been Slashdotted. It’s really good research, which Rob Lemos covered in “Are Your “Secret Questions” Too Easily Answered?”
cloudenfreude — Feeling of happiness at watching the discomfort of others, especially senior management, as they accept in aggregate for *aaS the same risks which were easily accepted piecemeal over time for the analgous service internally.
Thinking security can not be done without adopting a preferential mode of thought of the attacker. A system cannot be defended if we do not know how to attack it. If the theory is still an interesting approach to formalize things, the operational approach must be the ultimate goal: to talk about security is meaningless [...]
Interesting information was made available today from VISA about PCI Compliance status for Level 1, 2, and 3 merchants. Find it as a .pdf >>here<< (thanks to Mike Dahn for bringing it to our notice). **UPDATE** You may want to check out what Pete Lindstrom has done with that data, in his Blog Post, “Is [...]
Is Statistically Mixed? Richard Bejtlich (whom I do admire greatly in most all of his work) just dug up a dead horse and started beating it with the shovel, and I just happen to have this baseball bat in my hands, and we seem to be entangled together on this subject, so here goes: I [...]
I hadn’t seen this article by Peter Hustinix when it came out, but it’s important. He says that “All data breaches must be made public:” The good news is that Europe’s lawmakers want to make it obligatory to disclose data breaches. The bad news is that the law will not apply to everyone. Those exemptions [...]
OR TEXAS HB1830S IS SWINEFLU LEGISLATION, IT’S BEEN INFECTED BY PORK! **UPDATE: It looks like the “vendor language” around Section Six has been struck! Given Bejtlich’s recent promises, I thought we’d take a quick but pragmatic look at why risk assessments, even dumb, back-of-the-envelope assessments, might just be a beneficial thing. As you probably know, [...]
Recently, a quote from Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek struck me kind of weird when I was reading Chris Hoff yet again push our hot buttons on cloud definitions and the concepts of information security survivability. Wolfgang says (and IIRC, this was presented at Jericho in SF a couple of weeks ago, too): In five years, [...]
Many at RSA commented on the lack of content in Melissa Hathaway’s RSA keynote. The Wall St Journal has an interesting article which may explain why, “Cybersecurity Review Sets Turf Battle:” President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity review has ignited turf battles inside the White House, with economic adviser Lawrence Summers weighing in to prevent what he [...]