Alex on Science and Risk Management

Alex Hutton has an excellent post on his work blog: Jim Tiller of British Telecom has published a blog post called “Risk Appetite, Counting Security Calories Won’t Help”. I’d like to discuss Jim’s blog post because I think it shows a difference in perspectives between our organizations. I’d also like to counter a few of [...]

Counterpoint: There is demand for security innovation

Over in the Securosis blog, Rich Mogull wrote a post “There is No Market for Security Innovation.” Rich is right that there’s currently no market, but that doesn’t mean there’s no demand. I think there are a couple of inhibitors to the market, but the key one is that transaction costs are kept high by [...]

Data void: False Positives

A Gartner blog post points out the lack of data reported by vendors or customers regarding the false positive rates for anti-spam solutions. This is part of a general problem in the security industry that is a major obstical to rational analysis of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, risk, and the rest

Everybody Should Be Doing Something about InfoSec Research

Previously, Russell wrote “Everybody complains about lack of information security research, but nobody does anything about it.” In that post, he argues for a model where Ideally, this program should be “idea capitalists”, knowing some people and ideas won’t payoff but others will be huge winners. One thing for sure — we shouldn’t focus this [...]

Krebs on Cyber vs Physical Crooks

In addition, while traditional bank robbers are limited to the amount of money they can physically carry from the scene of the crime, cyber thieves have a seemingly limitless supply of accomplices to help them haul the loot, by hiring so-called money mules to carry the cash for them. I can’t help but notice one [...]

Symantec State of Security 2010 Report Out

http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/about/presskits/SES_report_Feb2010.pdf Thanks to big yellow for not making us register!  Oh, and Adam thanks you for not using pie charts…

Open Security Foundation Looking for Advisors

Open Security Foundation – Advisory Board – Call for Nominations: The Open Security Foundation (OSF) is an internationally recognized 501(c)(3) non-profit public organization seeking senior leaders capable of providing broad-based perspective on information security, business management and fundraising to volunteer for an Advisory Board. The Advisory Board will provide insight and guidance when developing future [...]

Data Not Assertions

There have already been a ton of posts out there about the Verizon DBIR Supplement that came out yesterday, so I’m not going to dive into the details, but I wanted to highlight this quick discussion from twitter yesterday that really sums of the value of the supplement and similar reports: georgevhulme: I’m glad we [...]

“80 Percent of Cyber Attacks Preventable”

Threatlevel (aka 27B/6) reported yesterday that Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s information assurance director testified to the Senate Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on the issue of computer based attacks. If network administrators simply instituted proper configuration policies and conducted good network monitoring, about 80 percent of commonly known cyber attacks could [...]

Botnet Research

Rob Lemos has a new article up on the MIT Technology Review, about some researchers from UC Santa Barbara who spent several months studying the Mebroot Botnet. They found some fascinating stuff and I’m looking forward to reading the paper when it’s finally published. While the vast majority of infected machines were Windows based (64% [...]