Over at the Office of Inadequate Security, Pogo was writing about the Lulzsec hacking of Arizona State Police. Her article is “A breach that crosses the line?” I’ve been blogging for years about the dangers of breaches. I am concerned about dissidents who might be jailed or killed for their political views, abortion doctors whose [...]
On Friday, I ranted a bit about “Are Lulz our best practice?” The biggest pushback I heard was that management doesn’t listen, or doesn’t make decisions in the best interests of the company. I think there’s a lot going on there, and want to unpack it. First, a quick model of getting executives to do [...]
Over at Risky.biz, Patrick Grey has an entertaining and thought-provoking article, “Why we secretly love LulzSec:” LulzSec is running around pummelling some of the world’s most powerful organisations into the ground… for laughs! For lulz! For shits and giggles! Surely that tells you what you need to know about computer security: there isn’t any. And [...]
So I haven’t had a chance to really digest the new DBIR yet, but one bit jumped out at me: “86% were discovered by a third party.” I’d like to offer up an explanatory story of why might that be, and muse a little on what it might mean for the deployment of intrusion detection [...]
In watching this TEDMed talk by Thomas Goetz, I was struck by what a great lesson it holds for information security. You should watch at least the first 7 minutes or so. (The next 9 minutes are interesting, but less instructive for information security.) The key lesson that I’d like you to take from this [...]
Over at The CMO Site, Terry Sweeney explains that “Hacker Attacks Won’t Hurt Your Company Brand.” Take a couple of minutes to watch this. Let me call your attention to this as a turning point for a trend. Those of us in the New School have been saying this for several years, but the idea [...]
Hey everybody! I was just reading Gunnar Peterson’s fun little back of the napkin security spending exercise, in which he references his post on a security budget “flat tax” (Three Steps To A Rational Security Budget). This got me to thinking a bit - What if, instead of in the world of compliance where we [...]
You might argue that insiders are dangerous. They’re dangerous because they’re authorized to do things, and so monitoring throws up a great many false positives, and raises privacy concerns. (As if anyone cared about those.) And everyone in information security loves to point to insiders as the ultimate threat. I’m tempted to claim this as [...]
National Institute of Standards and Technology Gaithersburg, MD USA April 5-6, 2011 Call for Participation The field of usable security has gained significant traction in recent years, evidenced by the annual presentation of usability papers at the top security conferences, and security papers at the top human-computer interaction (HCI) conferences. Evidence is growing that significant [...]
“Towards Better Usability, Security and Privacy of Information Technology” is a great survey of the state of usable security and privacy: Usability has emerged as a significant issue in ensuring the security and privacy of computer systems. More-usable security can help avoid the inadvertent (or even deliberate) undermining of security by users. Indeed, without sufficient [...]