Why Do Outsiders Detect Breaches?

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 [...]

Fear, Information Security, and a TED Talk

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 [...]

A Day of Reckoning is Coming

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 [...]

Gunnar’s Flat Tax: An Alternative to Prescriptive Compliance?

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 [...]

Referencing Insiders is a Best Practice

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 [...]

The 1st Software And Usable Security Aligned for Good Engineering (SAUSAGE) Workshop

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”

“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 [...]

Games and The New School

On my work (“Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle”) blog, I’ve posted “Make Your Own Game! (My BlueHat lightning talk).”

Re-architecting the internet?

Information Security.com reports that: [Richard Clarke] controversially declared “that spending more money on technology like anti-virus and IPS is not going to stop us losing cyber-command. Instead, we need to re-architect our networks to create a fortress. Let’s spend money on research to create a whole new architecture, which will cost just a fraction of [...]

Java Security & Criminals

Brian Krebs has an interesting article on “Java: A Gift to Exploit Pack Makers.” What makes it interesting is that since information security professionals share data so well, Brian was able to go to the top IDS makers and get practical advice on what really works to secure a system. Sorry, dreaming there for a [...]