In It’s not about risk, Shrdlu got me thinking about the problem of perception. A few years back, I noticed one of my IT staff doing something odd. Every couple weeks, over a period of many months, I would see this person walk into a room with marketing and sales people to attend a half-hour meeting. I was pretty sure the IT staffer did not know these people and had nothing to do with marketing or sales efforts. We were not running any joint projects at the time, so I…
When you think about it, security success in today’s environment comes down to a handful of key imperatives. First we need to improve the security of our environment. We are losing ground to the bad guys, and we’ve got to make some inroads on more quickly figuring out what’s being attacked and stopping it.
Symantec has once again flexed its wallet, and bought a spot in the data protection market. By acquiring PGP Corporation for $300MM and GuardianEdge for $70MM in cash, Symantec basically bought the marketshare lead in endpoint encryption. Whatever that means, since encryption is a number of different markets with distinct buying constituencies and market leaders. We estimate PGP got a multiple of around 4x bookings, and GuardianEdge got between 3-4x as well, which is pretty generous but not…
After being married for coming up on 14 years, some things about your beloved you just need to accept. They aren’t changing. The Boss would like me to be more affectionate. As much as I’d like to, it just doesn’t occur to me. It’s not an intentional slight – the thought of giving an unprompted hug, etc., just never enters my mind. It causes her some angst, but she knows I love her and that I’m not likely to change.
Over the past decade business processes have been changing rapidly. We focus on collaboration, both inside and outside our own organizations. We have to support more devices in different form factors, many of which IT doesn’t directly control. We add new applications on a monthly basis, and are currently witnessing the decomposition of monolithic applications into dozens of smaller loosely connected application stacks. We add virtualization technologies and SaaS for increased efficiency. Now we…
The pendulum swings back and forth. And back and forth. And back and forth again. In the early days of security, there was a network security team and they dealt with authentication tokens and the firewall. Then there was an endpoint security team, who dealt with AV. Then the messaging security team, who dealt with spam. The database security team, the application security team, and so on and so forth.
“Don’t worry about that 5 and 1 Adjustable Rate Mortgage. 5 years from now your house will be worth twice what you paid, and you can re-finance.” It’s worth half, and you can’t get a new loan. “That’s a great interest rate!” It wasn’t, and points were padded on the back end. “Collateralzied debt obligations are a great investment – they are Triple A rated!” Terrible investment, closer to Triple B value, and a root cause of the financial collapse. “Rates have never been lower so you should…
I realized from my last post that I made a mistake. In my previous post on Auditing Transactions, attempting to simplify database auditing, I instead made it more complicated. What I want to do is to differentiate between database auditing through the native database transactional audit trail, from other forms of logging and event collection. The reason is that the native database audit trail provides a sequence of associated events, and whether and when those events were committed to disk.…
Two of the most common criticisms of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) that comes up in user discussions are a) its complexity and b) the fear of false positives. Security professionals worry that DLP is an expensive widget that will fail to deliver the expected value – turning into yet another black hole of productivity. But when used properly DLP provides rapid assessment and identification of data security issues not available with any other technology.
There are a lot of grumpy McAfee customers out there today. Yesterday, little Red issued a faulty DAT file update that mistakenly thought svchost.exe was a bad file and blew it away. This, of course, results in all sorts of badness on Windows XP SP3, causing an endless reboot loop and rendering those machines inoperable.