My kids are picky eaters. Two out of the three anyway. XX1 (oldest daughter) doesn’t like pizza or hamburgers. How do you not like pizza or hamburgers? Anyway, she let us know over the weekend her favorite foods are cake frosting and butter. Awesome.
According to the New York Times, when Google was hacked during the recent China incident, their single sign on system was specifically targeted. The attackers may have accessed the source code, which gives them some good intel to look for other vulnerabilities. There’s speculation they could have also added a back door to the source code, but I suspect that even if they did this, given how quickly Google detected the intrusion, any back doors probably didn’t make it into backups and might be…
If you are using encryption, somewhere you have encryption keys. Where you store them, and how they are managed and shared, are legitimate concerns. It is fashionable to store all keys in a single centralized key management server. Much as the name implies, this means storing all of your keys, of different types, for multiple use cases into a single key management server. Rich likes to call these ‘uber’ key manager, that handle any and all key functions; and are distinct from external key…
I was perusing some of my saved links from the past few weeks and came across Shimmy’s dispatch from the ETA (Electronic Transaction Association) show, which is a big conference for payment processors. As Alan summarized, here are the key takeaways from the processors:
Nowadays, the endpoint is the path of least resistance for the bad guys to get a foothold in your organization. Which means we have to have a structured plan and process for dealing with endpoint compromises. The high level process we’ll lay out here focuses on: confirming the attack, containing the damage, and then performing a post-mortem.
I am sitting here staring at power supplies and empty cases. Cleaning out the garage and closets, looking at the remnants from my PC building days. I used to love going out to select new motherboard and chipset combinations, hand-selecting each component to build just the right database server or video game machine. Over the years one sad acknowledgement needed to be made: after a year or so, the only pieces worth a nickel were the power supply and the case. Sad, but you spend $1,500.00 and…
Chris Pepper tweeted a very cool post on Why Content is a Public Good. The author, Milena Popova, provides an economist’s perspective on market forces and digital goods. Her premise is that in economic terms, many types of electronic content are “public goods” – that being a technical term for objects with infinite supply and no good way to control consumption. She makes the economic concepts of ‘rival’ and ‘excludable’ very easy to understand, and by breaking it down into rudimentary…
You didn’t think we could get through an 11-part series about anything without discussing compliance, did you? No matter what we do from a security context – whatever the catalyst, budget center, or end goal – we need to substantiate implemented controls. We can grind out teeth and curse the gods all we want, but security investments are contingent on some kind of compliance driver.
Over the previous 8 posts in this Endpoint Security Fundamentals series, we’ve looked at the problem from the standpoint of what to do right awat (Prioritize and Triage) and the Controls (update software and patch, secure configuration, anti-malware, firewall, HIPS and device control, and full disk encryption). But every experienced security professional knows a set of widgets doesn’t make a repeatable process, and it’s really the process and the people that makes the endpoints secure.
As numb as we are to most advertising (since we are hit with thousands of advertising exposures every day), sometimes an ad campaign is memorable and really resonates. No, seeing Danica Patrick on a massage table doesn’t qualify. But Apple’s Think Different campaign really did. At that point, Apple was positioning to the counter-culture, looking for folks who didn’t want to conform. Those who had their own opinions, but needed a way to set them loose on the world.