Given how much PR email I get on a daily basis – which does help keep me up to date on what’s happening in the market segments I cover – I seldom miss newsworthy security events. On occasion I totally miss something of interest, like the M86 acquisition of Finjan … three freakin’ weeks ago! For those of you interested in email and web security, big firms don’t offer a lot of interesting tidbits to write about, which makes the smaller firms more fun to watch. In a mature market segment like email…
There was a tiny blurb in the Sunday Arizona Republic regarding a request by the Arizona Attorney General to Health Net regarding a data breach notification. It seems they delayed telling anyone that data was stolen or missing for six months or so:
Over the weekend 0-day exploit was reported in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Both Threatpost and Heise Security posted that the getElementsByTagName() JavaScript method within Microsoft’s HTML viewer has a dangling pointer. This leaves the browser susceptible to code injection; which in the best case crashes the browser, and in a worse case directs you to a malicious site.
Ironically, I was calling to activate my new credit card yesterday – as the number was considered compromised by BofA – when I read about the credit card scam in Spain. Very little information is coming out about the EU Credit Card Breach. Seems to be Visa specific; some 100k cards are being recalled in Germany, and police efforts are focused in Spain. And it seems every news agency and security blog in the country is reliant on this tiny amount of data provided by the BBC. Given this is a…
Here’s the thing about that 60 Minutes report on cybersecurity from the other week. Yes, some of the facts were clearly wrong. Yes, there are massive political fights under way to see who ‘controls’ cybersecurity, and how much money they get. Some .gov types might have steered the reporters/producers in the wrong direction. The Brazilian power outage probably wasn’t caused by hackers.
I was reading PC Magazine’s recap of Ray Ozzie’s announcement of the Azure cloud computing platform.
The vision of Azure, said Ozzie, is “… three screens and a cloud,” meaning Internet-based data and software that plays equally well on PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.
I had to laugh when I read Alan Shimel’s post “Where does Tipping Point fit in the post-3Com ProCurve”? His comment:
A few weeks ago a new TLS and SSLv3 renegotiation vulnerability was disclosed, and there’s been a fair bit of confusion around it. When the first reports of the bug hit the wire, my initial impression was that the exploit was too complex to be practical, but as more information comes to light I’m starting to think it’s worth paying attention to. Since every web browser and most other kinds of encrypted Internet connections – such as between mail servers – use TLS or SSLv3 to protect traffic, the…
Rich and I were on a data security Q&A podcast today. I was surprised when the audience asked questions about Application & Database Monitoring and Protection (ADMP), as it was not on our agenda, nor have we written about it in the last year. When Rich first sketched out the concept, he listed specific market forces behind ADMP, and presented a couple of ADMP models. But these are really technical challenges to management and security and the projected synergies if they are linked. When…
Thanks to my wife’s job at a hospital, yesterday I was able to finally get my H1N1 flu shot. While driving down, I was also listening to a science podcast talking about the problems when the government last rolled out a big flu vaccine program in the 1970s. The epidemic never really hit, and there was a much higher than usual complication rate with that vaccine (don’t let this scare you off – we’ve had 30 years of improvement since then). The public was justifiably angry, and the Ford…