All last week I was out of the office on vacation down in Puerto Vallarta. It was a trip my wife and I won in a raffle at the Phoenix Zoo, which was pretty darn cool.
IDM fascinates me, if only because it is such an important base for a good security program. Despite this, many organizations (even ones with cutting edge technology) haven’t really focused on solving the issues around managing users’ identity. This is, no doubt, in part due to the fact that IDM is hard in the real world. Businesses can have hundreds if not thousands of applications (GM purportedly had over 15,000 apps at one point) and each application itself can have hundreds or thousands of…
I was reviewing the recent Health and Human Services guidance on medical data breach notifications and it’s clear that the HHS either was bought off, or doesn’t understand the fundamentals of risk assessment. Having a little bit of inside experience within HHS, my vote is for willful ignorance.
Today you’d be hard pressed to find a decent sized network that doesn’t have some implementation of Security Event Management (SEM). It’s just a fact of modern regulation that a centralized system to collect all that logolicious information makes sense (and may be mandatory). Part of the problem with architecting and managing these systems is that one runs into the issue of securely collecting the information and subsequently verifying its authenticity.
(The following post covers some rather esoteric bits of security philosophy, or what Rich has affectionately called “Security Jazz” in the past. Unless you are into obscure data-centric security minutiae, you will probably not be interested).
Today Barracuda Networks announced their acquisition of Purewire. Barracuda has an incredibly broad product suite, including AV, WAF, Anti-spam, anti-malware, SSL gateways, and so on, but are behind their competition in web filtering and seriously lacking in solutions delivered as SaaS. The Purewire product set closes Barracuda’s biggest product gap, giving them URL filtering and some basic content inspection. But most importantly it can be delivered as SaaS. This is important for two reasons:…
We don’t normally cover Patch Tuesday unless there is something unusual, but the October 2009 advanced notification appears to be just that. It lists patches for 13 different security bulletins, for what looks like 30 separate security problems. Eight of the bulletins are for critical vulnerabilities with the possibility of remote code execution. The majority of the patches are for Windows itself, with a couple for SQL Server, Office, and Forefront, but it looks like just about every production…
Interesting story of a San Francisco commercial landlord who found 46 boxes of personal information and financial data for thousands of people left behind by a failed title company.
A lot of not this week. I was not at SECtor, although I understand it was a good time. I am not going to Oracle Open World. I should be going, but too many projects are either beginning or remain unfinished for me to travel to the Bay Area, visiting old friends and finding a good bar to hang out at. That is lots of fun I will not be having. I will not be going to Atlanta in November as the Tech Target event for data security has been knocked off the calendar. And I am not taking a free Mexican…
So a buddy of mine back from when I was on the customer side contacted me recently. He’s at a new company doing some very interesting work on detecting certain classes of online fraud and amounts of malware on websites. So far he’s gathered some fascinating data on just how bad the problem is, and I’m trying to convince him that he should start publishing some of his aggregate data in a quarterly or semi-annual report. He is very interested but would love some community input on what the report…