I’ll be honest- it’s been a bit tough to stay up to date on current events in the security world over the past month or so. There’s something about nonstop travel and tight project deadlines that isn’t very conducive to keeping up with the good old RSS feed, even when said browsing is a major part of your job. Not that I’m complaining about being able to pay the bills.
This is an off topic post.
Most people don’t think of me as a photographer, but it’s true, I am. Not a good one, mind you, but a photographer. I take a lot of photos. Some days I take hundreds, and they all pretty much look the same. Crappy. Nor am I interested in any of the photos I take, rather I delete them from the camera as soon as possible. I don’t even own a camera; rather I borrow my wife’s cheap Canon with the broken auto-cover lens cap, and I take that little battery sucking clunker…
I got an interesting email right before I ran off on vacation from Mark on a PCI issue he blogged about:
A very thought-provoking ‘Good until Reached For’ post over on Gunnar Peterson’s site this week. Gunnar is tying together a number of recent blog threads to exemplify through the current financial crisis of how security and risk management best practices were not applied. There are many angles to this post, and Gunnar is covering a lot of ground, but the concept that really resonated with me is automation of process without verification.
Just a short, friendly reminder that there is no such thing as a trusted website anymore, as demonstrated by BusinessWeek.
We continue to see trusted websites breached, and rather than leaving a little graffiti on the site the attackers now use that as a platform to attack browsers. It’s one reason I use FireFox with NoScript and only enable the absolute minimum to get a site running.
Boy am I behind on my blog posts! I have a ton of stuff to get up/announce, and first up is episode 120 of the Network Security Podcast. Martin and I were joined by Justin Searle, Kevin Johnson and Jay Beale from Intelguardians. As well as discussing the news stories of the week, the guys were here to tell us about a new LiveCD they’ve developed, Samurai.
Wow. The American taxpayer now owns AIG. Does that mean I can get a cheap rate?
The economic events of the past few days transitioned the months-long saga of financial irresponsibility past merely sturn ing into the realm of truly terrifying. We’ve leaped past the predictable into a maelstrom of uncertainty edging on a black hole of unknowable repercussions. True, the system could stabilize soon; allowing us to rebuild before the shock waves topple the relatively stable average family. But right…
There’s been an extremely interesting, and somewhat surprising, development in the TJX case the past couple weeks. No, I’m not talking about one of the defendants pleading guilty (and winning the prisoners dilemma), but the scope of the breach.
I have a well-publicized love-hate opinion of Digital Rights Management. DRM can solve some security problems but will fail outright if applied in other areas, most notably consumer media protection. I remain an advocate and believe that an Information Centric approach to data security has a future, and I am continually looking for new uses for this model. Still, few things get me started on a rant like someone who says that DRM is going to secure consumer media, and DRM in the Cloud is…
Sopra Group, through its Axway subsidiary, has acquired Tumbleweed Communications for $143 million. The press release is here.
With Tumbleweed’s offerings for email security, secure file transport, and certificate validation, there were just not enough tools in that chest to build a compelling story- either for messaging security or secure transaction processing. And it provides just one more example of why Rothman is right on target. Given that Tumbleweed’s stock price has been flat for the…