Security Balance

I was trying to find words to add to this post from Anton Chuvakin about the current state of log analysis, caused by the numbers in the last Verizon report. I simply can’t find anything to add. He’s dead right about everything. If you are interested in log analysis / log management, that’s something to [...]

I was reading about the new framework from SourceFire, Razorback, and I realized it has a lot of similarities with TCG’s  IF-MAP. There is a lot of vendors mentioning things go beyond the simple correlation so common in the SIEM tools. It is a drive from CORRELATION to COOPERATION between security tools. That’s awesome. Instead of [...]

I’m starting a Wave on Google Wave to build a collaboration piece on security decision making. Please send me your contact if you want to participate. It starts like this:  Security decision making Dear security friends, I’m planning for a long time to work on a paper/presentation about security decision making. I was planning to [...]

I’ve just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. As usual, Gladwell’s books always bring food for thought on security for me. Security is deeply related to human behaviour, the main subject of his books. The most interesting thing from TP for security is the Dunbar’s number. Honestly, when I read about it I thought [...]

I agree with Ben Tomhave on this particular subject. He is basically saying that we still don’t have a good solution for reliable and repeatable risk assessments. I must say that this is not true to smaller scopes, like a single application or a small network or system. However, when we start talking about a [...]

I like the spin that Pete Lindstrom gives to some classical security discussions, but I think he is completely missing the point here: “If finding vulnerabilities makes software more secure, why do we assert that software with the highest vulnerability count is less secure (than, e.g., a competitor)?” If we agree with him we could [...]

Back in 2007 I noticed (together with Fucs and Victor) that botnet creators had to solve a very important issue to keep controlling the infected computers: how to update the location of the controller? Until then they were including the controller location inside the bot code, so it was easy to find to identify it [...]

I was glad to be one of the contributors of the “unsecured economies report”, sponsored by McAfee. It’s certainly a very good report and it’s nice to see my name in the same list as Ross Anderson and Gene Spafford. However, McAfee is saying since the Economic Forum in Davos that the losses due to [...]

The info about Senthil Cheetancheri proposal on fighting zero-day attacks with a peer-to-peer software that shares information about anomalous behavior is spread through a lot of security blogs and portals today. It is not that innovative, but it’s certainly something nice to think about. I would go a little further and propose something a little [...]

Seriously, their research is awesome…but the picture…OMG!