Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Weekend Photography

An amazing shot by Philipp Schmidli of a cyclist in front of the moon. PetaPixel explains the work involved in getting that shot in “Silhouettes in a Giant Moonrise, Captured Using a 1200mm Lens.” (Thanks to Bob Blakely). Also in the realm of impressive tool use is this: Orangutan from Borneo photographed using a spear […]

 

The Psychology of Password Managers

As I think more about the way people are likely to use a password manager, I think there’s real problems with the way master passwords are set up. As I write this, I’m deeply aware that I’m risking going into a space of “it’s logical that” without proper evidence. Let’s start from the way most […]

 

The Breach Trilogy: Assume, Confirm, Discuss

We’ve been hearing for several years that we should assume breach. Many people have taken this to heart (although today’s DBIR still says it’s still months to detect those breaches). I’d like to propose (predict?) that breach as a central concept will move through phases. Each of these phases will go through a hype cycle, […]

 

The best part of exploit kits

Following up on my post on exploit kit statistics (no data? really folks?), I wanted to share a bit of a head-shaker for a Friday with way too much serious stuff going on. Sometimes, researchers obscure all the information, such as this screenshot. I have no idea who these folks think they’re protecting by destroying […]

 

1Password & Hashcat

The folks at Hashcat have some interesting observations about 1Password. The folks at 1Password have a response, and I think there’s all sorts of fascinating lessons here. The crypto conversations are interesting, but at the end of the day, a lot of security is unavoidably contributed by the master password strength. I’d like to offer […]

 

Exploit Kit Statistics

On a fairly regular basis, I come across pages like this one from SANS, which contain fascinating information taken from exploit kit control panels: There’s all sorts of interesting numbers in that picture. For example, the success rate for owning XP machines (19.61%) is three times that of Windows 7. (As an aside, the XP […]

 

Celebrating 5 Years of New School: 40% off!

Thanks to Addison Wesley, who are offering 40% off the book. Apply code NEWSCHOOL40 to get your discounted copy. (You apply the code after proceeding to checkout.)

 

By looking for evidence first, the Brits do it right

As it happens, both the US Government and the UK government are leading “cyber security standards framework” initiatives right now.  The US is using a consensus process to “incorporate existing consensus-based standards to the fullest extent possible”, including “cybersecurity standards, guidelines, frameworks, and best practices” and “conformity assessment programs”. In contrast, the UK is asking […]

 

5 Years of New School

Five years ago Friday was the official publication date of The New School of Information Security. I want to take this opportunity to look back a little and look forward to the next few years. Five years ago, fear of a breach and its consequences was nearly universal, and few people thought anything but pain […]

 

I swear, I'm just looking at the articles!

Apparently, Playboy (possibly NSFW) has an app on iTunes. However, to get an app through the censors prudes “appropriate content” editors, there’s none of Playboy’s trademark nudes. There hasn’t been such good news for their writers since the braille edition. I’ll leave the jokes to you. It’s worth thinking about this as the sanitized future […]

 

Analyzing The Army's Accidental Test

According to Wired, “Army Practices Poor Data Hygiene on Its New Smartphones, Tablets.” And I think that’s awesome. No, really, not the ironic sort of awesome, but the awesome sort of awesome, because what the Army is doing is a large scale natural experiment in “does it matter?” Over the next n months, the Pentagon’s […]

 

AdaCamp: San Francisco June 8-9

(Posted for friends) AdaCamp is a conference dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture: open source software, Wikipedia-related projects, open data, open geo, fan fiction, remix culture, and more. The conference will be held June 8 and 9th in San Francisco. There will be two tracks at the conference: one for people […]

 

Hacking Humans at BlackHat

Hacking humans is an important step in today’s exploitation chains. From “2011 Recruitment plan.xls” to instant messenger URL delivery at the start of Aurora, the human in the loop is being exploited just as much as the machine. In fact, with the right story, you might not even need an exploit at all. So I’m […]