Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Happy Independence Day!

Since 2005, this blog has had a holiday tradition of posting “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Never in our wildest, most chaotic dreams, did we imagine that the British would one day quote these opening words: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to […]

 

PCI & the 166816 password

This was a story back around RSA, but I missed it until RSnake brought it up on Twitter: “[A default password] can hack nearly every credit card machine in the country.” The simple version is that Charles Henderson of Trustwave found that “90% of the terminals of this brand we test for the first time […]

 

The Worst User Experience In Computer Security?

I’d like to nominate Xfinity’s “walled garden” for the worst user experience in computer security. For those not familiar, Xfinity has a “feature” called “Constant Guard” in which they monitor your internet for (I believe) DNS and IP connections for known botnet command and control services. When they think you have a bot, you see […]

 

What's Copyright, Doc?

I blogged yesterday about all the new works that have entered the public domain as their copyright expired in the United States. If you missed it, that’s because exactly nothing entered the public domain yesterday. Read more — but only commentary, because there’s no newly free work — at “What Could Have Entered the Public […]

 

Replacing Flickr?

So Flickr has launched a new redesign, and it’s crowded, jumbled and slow. Now on Flickr with its overlays, its fade-ins and loads, it’s unmoving side and top bars, Flickr’s design takes center stage, elbowing aside the photos that I’m there to see. So I’m looking for a new community site where the photo I […]

 

Security Lessons From Star Wars: Breach Response

To celebrate Star Wars Day, I want to talk about the central information security failure that drives Episode IV: the theft of the plans. First, we’re talking about really persistent threats. Not like this persistence, but the “many Bothans died to bring us this information” sort of persistence. Until members of Comment Crew are going […]

 

Email Security Myths

My buddy Curt Hopkins is writing about the Patraeus case, and asked: I wonder, in addition to ‘it’s safe if it’s in the draft folder,’ how many additional technically- and legally-useless bits of sympathetic magic that people regularly use in the belief that it will save them from intrusion or discovery, either based on the […]

 

Base Rate & Infosec

At SOURCE Seattle, I had the pleasure of seeing Jeff Lowder and Patrick Florer present on “The Base Rate Fallacy.” The talk was excellent, lining up the idea of the base rate fallacy, how and why it matters to infosec. What really struck me about this talk was that about a week before, I had […]

 

Theme breakage, help?

The blog header image is repeating because of something in the stylesheets. I can’t see where the bug is. If someone can help out, I’d be much obliged. Expanded to add: It appears that there’s a computed “repeat” on the bg img which is the header, but why that repeat is being computed is unclear […]

 

The Plural of Anecdote is Anecdotes

Over at Lexology.com, there’s a story which starts: Medical-data blackmail is becoming more common as more health care providers adopt electronic health records systems and store patient data digitally. (“Hackers demand ransom to keep medical records private“) The trouble with this opening sentence is that it has nothing to do with the story. It’s a […]

 

A flame about flame

CNET ran a truly ridiculous article last week titled “Flame can sabotage computers by deleting files, says Symantec”. And if that’s not goofy enough, the post opens with The virus can not only steal data but disrupt computers by removing critical files, says a Symantec researcher. ZOMG! A virus that deletes files! Now that is […]

 

Is Norton Cybercrime Index just 'Security Metrics Theater'?

Symantec’s new Norton Cybercrime Index looks like it is mostly a marketing tool. They present it as though there is solid science, data, and methods behind it, but an initial analysis shows that this is probably not the case. The only way to have confidence in this is if Symantec opens up about their algorthms and data.

 

A Letter from Sid CRISC – ious

In the comments to “Why I Don’t Like CRISC” where I challenge ISACA to show us in valid scale and in publicly available models, the risk reduction of COBIT adoption, reader Sid starts to get it, but then kinda devolves into a defense of COBIT or something.  But it’s a great comment, and I wanted […]

 

Smoke, Fire and SSL

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, goes the adage. And in the case of an allegedly-theoretical exploit outlined in a new paper by Chris Soghoian and Sid Stamm (the compelled certificate creation attack), the presence of a product whose only use it to exploit it probably indicates that there’s more going on than one would like […]

 

Well that didn't take long…

The Guardian has reported the first official incident of misuse of full-body scanner information The police have issued a warning for harassment against an airport worker after he allegedly took a photo of a female colleague as she went through a full-body scanner at Heathrow airport. The incident, which occurred at terminal 5 on 10 […]