[We] live in a world very different from the one we evolved in. Our reflexive defenses might be optimized for the risks endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, not 2009 New York City. But we can go beyond fear, and actually think sensibly about security. Far [...]
via Dark Reading Run Windows? No antivirus software? Direct connection to the internet? Let’s add a new time frame for computing disaster to the list above, one that every security pro should know: 20 minutes… that’s how long your average unprotected PC running Windows XP will last once it’s connected to the Internet … before [...]
One might argue that information services (and clients) have followed an evolution not unlike that of competing organisms in the wild. At first it was enough to simply provide the most accurate and direct data possible, just as it was once sufficient for an organism to simply acquire nutrients and reproduce. When organisms began deriving [...]
They’re building laptops with hand-crank generators for kids in third world countries. You know what this means, right? The next generation of Nigerian spammers is going to look a lot like Popeye. – Unknown Not to worry, those laptops are running a relatively secure operating system and, while amusing, the Popeye Scenario isn’t a particularly [...]
The realities of authentication in the computing world (user provides input, user input is compared, comparison results in a Boolean authorized or unauthorized determination, life goes on) have been explored and exploited ad nauseum; increasingly-invasive techniques are met with new methods of evasion. No password is impossible to guess, no fingerprint reader is impervious to [...]
George Orwell’s Big Brother represents the totalitarian rule of the party: a figure of dubious veracity imbued with absolute authority and control whose omniscient watch over its subjects is permanent and unquestionable. Surveillance underpins the efforts of any totalitarian state – the power of an authority is limited to the information upon which it may [...]
Excellent, i’ faith; of the chameleon’s dish:I eat the air, promise-crammed. – Hamlet ACT 3 SCENE 2 Quite possibly the most-understated security peril of present day computing, standards-based security and the cryptographic functions which support it has been stretched thin across an ever-growing spectrum of applications. A disastrous combination – the built-in obsolescence of mass [...]
The variety and severity of threats necessitates extreme caution on the part of the actor in any real-world system. Whether the actor is operating in virtual or physical space, the following precepts apply: Threat Assessment: Refer to Threat Assessment Overview. Information Management: All information should be handled in the following order, as applicable: Withheld Encrypted [...]
After entirely too much time spent reading and worrying about the likes of phylum platyhelminthes and phylum nematoda, and phylum apicomplexa, I have begun making comparisons between the natural world (in which parasites often thrive) and the abstract man-made realms which have yet to enumerate or adequately model evolved organisms (which is not to say [...]
