Back in the saddle again. It’s a short week for both sides of the border here in North America. Happy post Canada Day to my brethren and a Happy (and approaching) July 4th to our cousins to the south.

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And now, the news…

1. 2600 HOPE conference bringing hacking to New York City (and we’ll see you there) | CNET
2. FBI Investigating Major ATM Hacking Ring | Las Vegas Now
3. Study: Unpatched Web Browsers Prevalent on the Internet | PC World
4. Netherlands man arrested for hacking 50,000 credit cards | Security Pro Portal
5. Vint Cerf Says Government Needs To Encourage Internet Competition | Information Week
6. The Government’s Top Hackers? | Veracode
7. HSBC sites vulnerable to XSS flaws, could aid phishing attacks | ZDNet
8. HMRC goes cap-in-hand to Americans for help with fraud | The Independent

Tags: News, Daily Links, Security Blog, Information Security, Security News

After hearing his speech, I thought about how Eric and Google are impacting the digital revolution after so many others have tried unsuccessfully over the last 25 years. He has led the company through a period of explosive growth from $1 Billion to over $16 Billion in the past year, while keeping the young, fun, irreverent culture intact. Considering the meteoric rise of Google’s popularity in a reasonably short period of time, to the point that the company name is now actually a verb!

The point that I found enlightening was his summary, which you can scroll to at the 26 - 30 minutes timeframe in the presentation, where he shared an interesting glimpse into the culture of Google. “Creating more luck, giving yourself more at bats, being out there… to think big and inspire a culture of YES.” The culture of Yes inspires people to aim higher and be ambitious in their reach and goals.

That is a very interesting point in which I really believe. If there is one thing that all companies and especially small companies struggle with because of natural resource constraints, it is building a strong culture of Yes. We have tried to do this from the very inception of ScienceLogic, but it continues to get harder and harder the larger the business grows. To consistently inspire a principle of Yes, without agreeing to every idea that flows across my desk is amongst the most challenging parts of our daily jobs. However if I could create the perfect scenario, we would intuitively strive for a principle of Yes and inspire our associates and our ecosystem of partners and customers to use this simple concept to confidently go forward.

Eric says, “It is possible to build a culture around innovation. It is possible to build a culture around leadership, and it is possible to build a culture around optimism.” Google is a great example, but by no means the only example. I agree with Eric’s summary and hope to lead ScienceLogic according to these very basic but essential principles. “Let’s be revolutionaries. Let’s take this opportunity, this huge change that is before us with technology and let’s change our businesses, our communication and the way we interact on some new principles that reflect the very best in America.”

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The golden age of comics in the 30's and 40's saw the creation of the superhero.  The good versus evil storylines mimicked the real life events of the day. It elevated the comic book to an art form.  Comic style illustration and story telling in short dialog balloons had never before or since reached those heights. Than after WW II, with the advent of TV and one evil empire ending, comic books seemed to recede back into the background of young boys play things.  Their numbers never again reached the levels seen during the war and many of the characters faded away.

Over the years the comic industry tried to regain their former glory, but the age of the superhero was over.  Yeah there was the TV cartoons, who didn't watch Superman or Batman when you were little.  Some of you like me, may have even watched the Marvel Superhero Show that had short segments of many of the Marvel characters (check them out in the You Tube video), but they were campy and never appealed to an audience beyond young boys.  The Superman movies with Christopher Reeves market a turning point on the return of the superhero and the Batman movies were very successful.  But beyond those two, there were many flops.

With better technology and better story lines, Spiderman, Iron Man and now the latest, The Incredible Hulk have brought comic book superheroes from the page to the screen in a big way. I know that I was not a big fan of the Iron Man movie, but seeing Tony Stark come in at the end of the Hulk movie did get even me excited by the possibilities. Also seeing the Hulk and Iron Man, I began to see that these movies are not aimed at adolescent boys with stories that I am used to from comic books and TV shows.  These are movies aimed at adults with adult storylines.  The technology is great, the heroes are played by big stars (I hear Brad Pitt is playing Thor) rather than unknowns and the productions are first class.

Besides the movies already out, Thor, Captain America, and Namor, the submariner are all headed for the big screen. Once each of these and more have their movie debuts, the subsequent combinations and sequels are almost infinite.  This could be the biggest movie franchise of all time and make the original comic book owners more money then they ever dreamed of!  In the meantime, I am excited to see many of my boyhood heroes get this new big screen treatment! 

That's an insanely large percentage of riders using the service, so it's possible ridership has increased even more than the mid-May figures indicate, or the commuters are really intense computer and handheld users. Also, note that the FAQ for the authority's overall Wi-Fi service requires you to be 18 years or older. It is Utah, after all--a minor might do something dirty with the service and the transit authority would be held responsible. The authority offers Wi-Fi on some buses, too.

The network is backed by fiber that runs alongside the track, which can make a huge difference in the ability to bring in backhaul. Other train lines have to work with either or both cellular and satellite backhaul, although Nomad typically uses fixed WiMax, as they are in this deployment. They're finishing up a 600 km London to Glasgow route for Virgin in the UK, which will be vastly larger than any other Internet-equipped route in the world.

This is one of the first major production service launches of train-based Wi-Fi in the U.S. VIA Rail in Canada is the only other in-production system offering in-transit Wi-Fi on a train line in North America. There are several trials, pilots, and phased-in plans underway. I thought 2007 would be the year that train-based Internet access took off; looks like it will leave the station worldwide in 2009, perhaps due to better 3G cell cover and improved antenna designs, as well as new commuter rail systems like FrontRunner that are designed with the idea of connectivity.

From PC World:

Two months after their Web site was hacked, the organizers of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign are looking for a network security expert to help lock down their Web site.

“Obama for America is looking for a network security expert who wants to play a key role in a historic political campaign,” reads the ad, posted to the Barackobama.com Web site.

The requirements are pretty much what you’d read in any e-commerce security help-wanted ad: VPN (virtual private network) and Unix or Linux experience, along with a “deep understanding” of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl) development. And of course, the successful candidate must be willing to “respond off-hours to high urgency security situations.”

Successful candidates will join Obama’s Boston team and should expect to find a new job come November.

So, find a new job in November cause its thanks for the memories? Or you can join the White House crew? So, if you can run on no sleep and you bleed caffeine then you might be a right fit.

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The Burton Group Catalyst Conference North America 2008 in San Diego, California on June 23-27.

His talk is called, “Metrics: Measurement, Modeling & Meaning“.

Come see Jack as he does more than just practice his alliteration!

How do you justify security spending?  How do you gain credibility with other lines of business?  How can you get executive management to do more than just the “bare minimum” of regulatory compliance?

Increasingly, CISO’s are discovering that the use of security metrics and a quantitative approach can help show the value of Information Risk Management.

What isn’t well understood, however, is just how to create meaning from a metrics program.  Join Jack Jones, former CISO for a Fortune 100 financial services company as he discusses the challenge of finding the right things to measure, the challenges we face in creating measurement, and the role of metrics and modeling in decision making.