1. Sad, but VERY insightful story of Alan Shimmel getting 0wned (1,2,3,4, others on his blog)
2. A very good essay on security industry/market/community "Evolution is Punctuated Equilibria" ("Right now, Internet security is due for another period of rapid change.")
3. As I like to say, most everybody in out industry is confused about risk (myself included, in fact) - here is some nice reading about the subject: "Quant love", "What is Risk?" ("The probability of a threat overcoming security controls resistance to exploit a vulnerability that results in a loss.") While you are at it, check this blurb about risk and CVSS (BTW, CVSS is about "V" - vulnerability, not "R" for risk!)
4. Solid gold on "running IT as business" (and where it hits the wall) - Richard, the original CIO.com piece ("If you've tried managing an internal IT department as a bona fide business you already know that you can't take that very far, for the obvious reason that your IT department isn't a business.")
5. More fun stuff from Richard on insiders and why NOT look for them (sadly, same logic applies to not looking for owned boxes in your environment...).
6. Analyst firms shocking discovery: wireless MAY have security issues (I guess count it as humor...)
7. Fun read: "Challenges of Enterprise Cloud Computing" ("By moving the data into the cloud, enterprise, for now, will lose some capabilities to govern their own data set.")
8. Raffy on visualization. ("One of the dangerous things is if you don't understand the log file itself, don't assume you'll understand the visualization of it or even generate a visualization that makes sense") Amen to that! BTW, Raffy's book is finally out.
9. Compliance and checkbox mentality: fun pickup from my original "DLP and Compliance" post - Rich and TechTarget. Good stuff! ("Don’t Sell ‘Compliance’ If It Isn’t A Checkbox ")
10. RedHat is nicely 0wned (more info)
11. BGP hole to dwarf the DNS hole?
12. Chris continues the virtualization and PCI DSS theme here. The jury is still out on this one, even though the common sense approach (that virtualization is OK in regards to PCI) will probably win.
13. NEWS FLASH! Privacy dies. The date of death? 1967. While reading it, think just how visionary some folks are...
14. Finally, just for laughs: How to Spin Bad News

Enjoy!

BTW, I am saving some fun reading for dedicated posts soon :-)

Just the facts ma’am:

• Rank on Inc. 500: #350
• Three-year revenue growth: 840%
• Rank on Top 100 DC-area companies: #27
• DC area ranked #1 for most companies on the Inc. 500 list; #2 for most companies on the Inc. 5000 list (behind NYC)
• 2^nd fastest-growing software company in the DC area (Note: we got categorized as IT Services but of course we really fall under “Software”. They never seem to have a “Technology Appliances” category…)

Read the full press release here.

We’re loving it because of the awards we’ve applied for over the last few years and haven’t won. (Or maybe only I care about this since I had to fill out all those applications. Hmmm, I’m sensing a pattern here…) But in this case, it’s all about the numbers.

We love this part of our story because it comes down to customers actually believing in you and your product enough to plunk down the money – and keep coming back for more once you prove yourself the first time. It’s not about the hype or the latest flash in the pan or “sponsorship” or how much money some VC gives you. It comes down to you, your product and your happy customers.

Blogger: Ramon Krikken

The web browser is one of those peculiar pieces of software, having to accept input from arbitrary sources and then parse and render the data that is sent to it. Part of this it does by itself, and other parts are taken care of by handlers and plug-ins. In doing so, it displays hypertext, images, videos, and even runs active content like Flash, JavaScript, and ActiveX.

But however much we love the browser, we’ve also come to hate the myriad of vulnerabilities that affect it. Everything from cross-site scripting to remote code execution via maliciously formed animated cursor files and Flash content can make browsing a hazardous activity. The browser is sick, and that’s not desirable for a platform we use for important business and personal transactions.

Worsening the browser’s diagnosis is the recent paper from Mark Dowd and Alexander Sotirov, sub-titled “Setting back browser security by 10 years,” which discusses how to bypass Microsoft Vista’s memory protection capabilities with some added effort for the exploit designers. It’s not that all of the techniques are necessarily new, but the browser appears to be particularly vulnerable to easy exploitation.

Surprising? Not exactly, when we take into account that the browser is suffering from the same disease as the general purpose operating system: bloat and compatibility. We expect the browser to do ever more, but everything we used it for before still needs to work as if it were yesterday. It feels a bit like people insisting on using a cardboard box as a safe, and wondering why their money keeps getting stolen.

It’s not like we haven’t been working on the browser’s cure, though. There have been some improvements in the browsers themselves, the operating systems have also implemented compensating controls, but most of all, there has been an enormous push for securing the web applications that deliver the data in the first place. Unfortunately, the latter two won’t help secure the browser in the long run.

The first issue is that not all content will come from ‘nice’ servers, the second that the server can only make an educated guess on how a browser will parse and render a given set of data, and the third that operating system controls have their own limitations, whether by design or implementation (for example needing to re-compile existing code to enable certain protections.) The browser, in the end, has to be mostly responsible for keeping itself safe; the operating system must assist it in doing so.

So we’re in a pickle. The browser is sick (and the operating system is too), but it’s hard to cure it without a redesign that will undoubtedly impact compatibility, the ever-so-desired multi-functionality, or its ease of use. We can layer defenses by using web filtering in the enterprise environment, but in the end – for the consumer market in particular – we need to fix the browser itself. I can think of a few things I think might help:

• Some kind of site security policy  to restrict where the browser loads auxiliary content from, and which data it can ‘trust’, when loading a web page (I’d prefer mandatory enforcement, and adding an HTML tag to be able to indicate blocks of untrustworthy data.)
• Restricted compartments for plug-ins to run in, ensuring that their bugs cannot easily affect the whole browser.
• Better software development practices for the plug-ins and content parsers themselves, so that they’re less vulnerable, and compiled with the latest protection measures to begin with.

All of this means more work, and some of it means a lot of unhappy reactions when things stop working. Even then we will of course still have to deal with additional vulnerabilities, such as those that may be present in hardware, but we will at least have taken prudent steps to ‘find a cure.’