• Love, love, love this piece :-) Remember the "robotic gun rampage" stories from last year? How does this sound: "The gun can track 360 degress, but there is a software-driven safety zone that makes sure rounds don't blow the rotors off. If the Osprey has to maneuver away from the target and the crew chief can't hold the gun on the bad guys manually, the system slaves the gun to the point of the last shot, slewing it as the plane moves." (watch the fun video there too)
  
• "Security idiot" meme lives on - go here. BTW, the post is a follow-up to this
• A fun follow-up to my post on compliance approaches titled Is PCI DSS "Too Prescriptive"?
• Finally, my fave post: "Increase Your Logging." I am sooooo happy that logging evangelism is spreading far and wide! A quote from the paper: ”Logs are interesting, logs are fun, logs should be done by EVERYONE…..get to logging!!!” (I promise that specific case was not my quote, even though I do say that very thing all the time!)
  

But I am reminded that it’s not just the titillating stuff that’s of interest. CA is still one of the Big 4 and up until a couple of years ago making headlines with some major and strategic purchases in our space – such as buying Concord for its e-Health software in 2005 and Wily Technology in 2006.

I recently ran across a 451 Group report, “CA: ghosts of deals past” by Brenon Daly (if you haven’t read one of his takes on the M&A market, you don’t know what you’re missing) that showed quantitatively just how much the acquisitions had slowed down.

2003 – 4

2004 – 3

2005 – 6

2006 – 6

2007 – 0

2008 – 0 (so far)

Two or three years ago (I still have the slide in our presentations), it seemed like you couldn’t go a month or two without hearing about the latest acquisition by the Big 4 – to either fill gaps in their monolithic portfolios or take out a growing threat, which had built some good technology. This should sound very familiar to anyone (like me) who rubbed up against WorldCom. Growth (in revenue and technology) by acquisition. Buy your own revenue and don’t worry about the niggling details like integration.

But we’ve certainly seen the acquisition trend slow across the board. HP, after its mega-purchase of Mercury Interactive in 2005 for $4.5 billion, for example, went relatively silent on the acquisition front in our space. Perhaps, as it turns out, because they were too busy preparing for the even bigger purchase of EDS for $13.9 billion (and the layoffs, 24,600 and counting, which in this worsening economy are probably just starting).

COBIT rivals ITIL from The IT Skeptic

“Everyone is tiptoeing around the fact that COBIT offers a significant competitive body of knowledge (BOK) to ITIL. Sure ITIL goes into more depth in places, but to say COBIT sits over the top is to grossly understate the overlap. COBIT extends a long way down into the “how” and it does it with an intellectual rigour that ITIL lacks.”

Interesting stuff that.  A detailed mapping might help some folks.  Either way, the good news for those keen on understanding risk management is that governance metrics, done right, allow us to understand a part of that “capability to manage risk” we’re always looking for.   Assurance, verification and the acquisition and interpretation of knowledge is king.   Speaking of which….

How To Tell When “Nothing Happens” by Pete Lindstrom

“…problem is that, it isn’t really true that “nothing happens” when you employ some specific security control to prevent an exploit. Not only that, but even when it is difficult to collect data on what didn’t happen, one can devise experiments to tell how frequently that nothing occurred.”

Good analysis is all about the uncertainty.   Speaking of accounting for uncertainty…

Assets Good Until Reached For by Gunnar Peterson

“If you have a 100,000 dekstops or 100,000 servers it hard to manage. You will need to automate and to do that you need to abstract, but you should also realize that its a drawing on a whiteboard not reality. You need abstraction assurance.”

And there’s the trick.  We might call “abstraction assurance” an analog to “confidence” or “uncertainty” in certain priors (metrics) or posteriors (calculated values based on those metrics).  The stronger that abstraction assurance is, the less uncertainty we have in our knowledge and the better our ability to create wisdom from that knowledge (you know, make decisions).

Epstein, Snow and Flake: Three Views of Software Security by Adam Shostack

Adam’s focus is on software security, but the discussion here can be abstracted out into the broader realm of risk management quite nicely.

Two-thirds of firms hit by cybercrime from Security Focus

The US DoJ says that in 2005 (there’s some timely data) 2/3 of their surveyed firms detected at least one cybercrime.  “Cybercrime” is “classified … into cyber attacks, cyber theft, and other incidents.”  Pretty general.  Also from the report:  “Computer viruses made up more than half of all cyber attacks.”

(That sound you hear is me tapping my forehead lightly on large iron object)

Lessons Learned from “Personal” Risk Management By: Christopher Daugherty

“This process is what I call “personal risk management.”  All of us have done it and will continue to do so.  Why is it, then, many companies have ignored following similar principles with the on-going health of the business?  This is a debate with many different answers so I ask you to select the best answer for your employer:

a) Have not ignored as this keeps me awake at night!

b) Please restate the problem, I cannot hear well with my head buried in the sand.

c) We passed our SOX audit so we checked this off the list!

d) We are informed of the challenge but we have a business to run and profits to make

e) Is this what internal audit and risk management has been telling us?”

Blogger: Dan Blum

It is no surprise for us to hear loose lips flapping in India about a capability to decrypt Blackberry and other carrier traffic.

After all, we’ve done basic threat analysis for years and it was only months ago that I was brought into a company-wide CISO meeting at a U.S. defense contractor to help them hash out their travel policy for mobile devices. Going into the meeting, I knew their policy restricted taking devices to a list of countries considered dangerous – but there was an exemption for BlackBerries.

Our research uncovered that BlackBerry is pretty secure in most respects. It has transport encryption along with optional password protection, remote kill, disk encryption, and S/MIME encryption. Viruses have not flourished on this functionally limited and closed platform. Few if any third party add on programs are required for additional protection. Nonetheless, I went into the meeting prepared to talk with the CISOs about the risks and security limitations of life on BlackBerry.

Was the BlackBerry exemption reasonable? At the time, BlackBerry transport encryption was not known to have been broken (to be fair, the article listed above still qualifies as rumor, not certainty of breakage). However, I pointed out that it is dangerous to assume well-equipped attackers like military or intelligence organizations can’t crack transport encryption. And even if they haven’t cracked the BlackBerry network and whole disk encryption features, sophisticated adversaries have other attack paths. Check out Neal Stephenson’s excellent book Cryptonomicon for a description of how a talented adversary might “see” your keystrokes and screen images through a motel room wall, for example.

If one of your employees – such as a key scientist, project manager, or executive – is targeted for surveillance and is carrying sensitive data through certain countries, one could argue that he or she had better undergo serious counter-intelligence training.  Learn to spot and shake tails, sneak into dark alleys for that BlackBerry fix. Learn to paper the closet with layers of aluminum foil and send messages in the dark. Defend that BlackBerry with encryption, long passphrases, and kung fu. But unless James Bond is running your company, I doubt this is what your executives have in mind for the next business trip!

Assuming your organization’s lower level employees are like needles in a haystack and won’t be bothered could be an exercise in wishful thinking. It is always possible that nation states are monitoring some or all of the airwaves. Not so long ago the NSA had a massive a covert surveillance program in place. Years before the government was reportedly snarfing up terabytes of emails and crunching them through a program called Carnivore. And of course, selective monitoring of people on watch lists continues on a large scale. This is just the surveillance we know about in the U.S. We suspect there’s more behind the scenes and especially in countries such as China. Even if you train your non-specifically-targeted low level employees to write and speak in search-keyword-free code, the carnivore programs of the world are pretty good at sniffing out those interesting needles – such as descriptions of your business plans, manufacturing processes, and trade secrets.

Sound paranoid? I admit that I don’t know what the probabilities of being targeted or monitored are – just that it can happen. It’s the height of arrogance to believe that a nation state can’t get your information if they’ve targeted it and you’re within their borders. And it’s dangerous to rely on security by obscurity when medium or high consequence information must be protected.

What can be done? If key personnel can't dispense with the BlackBerry (or any other email device) during international travel to those countries where information may be most at risk, they (the users) should limit communications to what they’d feel comfortable uttering over a potentially-monitored telephone call. Controlling incoming communications – messages sent by others – is a harder problem. Until data loss prevention (DLP) products become more contextually sensitive about the travel issues, it may be best not to synchronize the BlackBerry with the overseas user’s home mailbox. Instead, have the user give out a temporary address for the BlackBerry and warn senders to be discreet.

The name reveals some of its creepy appeal: Spykee = Spy Camera. I suppose the nanny you're trying to make sure isn't shaking your baby might be freaked out when it suddenly starts emitting Star Wars music, or such like. Made by Meccano under the Erector brand, its control software is Mac and Windows compatible.

I, for one, welcome our new Spykee overlords--on 15-Oct-2008 when it starts to ship generally.

Silicon Valley project finally gets underway: It's a still a pilot, small, with no promised outcome. And after all this time, a switch of partners, and new parameters, they've still mounted just 20 of 28 access points.

First of all, as background information, I learned the Thai alphabet (script with 44 consonants and 32 vowels) nearly 20 years ago, so I have have a pretty decent foundation for the Thai language compared to most foreigners visting or working in Thailand.   I can read (slowly) and speak better than 99.99+ percent of all foreigners in Thailand.  For this reason, I thought it was ”the right thing to do” to redirect my career to a “new challenge” in the business climate of Thailand as I continue to improve my foreign language skills.   I wanted to help Thailand progress in IT and IT security, so where else would I go but where I have second language skills?

This was no small decision as you can imagine.  Your career and life changes quite dramatically when you give up a long established consulting practice in the US and dive into business in a foreign land, seeking a new challenge.  I can frankly tell you thatit is more difficult to do business in Thailand (as a foreigner) than I expected, for a number of reasons.  Here is my first off-topic post on this topic.

First of all, it is not legal for foreigners to directly own land in Thailand.  Foreigners can ”own” land using a variety of legal loopholes, proxy owners and shell companies; but all of this is risky and not advised.  Many foreigners lose a lot of money coming to Thailand and attempting to buy land via various “structures”.  Some get lucky, but the entire process of foreigners buying and selling land is quite risky and not recommended.

Foreigners can legally own condominiums, under certain conditions, but this “foreign market” results in inflated prices for condos in Thailand that are traded in an “artificial market place” designed for foreigners.   Condos in Bangkok and major resort areas that are up-to-par with condos in the US can easily cost more than condos in major cities in the US.  Hence, the cost of living in Thailand is not as economical as some might believe when you visit Thailand as a tourist.

Second, business in Thailand can best be described as protectionism with discrimination where the government has placed many barriers to entry to foreigners working and competing in Thailand.     Every foreigner must have a work permit and these work permits are expensive and time consuming to maintain.   If you own a business you must pay high professional service fees for “auditors” to perform annual and semiannual audits regardless of how much income you have (including zero).   Firms in Thailand charge thousands of dollars for these ”audits”.      

Third, if you operate a business in Thailand, you must have a place of business (you cannot legally work from your condo you bought at high prices!), so you are forced, by law, to lease office space.   Foreigners from the US, for example, must be paid a minimum of 50,000 Thai Baht per month, so the government will take 10 percent of that each month as their share of tax withholdings.  Startups with no income simply pay income taxes against their personal savings to comply with the law.  Therefore, to start a company and maintain the business in Thailand, you are required to pay significant startup, monthly, semi-annual and annual fees, permits, tax, leases, visas, etc. 

Forth, generating incoming revenue in Thailand can be quite difficult in a climate of both protectionism and discrimination.   In Thailand, it is easy when you are spending money.  This is the ”Land of Smiles” that tourists see and experience.   However, when you are legally permitted to work in Thailand and trying to generate in-country income, you cannot help but notice the protectionism and discrimination against foreigners working and living here.  Many foreigners working in Thailand just “give up” because the barriers to business success are quite high.

Fifth, on top of the challenges of protectionism/discrimination regarding foreigners and foreign investments, which I have only just scratched the surface here, is the overall global business slowdown combined with a climate of political instability which I am sure you have seen in the news.  Thailand has seen 18 coups since 1932.   Currently, Thailand is under a State-of-Emergency  which negatively impacts business even more.  Sound challenging? 

Most people who live and work in Thailand have the opinion that it is far better to enjoy being a tourist here. Working in Thailand is very difficult for many reasons.   Being a tourist in Thailand is completely different than working here.  When you are a tourist, foreign currently flows from you into Thailand, so life in Thailand as a tourist is fun and friendly, hence the “Land of Smiles” you have heard about or experienced.     However, when you are working in Thailand and trying to generate income from Thailand versus bringing in foreign currency, you don’t see the “Land of Smiles” quite the same anymore.

Without getting into too many details in this post, I can simply say that a foreigner doing business in Thailand experiences both protectionism and discrimination.  I came to Thailand hoping to contribute my experience to help the Kingdom.  However, sometimes it feels like foreigners are only welcome if you are working for free, giving seminars for free, and bringing in lots of foreign currency here.

In a future post on business in Thailand I will dive into some details on a number of topics that might be of interest to readers who will never have a chance to come and work here.