industry
Conficker Mostly a Dud
After tons of breathless media coverage about how April 1st might be the latest “cyber-catastrophe,” the date has come and gone and… nothing happened. There was, admittedly, some cause for concern. With 250,000 known machines infected with Conficker.C (and estimates of the full number of infected machines as high as 15 million before antivirus software [...]
BlackHat 2008, Day 1
Today was the first day of this year’s BlackHat Briefings in Las Vegas. The biggest security conference of the year, it’s always an interesting place to be and often involves the release of new and previously unknown exploits. The keynote speaker was Ian Angell, of the London School of Economics, who was speaking, ostensibly, about [...]
The Black Hat Tax
Auren Hoffman at Summation has an interesting post on the “black hat tax.” Essentially, how much do hackers and other online criminals actually cost us? He estimates it at 25% of time and resources, after taking into account not just hackers but also scammers, phishers, and responding to law enforcement requests. According to James Currier [...]
Ad Replacers and the Future of the Internet
A company named Phorm (formerly 121Media) has introduced a new product for ISPs. The idea is that the ISP installs this product (basically a transparent proxy) on their network, and as their customers surf the web, the OIX proxy replaces advertisements on web pages with advertisements on the Phorm network. To make it more palatable, [...]
How to Get a Job in Information Security
Don Parker at SecurityFocus has an article called Skills for the Future about how to get a job in information security. He outlines one path, and while I don’t deny it’s a good one, and probably the most common, it’s not the only way, either. There are quite a few different areas of specialization within [...]
