John Pescatore

One of the most fun parts of being a Gartner analyst is spending so much time with our enterprise clients, working with them to deal with ever-changing security issues.  Since it is well known that we do a lot of this, I get a lot of interesting email from various product vendors. It is not always very clear why a particular vendor chooses to send me a particular email. However, one thing I’ve learned is that it is almost always worth a few seconds to look into some odd topic – if you put blinders on you miss out on a lot of possible mutations that lead you into interesting areas where you learn good stuff.

So when I received an email with the title “Polyplus-transfection announces the development of “ZNA(TM)“, a new class of modified oligonucleotides” my first instinct was to delete before reading.  But then a quick visit to dictionary.reference.com told me that transfection was “the insertion into a cell of a bacterial plasmid that contains a foreign virus or genetic material.” Cool -  a link to security, and probably a reason why this company mistakenly sent me this press release.

Despite the common name, there really isn’t much in common between computer viruses and biological viruses.  But in perusing some of the links I hopped through, it turns out that the easiest ways of doing transfection are the least reliable and the most effective requires a lot of customization towards the particular cell lines and plasmids – a direct analogy to today’s threat environment where attacks are targeted and simple means (signature-based blocking, simple vulnerability scanning) just are not effective anymore.

Of course, I had to plow through a lot of stuff about mobilume conjugation and eukaryotic organisms to get to that simple conclusion. But it was more fun than filling out expense vouchers, anyway…

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