John Pescatore

On Tuesday, Fortinet put out an alert about the reemergence of the Koobface worm that was spreading malware to Facebook users earlier this year.  Yesterday, Network World posted a nice piece by Robert McMillan giving some detail on the attack and why the simple defensive measures Facebook put in place earlier weren’t sufficient. This new [...]

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I’ve been getting a steady stream of client questions of the form: “We have outsourced a lot of IT admin functions – how do we limit what the vendor or outsourcer can do when they remotely connect to us?”
In the bad old days there were a lot of single server dial-in modems or modem banks [...]

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The best security program is at the business with the happiest customers.

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On Friday, Neil Macdonald and I pushed out a Gartner First Take on the importance of patching the latest Windows vulnerability. Over the weekend, more active exploits did come out – make sure you patch (and reboot) your home PCs, too. Microsoft put out a few additional areas of guidance that have some good detail [...]

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I’m going to start choosing exercycles at my health club that don’t have a clear view of the televisions. I used to just avoid the bike that was near the TV that was tuned to any business channel, but now just about every station runs a crawl trumpeting the latest bad news.  This morning, even the [...]

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I’ve been using the Chrome browser, mainly because I got tired of browser bloat in IE and Mozilla. When I installed Chrome, it asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks from IE and I bravely said no – time for a fresh start. My bookmark file dates back to about 1994 and the [...]

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A few years ago I was talking to a venture capital firm about small security companies that might potentially IPO. When I mentioned a few small companies that I thought had good technology and happy customers, the VC said “Oh, those aren’t IPO targets – those are ‘lifestyle’ companies.” When I asked what that meant, [...]

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“Given 8 hours to fell a tree, spend 6 sharpening the axe.”
(Shortened from Abraham Lincoln’s original,  which is more active but too verbose for the twelve word construct: “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.“)
(Just think how much better the Gettysburg address would have been if [...]

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At Gartner, we constantly get pitched by scads of start-ups.  For about 90 out of 100 the only thing I remember is “nothing new, nothing needed, VC money in search of a problem, I just wasted 30 minutes.” For about 9 out of the remaining ten I think “there is a germ of an idea [...]

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I’ve been at Gartner nine years now and this was my tenth IT Symposium. The basic model hasn’t changed much over all those years. As an analyst you are either giving presentations or meeting with attendees the entire time. It is sort of like being a Spanish language major and taking a week-long trip to [...]

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