John Pescatore

I would really, really like 2009 to be a better year than 2008, even more than my normal hoping that year X be a better year than year X-1.  From a security perspective, there are mainly 3 areas I want to see improve:

Economics – 2008 was a real financial bummer, even worse than the dot [...]

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“Global warfare decreased by over 60% since 1985 – now at mid-1950’s level”
 
From “Peace and Conflict 2005: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self-Determination Movements and Democracy,” Gurr and Marshall, University of Maryland Center for International Development and Conflict Management, as quoted in “The Post American World” by Fareed Zakaria.

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For the second time this year, undersea cables in the Mediterranean have been cut, causing temporary disruption and degradation in the Middle East and Southern Asia. This will surely spin off more discussions of attack vs. accident, but the cause doesn’t really matter – the effect is the issue. If you outsource your call center [...]

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I am about the same age as Tang, the allegedly orange juice-like powdered mix. I always figured the real history of Tang was that the chemical industry was trying to come up with a way to compete with the actual orange juice industry and Tang was as close as they could get – not very [...]

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I read in the Wall Street Journal that Google was trying to negotiate for preferred service by ISPs when Google bits are traveling over the Internet. Let’s not get all in a tizzy about the elusive “Net neutrality” – let’s think this through. After all, it is now popular to to change HOV lanes from [...]

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Tell me how to spend my first security dollar, not my next.
 
Loosely quoted from Bryan Palma when he was CISO at PepsiCo.

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Not that Gartner condones the practice (happy, Gartner lawyers?) but in my career I’ve sat through many meetings and briefings where I wanted to throw my shoes.  Imagine – for the cost of a few replacement Thom Mcans I could have save years of wasted time, since I’ve calculated that every hour in a meeting [...]

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Microsoft issued a special security advisory this week around attacks exploiting a Windows IE7 vulnerability for which there is no patch. Microsoft followed this up with a blog posting showing where they are seeing the attacks hit, mostly in the United States.  This is in addition to Microsoft’s regularly scheduled Vulnerability Tuesday announcement that there [...]

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uTest released the results of their Bug Battle where they had 1,330 testers pound on the beta releases of the three major browsers: Microsoft IE8, Google Chrome,  and Mozilla Firefox 3.1. Not surprisingly, Google Chrome was the buggiest – almost 50% more bugs than they found in Firefox, even though more testers were banging on Firefox. [...]

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When you put a check in an envelope to pay your mortgage, and address that envelope to your mortgage company, imagine if the Postal Service looked at the address and sent the check to a criminal gang in Elbonia.
When you dial the airlines over the phone and give out your credit card number to buy [...]

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