John Pescatore

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Archives for February, 2009


Good News Friday: DNSSEC for .com and .net in 2011

by John Pescatore  |  February 27, 2009  |  1 Comment

I’ve decided that Friday blog posts should be all unicorns and rainbows – there’s enough depressing economic news out each week to ruin all of our weekends. So, from now on only positive security blog thoughts on Fridays. If I don’t post on Friday, it is because I’m following Thumper’s advice to Bambi… In a [...]

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Google Outage and Rebate – Is 95% email uptime good enough?

by John Pescatore  |  February 26, 2009  |  7 Comments

The Washington Post reports that Google is offering Google Apps Premier Edition paying customers a 15 day credit to make up for the service outage that occurred on the 24th of February.  If you look at the Google Apps SLA, this means Google is offering compensation as if the February uptime percentage will be under 95%.  [...]

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Twelve Word Tuesday: Thoughts From the Gartner Mobile and Wireless Conference

by John Pescatore  |  February 24, 2009  |  Submit a Comment

IT has reached the “Princess Phone” phase – fads rule, dependability not yet.

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On the Road Again

by John Pescatore  |  February 23, 2009  |  2 Comments

I’ve been doing mostly local travel meeting with Gartner clients in the DC area this year, with the exception of a few days in San Francisco meeting with Gartner financial services clients. This week I’m in Chicago at Gartner’s Mobile and Wireless conference. This a tough year for the conference business, but attendance looks strong [...]

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Vista We Hardly Knew Ye

by John Pescatore  |  February 20, 2009  |  Submit a Comment

It used to be security mantra not to use a Windows operating system until Service Pack 2 came out. That was never great advice – I used to advise Gartner clients to focus on the types and severity of bugs coming out in Windows vs. any hard coded event like a Service Pack release to [...]

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Off With Their Heads! Satisfying, But Usually Not the Right Strategy

by John Pescatore  |  February 19, 2009  |  8 Comments

Wired News reports that the Air Force disconnected Maxwell Air Force Base from the Internet. Wired references from Air Force General Norton Schwartz quotes to InsideDefense.com, saying that the base:  ”…hadn’t demonstrated — in our view at the headquarters — their capacity to manage their network in a way that didn’t make everyone else vulnerable. This is [...]

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Guest Blogger: Lawrence Orans on Trustwave Acquiring Mirage Networks

by John Pescatore  |  February 18, 2009  |  1 Comment

The current economy means we are going to see a lot of vendors get acquired and some will fail. Gartner does First Takes on major mergers and acquisitions but for smaller ones blog posts make more sense. Today we have Gartner analyst Lawrence Orans giving his take on the recent Trustwave Acquisition of Network Access [...]

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Twelve Word Tuesday: All Hail the Federal Trade Commission

by John Pescatore  |  February 17, 2009  |  Submit a Comment

The FTC is the only agency that enforces (vs. ignoring) privacy regulations.

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Open Source Software Is Not Less Secure Than Proprietary Code – Nor Is It More Secure

by John Pescatore  |  February 12, 2009  |  Submit a Comment

I thought we had put this issue to bed many years ago, but Gartner analyst Ant Allan forwarded a Slashdot post saying that the poster had seen an increased push by Certified Microsoft Professional to use security concerns to try to scare enterprises away form using open source software. I haven’t seen any increased questions [...]

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What I Want for Wednesday: Precipitate Patching

by John Pescatore  |  February 11, 2009  |  Submit a Comment

Yesterday was the monthly Microsoft Vulnerability Tuesday, and while the number of patches issued wasn’t that high, there are a couple listed in the Microsoft bulletin that are worth expedited attention: MS09-003: This is an Exchange Server vulnerability, where if a specially crafted TNEF-formatted email is received by the Exchange Server the attacker can execute [...]

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