John Pescatore

Conficker is just the press hype-driven tip of the botnet iceberg.
(Gartner First Take on Conficker should be here.)

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The Telegraph reports that UK intelligence officials have warned that BT’s new 21CN network is vulnerable to exploit by the Chinese government since the network uses Huawei telecoms equipment. Huawei is China’s largest telecoms company and was recently “discouraged” by the US from acquiring the TippingPoint intrusion prevention technology owned by 3Com. There have been [...]

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Unlike others, I did not postpone travel to Texas this week. After seeing TV pictures of floods in North Dakota, blizzards in Colorado and tornadoes in Louisiana, hard to complain about my bumpy and delayed flights
Anyway, after a bit of exciting rerouting through Oklahoma City, I did get to Texas and met with security folks at [...]

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Greg Young of Gartner posted here about the sorry state of security  - but is that really the case?
Before there was postal mail, all fraud and scams were done in person. Of course, there were a lot fewer transactions because everyone had to be near each other to transact. Once postal mail came along, mail scams [...]

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If only vulnerable software would belch smoke and rumble before it exploded.

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Who are you? 
Who, who, who, who? 
Who are you? 
Who, who, who, who? 
Who are you? 
Who, who, who, who? 
Who are you? 
Who, who, who, who?
(refrain from “Who Are You?” by The Who)
Almost 16 years ago “The New Yorker” published the now iconic “On The Internet, No One Knows You’re a Dog” cartoon, which fueled security presentations for years and [...]

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I love to watch television but there just doesn’t seem to be all that much on that’s worth watching anymore. One exception is the TV show “House” – that is on our Tivo Season Pass list, along with a few other shows. Now, in “House” the patient has baffling symptoms and for the first 50 [...]

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AIG was obviously lacking ‘Beware Bonusing While Being Bailed Out” awareness posters.

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Gartner recently published a First Take about Google’s preview of Google Voice, which is basically a Google-provided phone number that will consolidate all of a user’s phone and text messaging into a single message mailbox. It will also provide voice to text transcription of voice mails and a bunch of other services. Google is currently [...]

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The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council recently published some guidelines for a sequential approach towards meeting the PCI Data Security Standard requirements. Essentially, they mapped the DSS requirements across six major milestones. This doesn’t mean they are opening the door towards making some requirements optional or even less important than others – but it is [...]

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