John Pescatore

Yup, just a cheap trick to attract search engines.  But I was on a call with a Gartner client in Australia last night and the first words on the call were “Is it true?” So, sorry, click here if you really were looking for the top current events.

So, nothing relevant to this weeks news. Next week is Gartner’s Information Security Summit at the Gaylord hotel outside Washington DC. If you’ve ever heard the pork industry saying “We use every part of the pig except the oink” – at Gartner conferences, they use every part of the analyst including the oink. So, blogging may be sparse next week – I’ll end this week with just a few cool tidbits I’ve run across recently.

Back in the early 2000s, when Gartner’s security practice was much smaller than it is today, I was trying to push the idea of removing vulnerabilities from software before allowing it onto production systems. There were companies like Perfecto (who became Sanctum who became part of Watchfire who became part of IBM…) and a few others showing how it could be done – but trying to get the app dev side to listen was like pushing a rock up a hill. The Gartner analysts covering application development would tell me “Biz apps/development VPs don’t care about that – they don’t want anything to do with thinking about security, it will slow down development.” It was like when the car manufacturers hired more mechanics to fix defects in cars rather than avoid them before selling the car.

The vulnerability seeking worms of 2001 and 2003 began to force commercial software developers to change their software development life cycles, and that began to ripple into business application development. Now at Gartner we have Joseph Feiman leading our coverage of application security with Neil Macdonald, and enough products and revenue to have Market Scopes and Magic Quadrants in the area.

But back in 2004 HBGary sold off a product called Bugscan to LogicLibrary and both HBGary and Bugscan fell off my radar screen. They popped back on when they briefed me on their technology for analyzing executables to determine if they are malicious, and their partnership with Guidance Software on the computer forensics side.

I’m always on the lookout for technologies that will help with the “arbitrary malware” problem that is at the root of the most damaging threats today, so a few others were of interest, too. Codenomicon briefed Gartner on some advances in their protocol fuzzing capabilities and a partnership with Qualys. Preemptive Solutions briefed us on how their Runtime Intelligence Service can be used to monitor the execution path of applications, and their partnership with Microsoft.  For the high end, Integrity Global Security (a spin-out from Green Hill) briefed us on their Integrity Software System that has been evaluated at EAL 6 against the Seperation Kernel Protection Profile for High Robustness.

A week in the life of a Gartner analyst always has a lot of vendor briefings, good and bad. There were some stinkers this week, but all in all it was nice to see some small companies doing innovative things – and even better to see some large companies already partnering with the innovative little guys.