John Pescatore

Back in the mid-1990s I worked at Trusted Information Systems in the early days of the firewall industry. TIS Gauntlet, like most of the first commercial firewall products, were proxy-based – they broke the connection from the outside world to the internal trusted network and used protocol-specific proxies to provide very thorough inspection of the [...]

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Without an added value security layer, public cloud fails for business applications.

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I still cringe at that scene in Marathon Man where Laurence Olivier puts Dustin Hoffman in the dentist chair and tortures him while asking “Is it safe??” In fact, now I cringe even more because it reminds me of so many conversations between CEOs/CIOs and CISOs: “OK, we gave you the budget increase. Is it [...]

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I seem have dedicated a lot of Twelve Word Tuesday posts to the issue of getting ISPs to be more active in filtering malware out of the incoming bits they sell us (see here and here and here.) This week a lot more verbose versions came out, with Google calling for ISPs to cooperate in [...]

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I do a lot of presentations on the changing threats in cyberspace. I always start out by saying the economics of developing cyber-threats is very different than for physical threats or traditional warfare. Governments do not have an advantage in developing cyber-threats – that is why the vast majority of the most damaging attacks are [...]

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“Network Neutrality” still allows ISPs to block “unlawful” content and harmful connections.

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And the toilets flush in the same direction, too!
At last week’s Gartner security summit in Sydney, I did five presentations, was on the closing panel, did several one on ones, and had numerous discussions with conference attendees. If I took away the Australian accents, I would have been hard pressed to tell I was in [...]

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If the roof doesn’t leak, who cares how hard/often it rains?

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I’m here in Sydney for the Gartner Asia Pacific Security Summit, so blogging this week will be sporadic but with hopefully some flavor of the security concerns in this region.
One thing I noticed right away is that cars drive on the left of the roadways, meaning you always have to look right first as you [...]

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Reuters reports that when asked by a teenager how to become president, President Obama replied:

“Well, let me give you some very practical tips. First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your [...]

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