John Pescatore

Eweek published a puff piece promoting the security of Google’s Android operating system that is starting to show up on some mobile phones. It read like a rip and read job from a Google marketing brochure:
1 – not really valid – we’ve said open source code gets more secure, more quickly but it is [...]

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Transparency plus inspection is the friend of security, freshness not so much.

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I live in the Washington DC area and much Beltway buzz about the Washington Post article on Tiversa’s discovery of a House ethics report openly available on a peer to peer music stealing file sharing network. The first reaction, of course, was to blame a cyber-attack, likely launched by the Chinese or maybe the North [...]

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Yesterday I spoke at the 5th annual NIST Security Content Automation conference in Baltimore. A few years ago I spoke at the 2nd or 3rd SCAP conference, which was then a much smaller event held at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg. The conference attendees then were mostly government security staff and managers, with a few small [...]

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Pilots play with laptops, miss airport; users click, install malware – eternal battle.

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Yesterday at our last security session at Gartner’s annual Symposium, I chaired a debate called “Is Government Regulation Required to Increase Cybersecurity?” The panelists were Gartner analysts French Caldwell, Paul Proctor and Earl Perkins. Basically, I was against government regulation and those three were for it.
Essentially, French felt regulation done right was needed and would [...]

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Dark Reading has a piece on US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano weighing in against the need for a Cabinet-level cybersecurity position. I agree big time – even though Secretary Napolitano’s position is surely based on protecting DHS’s charter.
Many have this vague hope that if government were to issue security regulations or if [...]

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This is the 11th year I’ve presented at Gartner’s annual Symposium in Orlando, Florida. The terrorist attacks of 2001 and the dot com bust of the same timeframe caused a lot of changes back then but for the last 8 years it has largely been the same. The same type of room in the Swan [...]

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Most people take way better care of their smartphones than their passwords.

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This week I’ll be sucked into the Gartner IT Symposium vortex, where life is pretty much a constant rotation of 1-1 meetings with attendees, giving presentations, doing the normal inquiry phone calls with Gartner clients, and sneaking time online to work off the never-ending flow of email.
Looking through my calendar at the one-on-one attendee meetings [...]

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