A Wish for Snow in Spring

The basic technique of cybercrime statistics—measuring the incidence of a given phenomenon (DDoS, trojan, APT) as a percentage of overall population size—had entered the mainstream of cybersecurity thought only in the previous decade. Cybersecurity as a science was still in its infancy, as many of its basic principles had yet to be established. At the… Continue reading

Security Hobos

If you haven’t viewed/read Wendy Nather’s (@451Wendy) insightful [Living Below The Security Poverty Line](https://451research.com/t1r-insight-living-below-the-security-poverty-line) you really need to do that before continuing (we’ll still be here when you get back). Unfortunately, the catalyst for this post came from two recent, real-world events: my returned exposure to the apparent ever-increasing homeless issue in San Francisco (a… Continue reading

Once More Into The [PRC Aggregated] Breaches

If you’re not on the SecurityMetrics.org mailing list you missed an interaction about the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Chronology of Data Breaches data source started by Lance Spitzner (@lspitzner). You’ll need to subscribe to the list see the thread, but one innocent question put me down the path to taking a look at the aggregated data… Continue reading

Off By One : The Importance Of Fact Checking Breach Reports

I didn’t read through the Massachusetts 2011 Report on Data Breach Notifications [PDF] until recently, but once I went through the report my brain kept telling me “something is wrong”. Not something earth shattering, but more of a “something is off” signal. This happens more than I’d like as I tend to constantly background process what… Continue reading

Businessweek Infographic Illustrates The Pounding We Took In 2011

Another #spiffy tip from @MetricsHulk: Evan Applegate put together a great & simple infographic for Businessweek that illustrates the number and size of 2011 data breaches pretty well. (Click for larger version) The summary data (below the timeline bubble chart) shows there was a 37.4% increase in reported incidents and over 260 million records exposed/stolen… Continue reading

What Can We Learn From The @lulzsec senate.gov Hack Dump?

What can the @lulzsec senate.gov dump tell us about how the admins maintained their system/site? [code light=”true”]SunOS a-ess-wwwi 5.10 Generic_139555-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise[/code] means they haven’t kept up with OS patches. [-1 patch management] [code light=”true”]celerra:/wwwdata 985G 609G 376G 62% /net/celerra/wwwdata[/code] tells us they use EMC NAS kit for web content. The ‘last‘ dump shows… Continue reading