Securityblog

For the last few weeks I’ve seen news stories and much lamenting on twitter about the security skills shortage. Some say there is no shortage, some say it’s horrible beyond belief. Basically there’s someone arguing every possible side of this. I’m not going to debate if there is or isn’t a worker shortage, that’s not really the point. A lot of complaining was done by people who would call themselves leaders in the security universe. I then read the below article and change my thinking up a bit. ...

I ran across this article about IoT security the other day The US Needs to Get Serious About Securing the Internet of Hackable Things I find articles like this frustrating for the simple fact everyone keeps talking about security, but nobody is going to do anything. If you look at the history of humanity, we’ve never been proactive when dealing with problems. We wait until things can’t get worse and the only actual option is to fix the problem. If you look at every problem there are at least two options. Option #1 is always “fix it”. Option #2 is ignore it. There could be more options, but generally we pick #2 because it’s the least amount of work in the short term. Humanity rarely cares about the long term implications of anything. ...

I’ve been thinking about the concept of free market forces this weekend. The basic idea here is that the price of a good is decided by the supply and demand of the market. If the market demands something, the price will go up if there it’s in short supply. This is basically why the Nintendo Switch is still selling on eBay for more than it would cost in the store. There is a demand but there isn’t a supply. But back to security. Let’s think about something I’m going to call “free market security”. What if demand and supply was driving security? Or we can flip the question around, what if the market will never drive security? ...

I was having some security conversations last week and cybersecurity insurance came up as a topic. This isn’t overly unusual as it’s a pretty popular topic, but someone said something that really got me thinking. What if the insurance covered the customers instead of the companies? Now I understand that many cybersecurity insurance policies can cover some amount of customer damage and loss, but fundamentally the coverage is for the company that is attacked, customers who have data stolen will maybe get a year of free credit monitoring or some other token service. That’s all well and good, but I couldn’t help myself from thinking about this problem from another angle. Let’s think about insurance in the context of shoplifting. For this thought exercise we’re going to use a real store in our example, which won’t be exactly correct, but the point is to think about the problem, not get all the minor details correct. ...

If you pay attention to Twitter at all, you’ve probably seen people arguing about patching your enterprise after the WannaCry malware. The short story is that Microsoft fixed a very serious security flaw a few months before the malware hit. That means there are quite a few machines on the Internet that haven’t applied a critical security update. Of course as you imagine there is plenty of back and forth about updates. There are two basic arguments I keep seeing. ...

I was reading the newspaper the other day (the real dead tree newspaper) and I came across an op-ed from my congressperson. Gallagher: Cybersecurity for small business It’s about what you’d expect but comes with some actionable advice! Well, not really. Here it is so you don’t have to read the whole thing. Businesses can start by taking some simple and relatively inexpensive steps to protect themselves, such as: » Installing antivirus, threat detection and firewall software and systems. » Encrypting company data and installing security patches to make sure computers and servers are up to date. » Strengthening password practices, including requiring the use of strong passwords and two-factor authentication. » Educating employees on how to recognize an attempted attack, including preparing rapid response measures to mitigate the damage of an attack in progress or recently completed. ...

The other day I ran across someone trying to keep their locker secured by using a combination lock. As you can see in the picture, the lock is on the handle of the locker, not on the loop that actually locks the door. When I saw this I had a good chuckle, took a picture, and put out a snarky tweet. I then started to think about this quite a bit. Is this the user’s fault or is this bad design? I’m going to blame bad design on this one. It’s easy to blame users, we do it often, but I think in most instances, the problem is the design, not the user. If nothing is ever our fault, we will never improve anything. I suspect this is part of the problem we see across the cybersecurity universe. ...

Every now and then I see something on a blog or Twitter about how you can’t replace a pen test with a bug bounty. For a long time I agreed with this, but I’ve recently changed my mind. I know this isn’t a super popular opinion (yet), and I don’t think either side of this argument is exactly right. Fundamentally the future of looking for issues will not be a pen test. They won’t really be bug bounties either, but I’m going to predict pen testing will evolve into what we currently call bug bounties. ...

It’s that time of year again. I don’t mean when all the government secrets are leaked onto the Internet by some unknown organization. I mean the time of year when it’s unsafe to cross streets or ride your bike. At least in the United States. It’s possible more civilized countries don’t have this problem. I enjoy getting around without a car, but I feel like the number of near misses has gone up a fair bit, and it’s always a person much younger than me with someone much older than them in the passenger seat. At first I didn’t think much about this and just dreamed of how self driving cars will rid us of the horror that is human drivers. After the last near fatality while crossing the street it dawned on me that now is the time all the kids have their driving learner’s permit. I do think I preferred not knowing this since now I know my adversary. It has a name, and that name is “youth”. ...

One of the few themes that comes up time and time again when we talk about security is how bad people tend to be at understanding what’s actually going on. This isn’t really anyone’s fault, we’re expecting people to go against what is essentially millions of years of evolution that created our behaviors. Most security problems revolve around the human being the weak link and doing something that is completely expected and completely wrong. ...