If you’ve not read my previous post on thought leadership, go do that now, this one builds on it. The thing that really kicked off my thinking on these matters was this article: Security liability is coming for software: Is your engineering team ready? The whole article is pretty silly, but the bit about liability and open source is the real treat. There’s some sort of special consideration when you use open source apparently, we’ll get back to that. Right now there is basically no liability of any sort when you use software. I doubt there will be anytime soon. Liability laws are tricky, but the lawyers I’ve spoken with have been clear that software isn’t currently covered in most instances. The whole article is basically nonsense from that respect. The people they interview set the stage for liability and responsibility then seem to discuss how open source should be treated special in this context. ...

Josh and Kurt talk about the new Stack Clash flaw, Grenfell Tower, risk management, and backwards compatibility. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/opensourcesecuritypodcast/328927519-opensourcesecuritypodcast-episode-52-you-could-have-done-it-right-but-you-didnt.mp3 Show Notes Qualys Blog Qualys Advisory Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit Grenfell Tower Join our Facebook Group Comment on Twitter with the #osspodcast hashtag

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. ...

Josh and Kurt talk to Dan Adinolfi about CVE. Most anything you ever wanted to know about CVE is discussed. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/opensourcesecuritypodcast/327688703-opensourcesecuritypodcast-episode-51-all-about-cve.mp3 Show Notes CVE The MITRE Corporation Mikko Hypponen CVE Form CVE CNA Rules Join our Facebook Group Comment on Twitter with the #osspodcast hashtag

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. ...

Josh and Kurt discuss Futurama, tornadoes, sudo, encryption, hacking back, and something called an ombudsman. Also episode 50! https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/opensourcesecuritypodcast/326788036-opensourcesecuritypodcast-episode-50-this-is-a-security-podcast-after-all.mp3 Show Notes Star Trek Discovery Mowing lawn with a tornado Edmonton Tornado Sudo flaw Encryption ban Hacking Back Ombudsman Join our Facebook Group Comment on Twitter with the #osspodcast hashtag

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? ...

Josh and Kurt discuss Samba, FTP sites, MSDOS, regulation, and the airplane laptop travel ban. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/opensourcesecuritypodcast/325265404-opensourcesecuritypodcast-episode-49-testing-software-is-impossible.mp3 Show Notes Samba Bug Wannacry Honeypot Schneier and regulating IoT Cyber ITL Refrigerator death Airplane laptop ban Israeli airport security Join our Facebook Group Comment on Twitter with the #osspodcast hashtag

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. ...