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22 Jun 2009Web application security – ignorance or idiocy?
You've heard me rant about common management and developer views of Web security here and in the articles I write for TechTarget. Here's some third-party validation of my thoughts. Entertaining yet sad....
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20 Jun 2009
Time to teach kids about personal responsibility, and prison?
Here's some insight into what children are doing online these days. Great example of the lack of parenting, discipline, personal responsibility, and ability to think long-term we have going in our society.On a side note, perhaps the "Psychologists have long known that when an attacker does not see their victim, the normal inhibitions that prevent us from doing wrong become much weaker" bit explains why we see so much road ...
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16 Jun 2009
Getting back to the basics – what’s it going to take?
With all the worry about budgets and all the marketing hype over some of these fancy vendor security solutions, I still see so many simple/silly/stupid things related to IT that need to be fixed before a penny is ever spent or a single new technology is ever deployed. Things like: --Network shares sharing out entire drives full of sensitive files - accessible by anyone with just a basic network login ...
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16 Jun 2009
Great site for getting your IT/security questions answered
I may have already blogged about this but here it is again. It's TechTarget's IT Knowledge Exchange.Let's say you have a question about, oh, anything related to what we do in IT and security. You're going to get some good answers. I answer a fair amount of questions on the site and there are a lot of sharp people who contribute. And odds are you won't get flamed for asking ...
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11 Jun 2009
Do you hate to lose or love to win?
Things have been crazy busy for me recently but I wanted to post a quickie one something I remember hearing from Don Yeager's recent speech about successful athletes and coaches. He said "they hate to lose more than they love to win and as soon as you accept being second you lose that edge that makes you a winner."Deep....
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04 Jun 2009
My new security vulnerability scanning service
Well, I'm officially on the SaaS market. I've just launched my security vulnerability scanning service for both basic external security scans as well as the PCI Council's mandated Authorized Scanning Vendor (ASV) scans.Here's what I just posted on my Web site:Whether you need to minimize your investment in information security and compliance, you’re in need of an easy way to discover the low-hanging vulnerabilities, or you need help certifying your ...
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03 Jun 2009
Neat (and free) tool for finding Flash flaws
HP's Application Security Center recently released SWFScan - a standalone tool that decompiles Flash applications and searches for security holes inside the code. Very cool.It's pretty surprising how many vulnerabilities Flash files can contain including XSS, embedded SQL statements, encryption keys, login credentials and more. Definitely worth downloading and taking it for a spin. Here's a screenshot of the interface and some findings:Also, check out Billy Hoffman's video walkthrough of ...
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03 Jun 2009
Secret list of nuclear sites released “by accident”
Apparently our Imperial Federal Government can't even follow its own rules for information privacy and security. It was just announced that a secret list of nuclear sites was released "by accident".First of all, "accidents" are like "computer glitches" - there's almost always human error behind them. Do you see the irony here? How is heavily-regulated private industry to be expected to lock everything down when the very entity writing OUR ...
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02 Jun 2009
Great quote on how our minds work
Here's a great quote from Bill Meyer that helps reiterate just how powerful our minds really are:"Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting golden delicious."It's critical to never lose sight of the fact that we become what we think about the most....
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26 May 2009
Perfect example of an unknown app becoming a known target
A while back I wrote about a great email server called Icewarp. It wasn't bloatware - it had just what SMBs needed in an email server...Oh, and it wasn't a target for security exploits - an obvious added benefit. But as with anything else, you grow bigger, your app becomes more complex, and you'll no doubt become a bigger target for attacks. As of late Icewarp has grown a lot ...
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I’ve written/co-written 12 books on information security including one of the best-sellers of all time:
