This is not a survey, consensus or popular poll. This is my opinion written from my viewpoint on how I see this subject. If you disagree with this list or if you agree, please do me a favor and write your OWN list! Seriously if you can’t find twenty things about the industry you work in no matter what it is then it is time for you to look for a new career. I have said it many times to be good at infosec you have to have a passion for it because the people you are up against love what they…

For over two years now, my ssh-honeypot kippo (developed by Upi Tamminen) is receiving “visits” from all over the world. With an easy to guess root password 123456, to shorten the brute force attacks I have gathered some interesting data/statistics.

So to sum things up:

First attack on Monday, 26-Jul-2010, 09:11 AM

Total login attempts 474433

Distinct source IP…

Every now and then somebody starts an argument about whether or not it should be a secret which security products you are using.

I will tell you my opinion on that right away:

1.) Unless your risk profile is extremely high and you are one of the five or so organizations in the world who really have super awesome wicked OPSEC in place, don't even bother starting to think about keeping secret the fact that you…

This article was originally posted on my Digital Forensics Blog.

I heard talk at the SANS DFIR Summit a couple weeks ago about "knowing normal".  What does that mean? Knowing what your systems and networks are doing each day and what their stats should look like. That way, even if you don't really know how to recognize…

Dear All,

This is my first post on DTH. I got to know about DTH due to my exploratory research on SE and I think this site provides a lot of useful info. Hopefully one of you can help me too, therefore I will shortly explain my research object. 

Sorry for my bad English by the way...

I am currently researching (historical) practices that point towards the use of Social Engineering in relation to criminal practices that have occurred within Dutch banks.…

Today I read a blogpost by Fefe in which he rants about how folks just give up on trying to develop more secure code or even fix all bugs in their software but instead draw resources from bugfixing teams in benefit of building mitigations like sandboxing technologies.

 

Fefe criticizes Adobe's security chief Arkin for saying the following sentence:

“My goal isn’t to find and fix every security bug, I’d…

I am lost - lost in an area of conflict.

Not that there were no solutions to solve the conflict.

In fact the conflict isn't as bad as it seems in the first place - at least this is my opinion.

You may be asking yourself exactly what am I talking about.

I am talking about the fact that we tell politicians and those in charge of IT:

a)…

A friend who wants to start a career in information security asked me which books are a "must read".

It goes without saying that the one and only "must-read" is of course Jayson's book.

Since you found your way to this site, you'll probably already know that. ;-)

Up front I would like to say that I really doubt there are…

WTFSecurity 0.5





A few definitions



(for later debate)







Secure (se kur) adjective , unobtainable state



-Complete removal of every threat of Possible Injurious Event (PIE), known and unknown, now and in the future.



(See also - Unusable)











Security (se kur a te) verb , non continuous state



-Constant valid attempt to be secure.



(See also - Valiant…

How2BSecure 0.5

PPIE



Or



(Try really, really hard not to die!!!)







Be aware of your surroundings



Knowing your current environment is critical to being able to identify the severity of possible probable injurious events (ppie)







What is your current environment?



Anything that can currently affect you. Current means right now. Your environment is always changing.







What is an…

I told my daughter when she was only three that I try not to reward negative actions/words with attention. I firmly believe that, so usually when someone has said or written something negative about me I try to ignore it. I just don't have the time to constantly respond to people who will never see any good in me at all. Even if I save a bus full of orphans carrying a box full of squirrels that was about to crash into a ravine, I am sure there would be a way to cast me in a negative…

Identifying unknown files by using fuzzy hashing…

-[ Introduction ]-

Most users trust their browser, some trust it with everything, while others like to keep their passwords safe in their heads.  Is there a way to leverage this trust and collect passwords from the not so trusting, after all if you want to surf the internet your going to have to trust something with your…

Emmet Jorgensen has written an article on Infosecisland that I'd like discuss for a bit. It is about wether or not FUD only has a bad connotation or could actually do something good as well. I must say I kind of agree and at the same time strongly disagree with his stance.

 …

Maybe you already have read the news: the local authority of the state of Niedersachsen in Germany seems to have blocked various anonymizing services such as Tor from accessing the state's websites.

The state office for statistics and communications technology stated that they have blacklisted several anonymizing services for security reasons, to better…

I think I am a polite and forthcoming person. Most of the time.

So when a sales representative of a reputable and well-known security vendor calls me, I will most of the time listen to what they are offering, although I really don't appreciate cold-calling. I will first see if I can somehow verify the identity of the caller before even continue talking to him or her. Since the person already managed to get my phone number, I will allow him to send me an email with his contact…

Are you keeping track of how many organizations have been breached and their data stolen this week?

I stopped counting.

But it is very interesting to see how different organizations react to data breaches. Those who obviously don't have proper incident handling & response procedures mostly are hit much harder, detect the breach much later and in addition to that get very bad public reputation for it after the breach becomes public.

Those organizations who detect…

Here's my take on Dancho Danchev's great article 5 reasons why the proposed ID scheme for internet users is a bad idea on ZDNet. Politicians all over the world have finally realized that internet crime is a serious business and they want to do something to counter it. They overreact because they realize that they slept through that development and now…