Today, it was revealed that a departing contractor left Fannie Mae with a parting gift – a Logic Bomb designed to take 4000 of the financial giants servers & their data. Since this news broke, a number of concerned CIOs have requested my team for some guidance on how to deal with logic bombs. So [...]
Archive for the ‘Security’ category
Note to Fannie Mae: Dealing with Logic Bombs
January 31, 2009The InfoSec X Prize: Fundamental Change Through Competition
January 22, 2009Today I had a thought provoking conversation with Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation & X Prize Foundation, on radical & fundamental change. Change that advances the status quo rather than relying on incremental change for gradual advance. Arguably the Ansari X Prize (and others in the hopper) have achieved some [...]
Meter This: Practical Application Of Power Drain Attack
August 15, 2008Last week while feeding my caffeine addiction I came across an article in the New York Times titled Can’t Find a Parking Spot? Check Smartphone. In order to reduce traffic congestion and fuel consumption, the city of San Francisco is implementing a new system that will help detect empty parking spots in downtown. Now clearly [...]
My BlueHat Talk: Suddenly Psychic
July 15, 2008Just got word that my talk Suddenly Psychic: Knowing everything about everyone was accepted at Microsoft’s BlueHat Security Conference on October 16-17th. Sometimes when you go blue… you really go blue. Over the course of the next few months my buddy Nitesh Dhanjani and I will be presenting our research on how the business, psychological [...]
Towards enabling secure infrastructure outsourcing
July 11, 2008Many enterprise customers are increasingly evaluating the benefits of infrastructure outsourcing (ITO) to their businesses. In the past year, several CIOs have expressed concerns around the impact to the security and privacy of digital assets resulting from infrastructure outsourcing. In this post I will discuss the business drivers and security concerns around ITO and propose [...]
Application Security Development Lifecycle 5A: Is Threat Modeling Right For You?
June 14, 2008Several enterprises are increasingly investing time and money in building application security tasks into their existing SDLCs. Some of them have also reached the conclusion that proactive approaches , like threat modeling, have more ROI than reactive approaches. As a result, some enterprises with nascent appsec programs have turned to threat modeling as a panacea [...]
Application Security Development Lifecycle 4: Finding the right security talent
June 1, 2008After about an hour of nodding his head vigorously in agreement with some of our lessons learnt, my customer jumped up and exclaimed, ” Great!! Now where do I find another 20 people like these?” (pointing to my team)… I thought about it a while and so Mr. B here is your answer: Information security [...]
Increase the TCO, kill the project: An ad-hoc analogy
May 13, 2008The other day I was subject to the assertion that the only asset an IT security organizations should care about is data. Now being in the application security business, I should have been jumping at this validation but couldn’t. The IT security org needs to understand what threats the business faces from its technology systems. [...]
Application Security Development Lifecycle 3: Funding Models
May 8, 2008Technorati Tags: Security,SDLC,Business Now that you’ve decided (or battled) to set up an application security program you realize that it actually needs to get funded. You must master the art of delicately drinking from the fire hydrant of line of business applications. In my experience helping organizations set up their application security programs funding was [...]
Application Security governance 2: Mandatory or Not?
May 1, 2008Large enterprises tend to have a number of line of business (LOB) applications supporting business operations. It becomes key for an application security program to help the organization manage the risk posed by each of these applications. Applications tend to be comprised of legacy applications, applications under development and application under planning. To start an [...]
