What Breach?

Aww man, it's us

As a security professional, I spend a lot of my time making sure that the bad guys aren't able to break in.  I set up all the fancy firewalls and anti-virus to keep us safe.  But what happens when a user unknowingly gives up their credentials due to a phish?  Well, if you are lucky, the spammers just use it to spam the world.  If you are unlucky, the figure out how to attack the inside of your network to get to the crown jewels.

Protecting your home network with OpenDNS for free

Deep packet inspection is a methodology that network security professionals have been doing for many years.  It involves looking at the data going over the network and determining if anything malicious is going on based on what's in those packets.

My last post on Ransomware was in 2013 when we were being hit by Cryptolocker.  I mentioned that in around 2010 Data Doctor 2010 was the ransomware in the news.  According to Wikipedia, the first "ransomware" was called the "AIDS Trojan" in 1989, which didn't encrypt your files, but merely hid their data by encrypting the filenames.

Poodle and the Beast, this isn't a love story

Three years ago, Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo demonstrated ^[1] an attack against one of the methods used in securing Internet traffic. 

Shellshock, a Bash Code Injection Vulnerability

In late September, 2014, a bug was released to the public in the popular Linux/Mac shell called bash.  For those that aren't familiar, the shell is the black box that some computer folks seem to spend a lot of time in typing archane commands to magically fix the computer.

Short Story

Heartbleed vulnerability

A flurry of information is coming out about the Heartbleed vulnerability that is affecting Internet websites everywhere.  As the Information Security Officer at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), I worked closely with the Computing Groups across our campus to secure our services.

Martin Lee, the Threat Intelligence Technical Lead over at Cisco, posted a fascinating article about the dangers of clicking on links when tired.  There has recently been a campaign telling people that driving tired is as bad or worse than driving drunk, and now it seems that clicking tired is also on the track of bad things to do.