Will Ransomware Cause the End of the Internet as We Know It?
Is ransomware a global cyberpandemic? If not, why not? Read on … There is an article by Samuel Greengard in the April 2021 edition of Communications of the ACM with the disturbing title “The Worsening State of Ransomware: Sophisticated, dangerous ransomware is the new normal … and there is no simple fix.” This raises the […]
Will AI Short Circuit Cybersecurity?
The general tone of Chris Baraniuk’s February 23, 2021 article on the BBC website, “How Google’s hot air balloon surprised its creators,” available at https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210222-how-googles-hot-air-balloon-surprised-its-creators is one of wonderment, although he does throw in some caveats about the dangers of AI operating in unexpected ways. The article describes how engineers discovered a surprising feature relating […]
Featured Articles
The CIA Triad: Theory and Practice
(Kenneth F. Belva) Recently Bloginfosec.com published an article by Warren Axelrod entitled, It’s About Availability and Integrity (not so much Confidentiality). It appears that the article Read more…
6 Theories of Probability and 6 Reasons Why They Matter to ISRA
(Jeff Lowder) While probably everyone would agree that information security risk analysis (ISRA) is shot through with appeals to probability, very few non-academic discussions of ISRA provide Read more…
Decision Theory is the Foundation for Information Security Risk Management
(Jeff Lowder) Disclaimer: I originally wrote the following text as a post to a mailing list in 2005, but it still seems applicable today. The more I read the writings of various information Read more…
H1N1 Threat Overblown? Information Security Relevance? A Logic Proof
(Kenneth F. Belva) “H1N1 was totally overblown. Nothing really terrible happened. No one suffered a pandemic and the resulting deaths were less in number than the deaths from the regular Read more…
Network Solutions “Hacked Account” Demonstrates Incompetence
(Kenneth F. Belva) When in doubt, claim the account was hacked. That appears to be the reasoning of a Network Solutions Technical Support Representative. Normally I do not write about other Read more…
US Drones Hack: It’s The Same Old Story
(Kenneth F. Belva) CNN reports that Iraqi insurgents were able to hack and view live feeds from US Spy Drones. The vulnerability was a non-technical one. The article summarized the issue as thus: Read more…
DHS Security Control May Improve Airport Economy
(Kenneth F. Belva) It turns out that banning water on airplanes may help improve the vendor economy in airports. The idea is simple. Since passengers may not carry water onto airplanes when Read more…
Video: Hard Drives – Watch Them Shred
(Kenneth F. Belva) While it’s the dream of almost every information security department to send their hard drives off to the shredder to destroy sensitive data, few of us have actually Read more…
Being Evil versus Doing Harm
(C. Warren Axelrod) Mea culpa. …. Craig Heath rightly states that the Google motto is “Don’t be evil” and not “Do no harm,” as I had misquoted in my column Read more…
Google Doing Harm
(C. Warren Axelrod) As we all know, Google’s motto is (was?) “Do no harm” … which, it appears, they took directly from the modern version of the physician’s Hippocratic Read more…
New Massachusetts Regulation Has Significant Implications for Information Security Professionals
(Sam Dekay) This year, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted a regulation that prescribes information security policies and practices quite unlike those required in any previous state or Read more…
Passwords – Déjà Vu All Over Again
(C. Warren Axelrod) With due credit to Yogi Berra, I found myself groaning “not again” when reading Randall Stross’s article “Goodbye, Passwords. You Aren’t a Good Read more…
Security and Audit – BFFLs? Maybe not, but…
(Patrick Foley) …we may have lots of reasons to work together more closely. Maybe it is just the luck of the draw that at almost every employer for the last 15 years, I have been the one Read more…
What is Russell Handorf’s Secret?
(Sam Dekay) Russell Handorf seems to have a secret that has been withheld from the ten other contributors to bloginfosec. Russell himself may know this secret, although it’s quite Read more…
Down the PCI Rabbit Hole in Search of Better Risk Measurements
(Patrick Foley) Decision-making is often a product of risk assessment and prioritization. Currently, I have several deliverables pending for work, a carpentry project at home and this article Read more…