Cybercrime’s Dark Triad
There is a very interesting article (at least for me) by Michele Maasberg, Craig Van Slyke, Selwyn Ellis and Nicole Beebe in the December 2020 edition of the Communications of the ACM with the title “The Dark Triad and Insider Threats in Cyber Security.” The article traces “the relationship between personality traits and insider cyber […]
Cybersecurity Lessons from the Pandemic: Getting Lucky
Antonio Regalado’s February 5, 2021 article in the MIT Technology Review, “The next act for messenger RNA could be bigger than covid vaccines,” which is available at The next act for messenger RNA could be bigger than covid vaccines | MIT Technology Review, is a riveting account of how the mRNA vaccine has been developed […]
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…