The Shape of Things to Come with Critical Infrastructure Attacks
February 13th, 2013
How many movies have you seen where the fate of humankind depends on a geeky guy sweating in front of a computer? The specific drama varies from movie to movie, but they generally include the need to: hack into a system to get critical information, crack a password, or disable an evil supercomputer bent on [...]
Blocking USB Borne Malware Isn’t Rocket Science
August 15th, 2012
In a recent newsletter, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) devoted significant space to a recent malware incident involving a removable media flash drive. Basically, someone connected a personally-owned USB flash drive to an air-gapped or isolated system; this USB stick was later found to be infected with the Hamweq virus. We’ve [...]
USBs: Unsafe at Any Speed?
August 12th, 2011
I always enjoy hearing about our venerable events in the popular press – sometimes they’re yuk-inducing, like this bit on Marketplace about their reporter asking about getting WiFi at Black Hat 2011 (see here or listen here for the whole piece). And although I did not attend, I’ve been trying to catch up on some [...]
Is FIPS 140-2 Fatally Flawed?
January 13th, 2010
So, upon my return to the Valley of the Sun and after figuring out where our new offices (let alone the coffee machine and bathrooms) were (Lumension has moved, in case you’ve not heard – 3rd floor with a seriously sweet view), I settled down to see what happened over the holidays. First up – [...]
Chris’ Security Cache Contemplation
May 12th, 2009
Miscellaneous interesting news / tidbits I’ve run across whilst trying to keep up with / clean out my RSS feed … Targeted Attack. It was widely reported last week (see here and here and here) that a convicted Swedish hacker was charged with the 2004 attack on Cisco Systems (where he stole source code), NASA’s [...]
Nasty Virus / Trojan Lurking in the Wild
April 27th, 2009
With Conficker still fresh on our minds, a new potential menace has emerged. The remote access capability of a Trojan that spreads like a Virus – W32.Virut.CF (Symantec) or W32/Scribble-A (Sophos) is poised to wreak havoc on networks over the coming days. Embedding itself deep within infected machines, the Trojan will make it difficult to [...]
Old Skool Hax
April 20th, 2009
The focus for those of us in the data leakage arena has generally been on the “big holes,” especially when it comes to the risk of insider theft… email, removable devices and drives (e.g., USB flash drives, external HDDs), removable media (e.g., CDs / DVDs). And for good reason. Why? Well, first, as I’ve mentioned before, [...]
Zero-day MS PowerPoint Vulnerability– exploit actively being used in the wild
April 3rd, 2009
Another day, another exploit – and no, this time it’s not related to Conficker. There is a new zero-day vulnerability lurking in-the-wild that impacts older versions of MS Office; Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and also includes Mac Office. However, please note that the latest version of Office 2007 is not vulnerable. Microsoft reports [...]
All Quiet On The Eastern Front as it Relates to Conficker
March 31st, 2009
Latest network traffic in China indciates that Conficker will not materialize into the overhyped sensation that it tuned out to be; however, Conficker turned out to be a very important lesson for everyone. Conficker is an aggressively spreading computer worm that has been laying down a powerful botnet infrastructure that can then be managed by [...]
Healthcare 2.0? The Security Skinny on Obama’s Stimulus Package
March 31st, 2009
On Tuesday February 17th, President Obama signed the economic stimulus package that carves out $19B for modernizing health information systems. The transition from paper to electronic or e-records in the healthcare industry has been happening for some time. Although in small numbers, the process has been slow to ramp up based on technology considerations and [...]






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