There were a number of very good presentations this year and the after-hours parties were great, but from a security industry standpoint, Black Hat 2011 seemed like it had less energy this year. Some of that might have been because it got so much airplay on commercial media and NPR before and during the event, […]
For the past five years it seems like almost everything in information security has focused on application security and, for the NetSPI consulting practices, our application security business (app pen testing, code review, etc.) has significantly increased. In that time, we have seen areas like network and systems vulnerability assessments change due to the commoditization of […]
We celebrated NetSPI’s 10 year anniversary last month. It’s amazing that it has been that long. The anniversary has led me to reflect on NetSPI’s history and on the security industry’s history (at least since I’ve been involved – so, from around 1995). Being on the forensics team at Ontrack in the mid 1990’s, we […]
There was a great quote in a recent Ponemon study sponsored by Cenzic and Barracuda: “Most organizations have been hacked, yet 88 percent still spend more on coffee than on app security.” Combined with the recent revelation that oil companies and components of our national infrastructure have been compromised (see McAfee’s Global Energy Cyberattacks: “Night […]
I like to watch industries evolve in how they deal with information security. It was interesting to watch retail evolve as PCI got more organized. The PCI Council put together the DSS with dates and penalties for breaches and non-compliance, and that drove significant change. It appears that a similar major change within healthcare is […]
We held the Secure360 conference in the Twin Cities last week. Presentation topics included PCI, cloud computing, and problems within the security industry. While it can get tiring discussing the industry’s problems, I like trying to understand the difficult nature of information security and enjoy the challenge of trying to overcome the obstacles related to rationally […]
In late March Thales released an interesting report on the state of PCI – “PCI DSS Trends 2010: QSA Insights Report.” The report was written by the Ponemon Institute and it highlights the difficulty of taking into account risk, security and subjectivity within the PCI DSS compliance standard. If you haven’t read it, here’s a […]
I was at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) national conference last week in Atlanta. Overall, the conference wasn’t much different than past years. From an information security perspective the presentations and conversations were limited, but there were a number of interesting things that I took away from the conference. First and foremost, […]
I attended the 2009 PCI Community meeting in Europe last week. Since this was a feedback year, there wasn’t a significant amount of new content; however, there were some interesting points regarding PCI adoption in Europe. It’s been discussed quite frequently that the Europeans are behind North America in implementing PCI, especially at the merchant […]