December 2010 Archives

With humblest apologies, I don't envision having any substantive posts to share through the end of the year. Perhaps I'll be inspired sometime in the next week, but I don't view that as an assured thing. Mostly I'm just cold these days. :) Since I hate to leave you, my loyal reader, with nothing to read or think about, I'll provide a couple thoughts for discussion:

1) Time "Person of the Year" 2010 - Mark Zuckerberg - Discuss and describe how "Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life..."

2) What would your reaction be if it was definitively proven that the U.S. Government was behind Stuxnet? What would your reaction be if it was, instead, China?

3) ExploitHub is selling exploits for profit. Discuss pros/cons of the business model. For extra credit: represent the perspectives of foreign organizations (governmental and *ahem* non-governmental).

4) WikiLeaks - Should we care? Does it change anything? (references: STRAFOR: Taking Stock of WikiLeaks and Arbor Networks: "The Internet Goes to War")

5) What lessons should we really learn from Gawker? (references: "Lessons Learned From the Gawker Hack" and "The Gawker hack: how a million passwords were lost")

It's all over the news, whether we're talking about the TSA and "security theater" or Wikileaks and the sensitive data spewing out of government, business, and academia (there's a certain irony here, btw, insomuch as much of this data has likely been captured previously). There are "security problems" and they must be solved! Unfortunately, these "solutions" tend to be nothing remotely associated with the actual core problems. Instead, we end up with half-baked ideas that do no real good, or draconian laws that do more harm than good.

At the heart of the matter is one simple challenge: More often than not, leaders "solve" problems that are at best ill-defined. How many billions of dollars are being wasted each year on "solutions" that end up costing organizations more money, whether it be in maintaining the solution, or having to revamp business processes to fit the solution (instead of the other way around), or simply in going through the heartbreak of investing in a technology (*cough*naked scanners*cough*) that wasn't needed in the first place.