About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
From AFP (Via Yahoo News)
The North Korean regime is in the process of building up its capabilities to launch offensive computer attacks, according to news reports out of South Korea. The reports say that North Korea is specifically strengthening its information warfare program with the intention of targeting its two traditional antagonists, the United States and South Korea, AFP reports.
The recent flood of stories on attacks against the electrical grid, various government agencies and other portions of the critical infrastructure has renewed the calls for improvements in federal cybersecurity and, especially, information sharing between the government and the private sector on attacks and vulnerabilities. Some of this has been going on behind the scenes in Washington for a long time in an ad hoc fashion, but it appears it’s been getting more organized of late.
For the landmark 10th episode of the Digital Underground podcast, Dennis Fisher talks with Art Coviello, president of RSA, the security division of EMC, about the evolution of the RSA Conference, the future of the security industry and whether the compliance mentality is taking the focus off security in the enterprise.
From CNet News (Stephanie Condon)
The Conficker Working Group several months ago discovered several hundred medical devices that had been infected with the Conficker worm and set about alerting the affected hospitals to the problem. The disinfection process should have been straightforward, but the tangle of regulations that govern medical facilities prevented the hospitals from making changes to the devices for three months.
Chris Hoff, the former chief security architect at Unisys and the author of the consistently insightful and funny Rational Survivability blog, is among the most sought-after speakers in the security industry and an authority on cloud computing and virtualization security. In this interview, he talks about the goals of the Cloud Security Alliance, the vague terminology and concepts of cloud computing and why cloud computing will neither save the world nor trigger the apocalypse.
Microsoft has developed an ultra-secure version of Windows XP, with many settings locked down by default. But the hardened OS isn’t for sale to the general public; it’s made specifically for the military. Microsoft built the secure version of XP a few years ago at the direction of the Air Force, which had grown weary of the constant updates to other Windows versions and had just seen its network defenses abused in a pentration test by the National Security Agency.
Dennis Fisher talks with Toney Jennings, CEO of Core Trace, about the history of the commercial IDS, the changes to the security industry in the last 15 years, the advantages of application white listing and the rush of racing a $300,000 Ferrari.
Digital Underground podcast with Dennis Fisher
In this episode of the Digital Underground podcast, Dennis Fisher talks with David Mortman, CSO-in-residence at Echelon One and longtime security executive, about whether we’ve become too reliant on compliance, the changing nature of the CSO’s job and how network security is like baking artisan bread. Really.
From The New York Times (John Markoff and John Shanker)
A study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences found that the United States military needs to create an open, public dalogue to clarify its plans around using offensive weapons in cyberspace. The study also recommends that the military explain what offensive capabilities it has and how they might be used to counter conventional military attacks.
In this video from Dojosec, Matthew Watchinski from Sourcefire’s Vulnerability Research Team reveals the timeline, from discovery to sale to exploitation to disclosure to patch, of the Adobe JBIG PDF flaw.
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