28 November 08 - 07:54Oliver Day's post on Microsoft's Stance on Piracy and Patching

Last week, I stumbled into an interesting guest post blog entry from Oliver Day, a staff security researcher at stopbadware.org, at SecurityFocus. He makes a case that Microsoft's policy of barring piracy copies of Windows from downloading patches is a counter-productive policy when it comes to securing computer systems and making the Internet a safer place. The comments on the post are pretty antagonistic. I think the commenters are missing the point. If illegal copies are out there, and Microsoft takes action to discourage patching, vulnerabilities will continue to exist out there. With the existence of these vulnerabilities, attackers will invest resources to attack these vulnerabilities. With these attacks out there, the Internet is a more dangerous place; for piracy Windows users as well as legitimate users. If patching would be easy and available to all without negative consequences, legitimate users would effectively be more safe…and isn’t that what we want?

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27 November 08 - 04:561st Pacific Rim Cyber Defense Competition Video Online

Back in April 2008, we had our 1st Pacific Rim Cyber Defense Competition. The event was organized by Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, her Center of Information Assurance & Cybersecurity, and an army of volunteers from different institutions (including Vic with myself.) The event was held on the Microsoft campus. The video of the competition was just published on the UW TV web site and nicely conveys the excitement of everybody at the event. (Its located here: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rid=27982&fid=5856). I am very proud to have been part of this events and looking forward to competitions in the future.

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18 November 08 - 08:09Recession: The Hacker's Paradise?

The financial crises: job loss & belt tightening. How will this affect the security field? I think not well!

Job losses might push folks down the path of cybercrime to pay their mortgage. Last week, we already seen that the financial crises also impacts tech companies. Sun Microsystems is going to cut 6,000 jobs (about 15-18 percent of their workforce.) I can imagine that the pressures in emerging markets will be even stronger and combined with lax cyber security laws overseas might pull more capable folks to the dark side.

At the same time, with everybody tightening their belts, security expenditure is some of these perceived unnecessities that are likely to be cut. With decrease in revenue, existing security companies are probably not going to making large investments. However, with more attackers out there and the existing attackers continuously improving their methods, the need for innovation and research in this area is greater than ever.

A dire picture … I hope that its just my pessimistic nature getting a hold of me and all will be fine…

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