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Sturm und Drang is associated with literature or music aiming to frighten the audience or imbue them with extremes of emotion”. The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report is a good example of sturm und drung marketing endemic in the information security industry. Vendors like Symantec sell fear, not security products, when they report on “Rises on Data …

I met with Maryellen Ariel Evans last week. She was in Israel on vacation and we had coffee on the Bat Yam boardwalk.   Maryellen is a serial entrepreneur; her latest venture is a security product for IBM Websphere MQ Series. She’s passionate about message queue security and I confess to buying into the vision. She …

Instead of getting some real work done this morning,  I started collating some thoughts on cyber security strategy. I guess it’s a lot easier to think about strategies than to fix buggy, risky code. For most people – there are two worlds, the cyberspace world and the physical, people-populated world. This dichotomy of two separate spaces …

I have written several times in the past here, here and here about the notion of taking cyber security on the offensive James Anderson, president of Professional Assurance LLC, says that there is no evidence that governments can protect large firms from cyber attacks. “National security authorities may not even acknowledge that their interests align …

I submit that a “no tickee, no washee” strategy might improve US Federal data security. An article published in the Federal Times states that Cyber attacks on Federal networks are up 40% from last year according to a report compiled by the OMB (Office of Management Budget) that  is based on numbers reported by the …

A pitch from Alex Whitson from SC TV for a Webinar on the LinkedIn Information Security Community piqued my attention with the following teaser: As you may have read recently, Cybercrime is now costing the UK $43.5 billion and around $1 trillion globally. Sponsored by security and compliance auditing vendor nCircle, the Webinar pitch didn’t cite any sources for the …

From the recent September/October 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs – William Lyn U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense writes about defending a new domain. The  long, eloquently phrased article, demonstrates that the US has fundamental flaws in it’s strategic thinking about fighting terror: Predicting cyberattacks is also proving difficult, especially since both state and nonstate actors …

User-Driven Design versus User-Centered design Alan Cooper, in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, draws a distinction between user-centered design and user-driven design. User-driven design is about collecting, prioritizing and implementing a system to the user requirements – we’ve all been seen software development projects where the requirements spiraled out of control and …

Last week, I got an email from the Internet Security Alliance (a trade association of companies like Raytheon and Northrup-Grumman that lobbies the government on cyber-security issues) with  Melissa Hathaway’s speech to the RSA Security conference. Besides all the touch-feely stuff -  I didn’t understand anything she is saying (and I’m a native English speaker..). …

An information security industry trade association (the ISAlliance – Internet Security Alliance) has been promoting the notion of a social contract between government and the private sector to improve cybersecurity. The ISAlliance includes representatives from Verizon, the National Association of Manufacturers, Nortel, the CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. According to the …