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Recently the IT news media has been abuzz with stories about loosely-organized hacker groups, their declaration of war against government and banking companies and their delegation of attacks to more secret groups. While the security industry is still analyzing the implications of these attacks, we deemed it wise to send a few security suggestions to our clients. But first, we'd like to clarify the threat. The threat stems from the fact that this activity is being tolerated and, in some cases, actively encouraged by groups of high-profile hackers and some segments of the media.

I am involved in a great many groups that are (ostensibly) focused on technology or security to some extent.  One somewhat disturbing trend that I’ve noticed in recent months is people complaining about their significant others and how they constantly put their shared system at risk through Facebook.

My marketing guy says if my posts are going to rank higher on search engines, they have to be timely and call out keywords in bold and italics(and use lots of hyperlinks throughout)so today you get a post about OPERATION NIGHT DRAGON (insert ominous sound effect here).

Well, it's that time of year again. I'm not talking about "vacation's over and now we have to actually work" or the "let's all resolve to exercise until Feb 1". I'm talking about the annual tradition of making security predictions for the coming year. It seems that every year more companies use this time to look for problems in the upcoming year.

The world is abuzz today with the news of Gawker's passwords being leaked. Rest assured, this will not be yet another "the sky is falling" post or yet another hasty analysis of what happened. If you want a good overview, please read Daniel Kennedy's excellent post over on Forbes.com. If you want to know what it means to the security community, todb's Metasploit post is good.

Protecting Yourself from Malware

The question often comes up: Should we allow our employees to engage in social networking? The debate has raged for years, and surprisingly, it is still not settled. In general, the discussion tends to fall down four possible paths:

1) Social media reduces productivity
2) There are a lot of threats that comes from social media
3) Social media is a new technology and therefore is scary
4) Employees don't really need social media anyway

In yesterday's world, you could get a computer virus and then launch a cleanup tool. Then, as it removed the infection, you were free to sit and ponder the lovely flying cars that we'd have in the future. Today, you could get a computer virus and never notice, then when you check your bank balance online, all your money could be transferred overseas while you ponder the fact we still don't have our flying cars.