While I was waiting for the Pulitzer Committee to call me to announce the nomination of “An Ode to Mike And Ikes” for an award (or at least an honorable mention), I went over to peruse the list of recent data breaches over at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. It's grim.  We're averaging an incident a day in June, with no signs of easing up.  My PII (personally identifiable information) was exposed at least 4 times in the last 18 months. We've lost this one, folks.  The data is gone, and we can't get it back.  As I've written previously, you can't put this genie...

Nobody would believe that an ode to Mike and Ikes has been percolating in the back of my mind for years.  I believe only my ex-wife knew the depth of my Mike and Ike problem, which is exceeded only by my love for the Fat Tire.  It's a thing.  I'm in therapy.  My therapist thinks we'll have time to address this problem around the 2012 timeframe.  Fingers crossed! Anyway, as I lay on my hotel room bed in Oklahoma City, contentedly consuming about 7 serving's worth of Mike and Ikes (I'm on vacation, get off me), I decided to fire up the laptop and see if...

One of the more interesting talks given at last week's CSI NetSec in Arizona was conducted by CSI editorial director Robert Richardson.  He gave us a preview of next month's release of the annual cybercrime survey conducted jointly by the FBI and CSI. The survey shows a continued decline in the money lost by companies due to cybercrime.  Compared to 2005, losses are down 18%, and down 68% compared to 2004.  This metric has been declining for 4 straight years actually. So.  Does that mean we're winning?  Does that mean that all the money we're spending on security is actually bearing fruit? Well,...

Fyodor recently announced an update to what was previously called “Top 75 Network Security Tools”.  The new list, compiled from votes cast on the nmap-hackers mailing list, has grown to 100 tools, including recent newcomer MetaSploit, which did not exist at the time the previous list was produced.  You can see the new Top 100 Network Security Tools here.  Fyodor does not permit votes for his legendary tool Nmap, since the poll is conducted on an Nmap-focused mailing list, and Nmap would certainly take the top spot (and rightfully so). In a somewhat related note, another legendary security tool, Ethereal, has...

My oldest Seattle-based friends, Bill and Jean, I've known for like 12 years or something.  I met them when I took a job at now-defunct DEC working on porting Windows NT to The Coolest Processor On The Planet (aka “The Most Horribly Marketed Processor On The Planet”). DEC is long gone now, and sadly, so is the processor, but my friendship with Bill and Jean survived somehow and they are still on my best friends short list.  Jean went from being a software developer to lawyer, and Bill is now running a very successful online pet supply store. The fact that we're...