I landed in Montreal on Sunday morning and immediately began sortingout pictures of my dogs (!) so I could put the finishing touches on myVirus Bulletin presentation. “Everything I Need to Know About Security I Learned from My Dog and a Country Western Song”is not your usual security paper title; in fact, the initial ideaevolved as a tongue-in-cheek “what if” mental exercise. However, themore I thought about it, and the more people I talked to about it, themore I realized the idea was worth pursuing to the next level.Somewhere along the way it changed to “two dogs”, I submitted theabstract to Virus Bulletin, it was accepted, and the paper began totake shape.

Virus Bulletin is undoubtedly one of the best...

Over the weekend, the Google blog was hacked and someone made a fake post stating Google was discontinuing their Click-To-Call service. A few weeks ago, Randy Charles Morin's blog was reportedly hacked using a new unknown and unpatched exploit by Jason Schramm known as the Host Overflow Application eXception.

Now,some people are putting one and one together and assuming Google's blogwas hacked via the unpatched Host Overflow Application eXception. Theproblem? The Host Overflow Application eXception appears to be a HOAX(follow the capital letters). Jason followed up with a post to his blogwith a supposed patch. The patch itself just would add a footer to...

As a security professional with over 10years of experience in both government and private industries, I amstill surprised at how little awareness the industry has about thetechnology, intent, and challenges surrounding intrusion prevention. Iintend to use this blog (and others moving forward) to lay out a basicunderstanding of what this thing called "IPS" is, from an analyst'spoint of view. Firstly, let's start with some simple explanations andlay to rest the history of the differences between the terms "IPS" and"IDS". I often hear these words used interchangeably in conversations,meetings, papers, and email threads; yet, there is a clear differencein these terms, based on the evolution of the technology.

In the early days of network traffic pattern patching, intrusiondetection software (IDS) was used to match a set of specified stringswithin a network stream and alert and/or log the event for the user.This information was used by system administrators to...

Markus Jakobsson is a computer science professor at Indiana University and has done some excellent work on understanding phishing attacks. I’ve blogged about some of Markus’ research in the past and I thought I’d share some information about some recent work of his that focuses on the question: What causes people to fall for phishing attacks?

Markus and his group completed a study at Indiana University where the subjects were shown various types of stimuli, such as Web pages and emails. Some of these were legitimate and others were based on phishing attacks. The subject group was asked to rate (on a scale of one to five) how authentic the stimulus was. If a participant marked a score of one, it was thought that the stimulus was taken from a phishing attack. A score of five meant that it appeared legitimate.

To make...