I recently made a joke online relative to a major – and very respected, if geopolitically controversial – security company advertising its revised “Cyberthreat Real-Time Map”. As many members of the security community are aware, “threat maps” – referred to derisively as “pewpew” maps – are heavy on eye-candy but Read more…
My country, the United States, has experienced days of disruption and discord not witnessed since the late 1960s across multiple municipalities and regions. Adequately parsing and analyzing these events, their motivations, and what lasting impacts they may have will be the work for others. Instead, these chaotic events identify a Read more…
A new Twitter account appeared on 27 May 2020 for “NSA Cyber”, claiming the following: “Welcome to the intersection of threat intel, vulnerability analysis, and technical expertise! All to better equip you against malicious #cyber activity.” This was a very interesting development, and a separate effort from the US National Read more…
The steadily unfolding COVID-19 pandemic continues to unleash chaos and uncertainty in tandem with the disease’s impacts on human health. In just the past few days, total US new unemployment numbers for the past two weeks increased by over 10 million people, the price of crude oil continues to crash, Read more…
The obvious story as of this writing is the slow-motion catastrophe of the novel coronavirus referred to as COVID19. While the medical struggle around this pathogen is harrowing and full of heroes (and villians), another struggle has emerged more in line with the political and economic consequences of this disease. Read more…
At the time of this writing, times are weird and they are only going to get weirder. Since initial identification in China in late 2019, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 has swept through most of the world. From prompting the virtual lockdown of hundreds of millions for weeks in China through Read more…
The realm of computer security incidents and events draws increasing amounts of attention, not only from specialists and key decision-makers within the field but also “lay” (or non-technical) audiences. As a result of such increasing desire to know about and understand events in this field, researchers as well as journalists Read more…
Late 02 January 2020 (US Eastern time), the United States launched a strike outside Baghdad airport killing Qasem Soleimani, Iranian general and leader of the paramilitary Qods Force. General Soleimani was a despicable person responsible for promoting conflict and prolonging strife in various areas of the Middle East (among other Read more…
Throughout the roiling (and often tiring) discussion over the release and disclosure of “offensive security tools” (OST – previously addressed here), one disadvantage is constantly referenced to show the harm of publicly-available hacking tools and techniques. Put most simply, individuals cite how many organizations either have little or no security Read more…
As of this writing (late December 2019), an argument has continued through multiple social media formats on the value (or harm) created by “offensive security tools” (OSTs). As with most discussions taking place online, the discourse – rooted in an originating, absolutist blog post – has rapidly devolved into rival Read more…