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…
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…
I recently watched a documentary about the Supermarine Spitfire – Spitfire: The Plane that Saved the World – one of the iconic airframes not only of the Second World War, but of military aviation from its start to the present. In addition to the documentary’s interviews with surviving Spitfire pilots Read more…
Note: This post will refer and link to allegedly classified programs leaked by Edward Snowden, and potentially others, in the past several years. If accessing this article from certain networks, readers are strongly advised to preview links before following them due to the possibility that such an action may be Read more…
One issue that came from my recent CYBERWARCON talk was an item of focus (or for others, limitation) when approaching the idea of what a “critical infrastructure attack” actually means. While I faced some (really good, topical) questions on my definition of “critical infrastructure”, a more public debate ensued over Read more…
Note: This blog post was significantly revised on 17 November 2019 after initial release on 12 November 2019. The primary alteration is within the second paragraph, noting that the initial event that inspired this blog post – an exchange between a security researcher/responder and a journalist – was much more Read more…