May 28, 2009 - Volume 4, #25

Good Morning:
So I'm on a flight a couple of weeks ago, and the guy next to me starts coughing. No, not a "cough cough." It was like he was hacking up a friggin' lung. Thankfully there was the air sickness bag to catch the nastiness. Normally, I don't think twice about that, besides to check my sleeves and make sure nothing escaped the dude's tissues. But with the Swine Flu going around, of course, that's the first thought I have.

So I start calculating the numbers. There have been a couple of hundred cases of the flu in the States. That makes the chance that I'd be sitting next to a carrier roughly... .0000001%. Some days I'm thankful for the mathematician in my that runs numbers and probabilities and uses those rationalizations to continue to function.

Now that threat is averted, I bury myself in another 50 games of Flood-It, perhaps one of the most addictive iPhone games. I really need to stop downloading these games. I probably should be writing TDI posts instead, but what fun is that?

Right when I'm lulled into a sense of Coke Zero complacency, the guy in front of me starts coughing that same cough from the guy next to me. Could it be? Could it be spreading that quickly? Then I feel that little tickle in my throat. Oh crap, I have it too?

Not even the mathematician can help now. I break out Word and start working on my will. I figure I'll stop by the hospital on the way home and see how bad the damage is. I play this game for another 15 minutes. Then I realize, all of this stuff is in my head. So I think about being in the wilderness and taking deep breaths. The air is clean and crisp. There are no bubonic plague carriers in breathing distance. It's all good.

Until the guy behind me goes into a coughing rage... Basically, I'm screwed. Have a great day.

Photo: "ZOMG!!! Swine Flu!!!!" originally uploaded by Amanda-Ruth
Technorati: Information Security, CSO, Security Mike, Internet Security

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Incite 4 U

I know. I suck. The best laid plans seem to get derailed by, well... life. Between sales meetings, day job responsibilities, and all the other crap that piles up on my plate, TDI has taken it in the shorts. So next week I'm going to recalibrate a bit and try to take a different perspective on it. I appreciate your patience.

1. You can't boil the ocean - Though the Incite lawyers are hard at work on the cease and desist order for Rich to stop using the term "Pragmatic" anything, he makes a really good point in discussing the Pragmatic Data Security Cycle. Most things security fail miserably when we try to cover everything. There is just too much, so part of success is knowing where and how to bound all of these key initiatives. Hopefully Rich (and Adrian) will be fleshing out how to actually do this in subsequent research because it's like learning Mandarin for lots of folks. We know we should do it, but it's really hard.
2. SMARTS gets smart about ConfigureSoft - The deals keep coming fast and furious. Yesterday, EMC announced the acquisition of ConfigureSoft for a undisclosed sum, though I'd be surprised if it was more than 2.5-3x trailing revenues. Most interesting to me is that it was EMC's Resource Management Group (which is built around the SMARTS system management technology) that did the deal, not RSA. Configuration management is more about operations than security - always has been. So having the EMC mother ship drive this deal is an indication of that.
3. Finding the next gig - Great post on the Security Catalyst site by Bill Pennington about how to stand out from the crowd during a job search. Getting an audience is the first step and Bill outlines the way he likes to be approached, which is great advice and probably very similar to many hiring managers out there. I very rarely use headhunters because I don't have to. I usually know the folks I like for a position, and if not, then the interesting one's tend to figure out how to find me. Though this is only the front end of the battle, and there is also some good pointers about how to research a company you are interviewing with. If you don't have a crisp idea on how you are going to help, forget it.
4. The future's so bright, you don't need shades - Is there a longer term future for the CISO? Or does the position go the way of the dodo bird? Boaz wonders how many larger organizations really need one? I'd posit that big companies NEED a CISO, but the CISO doesn't need to have an organization. I still believe someone needs to be the "conscience" of the organization, to evangelize and persuade the operational teams and business units that security is important. This person needs to own the "program" and set the standards for what is acceptable and what isn't. What they don't need is an empire. There is no reason that firewall changes shouldn't be owned by the network team, and database security shouldn't be owned by the data center team (or DBA team if you have one of those).
5. Security budgets take a hit? No kidding... - I think the security industry for the most part has a bad case of happy ears. For the past few months (even though I haven't been writing, I've been reading), a lot of folks continue to maintain that budgets will be stable, maybe even increasing a bit. Sorry, that's a load of crap and I've been saying that for a while. Everything is being scrutinized by big companies, and that includes security. The Deloitte folks did a survey finally proving that. It was restricted to media, telecom and tech companies, but I'd be willing to be it's pretty consistent across the other verticals as well (besides maybe the Fed space). I do think security will recover first, when things start really getting better - but to think there would be no budget impact of the financial implosion and recession is just silly.
6. Heartland regains PCI Compliance - Hurray for Heartland, who is once again PCI compliant. Until they aren't. To these guys credit, they acted decisively and addressed the shorter term issues that allowed the data breach. But to be clear, this doesn't mean they are secure. It just means they have done the bare minimum, until the Standards Council decides to either re-write the rules or get into the time machine and change things. It's easy to always be right when you have a time machine at your disposal.