Pop quiz: Can you rattle off the number of your favorite credit card? Extra credit: What about the customer identification number on the back of the same card? That second three- or four-digit code has been known to trip up even the greatest credit card connoisseurs on occasion, but that’s sort of the point, as it’s…
“One of the nifty and powerful tools in our litigation support tool belt is “regular expressions.” We use regular expressions to match patterns of data that we need to search for and then perhaps manipulate in some way. A few examples of easy-to-recognize “data patterns” are social security numbers (999-99-9999) and phone numbers (999-999-9999). Both…
“I want to know what breaches like this mean to me. Me personally. Me professionally. I’ve been using Yahoo since 1999. And AOL before that. And Prodigy before that. And the Europa BBS service from my Commodore64 in 1988 before that. That’s a long history on the Internet and its predecessors. What should I do…
The growing supply of IoT malware is creating a tipping point in the denial-of-service domain that’s giving relatively unsophisticated actors capabilities that were once reserved only for the most elite of attackers. And that, in turn, represents a threat to the Internet as we know it. “The biggest threats as far as I’m concerned in…
An unnamed US intelligence official was quoted by NBC News as calling the leak of contractor Ian Mellul’s e-mails “the most damaging compromise of the security of the president of the United States that I’ve seen in decades”—one caused by the use of an outside personal e-mail account for government business. The e-mails included full…
In my experience, and in the experience of many others as well, unfocused attempts at visualization over raw, unreduced data produce visualizations that are not particularly useful for security operations. Visualization does have tremendous potential to bring value to security operations when leveraged properly. Performing data reduction by posing specific, targeted, incisive queries into the…