2009 | Branden R. Williams, Business Security Specialist

Revisiting Botnets for Profit standard

One thing about Botnets that scares me is the amount of idle computing power that is available to the owner of the Botnet. Suddenly, things that were once computationally infeasible with one machine become plausible or even possible with thousands of machines. It seems like most Botnets churn out SPAM right now to the tune of trillions per day. SPAM may be profitable–the fraud generated by the SPAM anyway–but in light of recent attacks, I wonder if there are more enterprising methods. If Botnet owners didn’t happen to have 200 PS3s laying around for a research project on SSL, they could develop a program to break a large task down into work units, and have each bot on the net ...

Will 2009 finally be the year for the insider threat? standard

Finance and Commerce Magazine published an article based on a survey revealing that most companies are unprepared for IT risks. *blink* What? You mean that with all the emphasis we put on it, and all the spending after some of the biggest breaches in history, we’re still not ready? This is not coming from the consultant who sees this stuff every day, this is coming from people working for these unprepared companies. With the economic situation as it is, will your own employees finally turn on you and take advantage of weak security controls in your network? This may be an unpopular position, but while the risk is definitely much higher for insider threat, it doesn’t seem to make the ...

Yearly Archives2009