...is that they are NOT public.

Do you, dear public, pay for those schools?
You do… you pay exactly «for» but not «to». The schools actually receive money from the govt, NOT from you. And you have no control over the money distribution. When the money are given to the schools they don't bear your scent anymore — these are «govt's money» at the moment. The govt decides who takes the money, and for these money, a school has to appease the govt, NOT you. These «public» schools are indeed the govt's schools.

Americans seem to forget the old russian proverb:

Who dines the girl, he dances her.

— I have all three web browsers installed and I actively use all of them.
— WHY?! you are not a web-developer you do not need all of them.
— I need, I really do: when the antivirus blocks my Chrome, I have to use FF, and when it blocks FF, then I have to launch Opera.

Dear mr. Thunderf00t, recently you have published a series of videos about melting gold in strange contraptions (or one might say «stupid setups»). This series culminated in the episode called «Will Burning Diamond Melt Gold?». I quote:

Gold melts at 1064 C, Diamond burns at 2700 C — this should be enough to melt gold, will a diamond melt gold?

Then you put a ~0.25g diamond on a 1g golden coin, ignite the diamond in the pure oxygen atmosphere and wait until the diamond burns a hole in the coin. The diamond burned happily to ashes and the coin remained intact.

This «failure» created confusion among yourself and your audience:

How so?! It burnt so HOOOOOOOT! and melted nothing...

Spoiler alert: ENERGY TRANSFER.

Given that few days before you successfully melted a bead of gold that was put in a cavity inside a burning graphite block (What a surprise that this contraption worked!), your confusion is legitimately cringeworthy.

FUCKING SHAME!!!

I want you to understand the magnitude of this shame. Mr. Thunderf00t is not only an official scientist like many imbeciles are, he has a real discovery in his portfolio which is an achievement that the Steven Hawking's portfolio lacks of. Mr. Thunderf00t is a real scientist — not a cosmologist or something — he knows his science and he is capable of conducting meaningful experiments. A man of this qualification was driven astray by the notion of temperature. So much astray, that laymen of ancient Egypt would laugh at his «gold melting» contraptions being so obviously against even the most basic common sense understanding of thermodynamics available for humans since 10 000 years ago… 20 000? Once again, pay attention, a credible scientist forgets to calculate the energy balance of his experiment before burning real diamonds.

I therefore propose to remove the notion of temperature from the middle school physics curriculum, for it is overwhelmingly confusing and marginally useful.

P.S.
make a funny experiment:
calculate «the temperature» of a 10 GEv proton, say X (note the amount of zeroes in the result)
and then ask a patented physicist: will a proton heated up to X Celcius deg melt a hole in a thin golden foil.

A few days ago I twitted this picture:


with a comment: guess what's wrong with this picture (hint: EVERYTHING).

Not everyone got the joke, so I think it deserves an explanation (sorry).


At a first glance it makes some sense and reflects quite common real world situation: first you start with some «one size fits all» «common sense» security (antivirus, firewall, vulnerability scanner, whatever). Then you get requirements (mostly compliance driven), then you do risk analysis and then voila, you get really good and start talking business objectives. Right?

Wrong.

It is a maturity level model. Which means a each level is a foundation for the next one and cannot be skipped. Does it work this way? No.

Actually you do some business driven decisions all the time from the very beginning. It is not a result, it is a foundation. You may do it an inefficient way, but you still do. With risk analysis. It may be ad hoc, again, depending on the size of your business and your insight into how things work, but from some mid-sized level you simply cannot stick to «checkbox mentality», you need to prioritize. Then you come with checklists and compliance requirements as part of your business risks.

The picture is all upside-down and plain wrong. I understand they need to sell RSA Archer at some point there and that's why they see it this way, but it does not constitute an excuse for inverting reality.

Gatrner sent me an ad of a quite disturbing report ( www.gartner.com/imagesrv/media-products/pdf/fortinet/fortinet-1-3315BQ3.pdf ) which advocates using «one firewall brand» to reduce complexity.

Sorry, guys, one brand of WHAT?

There is no such thing as «general purpose firewall» that fits all. It is a mythical device (and this myth was supported by Gartner for years).
What you call «firewall» is actually one of three (or more) things:

1) A border/datacenter segmenation device. Think high throughput, ASICs, fault tolerance and basic IPS capabilities.
2) An «office» firewall. Think moderate throughput, egress filtering, in-depth protocol inspection, IAM integration and logging capabilities
3) WAF. Enough said, WAF is completely different beast, having almost nothing in common with any of those.

Ah, and a VPN server. It is not a firewall (though it should have basic firewall capabilities). Not falls into any of those categories.

Dear Gartner, have you ever tried to market a pipe-wrench-hair-dryer? You should, you have a talent for that.

The trouble of all serious social troubles is that they do not allow for a prolix bloated discussion that normal people value so much. Muslims want us dead. Hitlary committed a high treason. Douchebank is a fraud. Credit cards are not secure. 2+2==4 — there is no room for a discussion!!! Here are some prooflinks, case closed, the public is bored and ignores the issue in question.

On the other hand, the lack of evidence, the absence of solid research method, the absurdity of the subject — open the gates for creativity and rhetoric and demagoguery and entertainment of all sorts. One may write volumes on Bigfoot, UFO, ghosts, gods, multiculturalism, oppression, patriarchy, microaggression. And I assure you those volumes will sell magnificently — people love talking much more than thinking.

I said it earlier this century, "state-sponsored malware/spyware developers ARE de facto blackhats".

There is no «legitimate» third side to receive zero days. Either you give a priority to your software vendor (and contribute to the defensive side) or you do not and contribute to the bad guys. Yes, bad.

Not that I blame vulnerability researchers for being immoral. I am a free market advocate: if a software vendor is not willing to pay a competitive price for vulnerability information, it certainly deserves the consequences. I just hate hypocrites that fail to admit the obvious fact that they are no different to blackhats — because «we sell to government and law enforcement only» clause makes no real difference.

But, wait!

They ARE different.

The ideal black market for zero day exploits is free and open for anyone, including software vendors searching for the exploits in their software. You, as a seller, do not want to sell your exploit to the vendor of the vulnerable software, because you are interested in the exploit's longevity. But on the black market there is no way for you to know if a buyer works for the vendor (directly or indirectly).

Contrary to that, the real market (thoroughly regulated by the government) completely rigs the game to the detriment of the software vendors. First, a software vendor is explicitly banned from participation (by this «we sell only to law enforcement»), no legitimate purchases for a vendor, tough luck. Second, it is open for trusted brokers who make huge profits from the fact they got government approvals (see HBGary leak to find out how hard some people try to set a foot there with quite limited success).

Needless to say, newly proposed so-called «cyber arms regulations» only worsen the situation, making free black market for zero day exploits illegal in favor of government-approved brokers.

So they are not «just» blackhats. They are the most vicious breed. They found a perfect exploit for the government. They use regulations to defeat their victims.

There is a simple remedy to many information security woes about smartphones.

And it is simple. And extremely unpopular. Vendors, operators definitely won't like it.

Just it: turn a smartphone to a computer. No, not like now. Really.

A computer does not run «firmware» bundled by «vendor» and «certified to use». It runs operating system, supplementary components like libraries and device drivers, and applications, both system and users'.

And there are updates. When there is a bug, an update is issued, not by the computer vendor, but by the OS or other software vendor. While «firmware» which FCC et al should care of is the tiny thing that runs inside broadband module you user probably never think of at all.

I've seen people arguing that it would break things. Due to device fragmentation people will get broken updates, brick their phones and overload repair centers. Come on. Never seen bundled OTA firmware update doing that? It is actually safer if the update is going to be granular and won't touch things it does not need to.

But you won't ever seen unfixed remote code execution bug to stay for years or even forever if your phone vendor decides that it no longer necessary to support this model.

I want my smartphone to be a real computer. With OS, applications, and no unremovable bloatware that is burned in by the vendor or (worse) MNO. Do you?

UPDATE: and surely initiatives like this will get middle finger as they deserve and no questions could be raised. You may run anything you want on your COMPUTER.

(it is a copy of my old LinkedIn blog post, I saved it here because Linkedin sucks big time as a blog platform)

The full story is here:
pastebin.com/raw/0SNSvyjJ
and it is worth reading for all InfoSec professionals and amateurs: perfect, outstanding example of an «old school» hack described step by step.

Also it provides us a classic example of another issue often overlook, or rather intentionally ignored: starting from certain (rather small) organization size and complexity, a sophisticated attacker WILL compromise your Active Directory. There is no «if» in this sentence: it is inevitable. I've seen many pen tests and many advanced attacks by malicious entities — ALL, I mean it, ALL of them ended like that.

That leads us to obvious, yet controversial conclusion: for certain valuable resources it is better to keep them OFF the domain. This means cutting away the whole branch of an attack graph: no SSO, no access from domain-joined admin workstations, no access recovery via domain-based email, no backups on AD-enabled storage, whatever. Which rises some completely different issues, but that's it.

Can you manage this? Can you live with this?

More than 90 percent of corporate executives said they cannot read a cybersecurity report and are not prepared to handle a major attack, according to a new survey.

More distressing is that 40 percent of executives said they don't feel responsible for the repercussions of hackings, said Dave Damato, chief security officer at Tanium, which commissioned the survey with the Nasdaq.

Seriously. They are «not responsible»! Who is, then? Those guys are getting paid enormous amount of money for being MANAGERS. Manager is a person who is responsible — for solving problems he/she might not truly comprehend as well, but that's ok. I do not expect them to really know a thing or two about IT or security. An executive should understand business risks, that's enough. If there is a business risk that an executive does not understand and is not willing to, he/she should consider getting another job, probably McDonalds could offer them an intern position?

Those people say they are utterly incompetent — and they say it in public and get away with that. And everyone thinks it is ok.