Category Archives: Economics

Better Products Bootstrap

Gunnnar notes the formation of a software vendor security best practices consortium and asks:
Why not bootstrap a Fortune 500 Secure Coding Initiative to drive better products, services and share best practices in the software security space?

— Secure Coding Advocacy Group, Gunnar Peterson, 1 Raindrop, 23 October 2007

Yes, if the customers demanded it, that might make some difference, and the vendors do pay the most attention to the biggest customers. Of course the biggest customer is the U.S. government, and they seem more interested in CYA than in actual security. And I’m a bit jaded on “best practices” due to reading Black Swans. But regardless of the specific form of better such a group demanded, demanding better security might make some difference.

Maybe they could also demand risk management, which would including having watchers watching ipsos custodes. Not just in the circular never-ending hamster wheel of death style, but for actual improvemment.

-jsq

Chinese Firewall Viewed as Vacuum

greatwall.jpg In addition to the Chinese national firewall being used as a Panopticon that encourages self-censorship, other uses are now emerging:
Further to our earlier story on visitors to Google Blogsearch being redirected to Baidu in China, new reports have surfaced that would indicate that China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu.

— Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites, by Duncan Riley, TechCrunch, 18 October 2007

Sort of an involuntary proxy, going somewhere other than where you thought.

Note the distinction between censorship and this new action:

…the redirect to Baidu would indicate an economic motive; if the Chinese Government were serious about censorship alone we would have reports of page not found/ blocked messages, not redirects to Baidu. The Chinese Government is clearly using its censorship regime to the economic benefit of a Chinese owned (but NASDAQ listed) company.
And also remember that there are U.S. government sponsored web panopticon projects. Research so far, or so far as we know.

-jsq

PS: Seen on Dancho Danchev‘s blog.

Silver Bullet Security Considered Harmful

Silver_Bullet.jpg In the comment discussion about Linus’s schedulers vs. security polemic, Iang mentioned a paper he’s writing:
We hypothesize that security is a good with insufficient information, and reject the assumption that security fits in the market for goods with asymmetric information. Security can be viewed as in a market where neither buyer nor seller has sufficient information to be able to make a rational buying decision. These characteristics lead to the arisal of a market in silver bullets as participants herd in search of best practices, a common set of goods that arises more to reduce the costs of externalities rather than achieve benefits in security itself.

— The Market for Silver Bullets, by Ian Grigg, Systemics, Inc. $Revision: 1.27 $ $Date: 2005/11/05 18:25:54 $

Evidently security needs to find another precious metal for its bullets, given that the Storm Botnet is still out there after months, phishing becomes more expensive all the time, spam has killed electronic mail for a whole generation of users, and the best the monoculture OS vendor can come up with is a new release that attempts to push responsibility for all its bugs and design flaws back on the user.

What to do? Continue reading →

What It Will Take to Win

gp.jpg IT and Internet security people and companies act mostly as an aftermarket. Meanwhile, the black hats are a well-integrated economy of coders, bot herders, and entrepeneurs. This is what it will take for the white hats to win:
It can seem overwhelming for security people who are typically housed in a separate organization, to begin to engage with software developers and architects to implement secure coding practices in an enterprise. While the security team may know that there are security vulnerabilities in the systems, they have to be able to articulate the specific issues and communicate some ideas on resolutions. This can be a daunting task especially if the security team does not have a prior workign relationship with the development staff, and understand their environment.

…

The task seems daunting also because there are so many developers compared to security people. I am here to tell you though that you don’t have to win over every last developer to make some major improvements. In my experience a small percentage of developers write the majority of code that actually goes live. The lead developers (who may be buried deep in the org charts) are the ones you need to engage, in many cases they really don’t want to write insecure code, they just lack the knowledge of how to build better. Once you have a relationship (i.e. that you are not just there to audit and report on them, but are there to help *build* more secure code) it is surprisingly easy to get security improvements into a system, especially if the design is well thought and clearly articulated. You don’t have get the proverbial stardotstar, each and every developer on board to make positive improvements, it can be incremental. See some more specific ideas on phasing security in the SD! LC here. In meantime, with security budgets increasing 20% a year, use some of that money to take your top developers out to lunch.

— Secure Coding – Getting Buy In, Gunnar Peterson, 1Raindrop, 17 Sep 2007

The start of what it will take.

-jsq

Online Crime Pays

dollarsign.jpg Why Internet security professionals are losing:

Today, few malware developers use their own code. They write it for the same reason commercial software developers do: to sell it for a healthy profit. If you’ve ever bought anything online, buying from them may be disconcertingly familiar. If you want to break into a computer or steal credit card numbers, you can buy the necessary software online, just like almost anything else. More than that, you can find user friendly, point-and-click attack applications that have been pre-tested and reviewed by experts, and read through customer feedback before making your purchase.

You might even be able to buy technical support or get a money back guarantee. Some developers offer their malware through a software-as-a-service model. If you prefer an even more hands-off approach, you can simply buy pre-screened credit card numbers and identity information itself, or sign a services agreement with someone who will do the dirty work for you. As in many other industries, money has given rise to professionalism.

Online crime and malware development has become a full-blown and extremely profitable commercial enterprise that in many ways mirrors the legitimate software market. "We’re in a world where these guys might as well just incorporate," says David Parry, Trend Micro’s Global Director of Security Education. "There’s certainly more money in the cybercrime market than the antivirus market. The internet security industry is a drop in the bucket; we’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars."

— Computer crime is slicker than you think, By David Raikow, CRN, 16 August 2007 08:04AM

Makes you wonder how long until traditional security companies get bought out by newly-IPOed offshore malware corps.

-jsq

Wildfire Myopia

smoke.gif It looks like technological security isn’t the only kind disorganized in government. The latest GAO report about wildfires seems like more smoke than fire:

This testimony summarizes several key actions that federal agencies need to complete or take to strengthen their management of the wildland fire program, including the need to (1) develop a long-term, cohesive strategy to reduce fuels and address wildland fire problems and (2) improve the management of their efforts to contain the costs of preparing for and responding to wildland fires.

…

For cost-containment efforts to be effective, the agencies need to integrate cost-containment goals with the other goals of the wildland fire program–such as protecting life, resources, and property–and to recognize that trade-offs will be needed to meet desired goals within the context of fiscal constraints.

— Wildland Fire Management: A Cohesive Strategy and Clear Cost-Containment Goals Are Needed for Federal Agencies to Manage Wildland Fire Activities Effectively, GAO-07-1017T, U.S. General Accounting Office, June 19, 2007

How about a strategy for integrating wildfire planning into subdivision planning, or cost allocations from homeowner wildfire insurance?

Continue reading →

Salvage Logging


AP Photo/Don Ryan, FILE

While the federal government tries to dump the costs of wildfires onto local governments, a new study indicates that federal policies have been making things worse:

"It was the conventional wisdom that salvage logging and planting could reduce the risk of high-severity fires," said Jonathan R. Thompson, a doctoral candidate in forest science at Oregon State, who was lead author of the study appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our data suggest otherwise."

They suggested that the large stands of closely packed young trees created by replanting are a much more volatile source of fuel for decades to come than the large dead trees that are cut down and hauled away in salvage logging operations.

—Scientists find logging dead trees after wildfire and replanting makes next year’s fire worse, by Jeff Barnard, AP, 11 June 2007

Salvage logging is removing dead trees after a fire. It turns out that doesn’t reduce the risk of fire, and close-packed new-planted trees increase that risk.

Continue reading →

Long Tail Field

longtailfield.gif Why long tail graphs are usually shown on a log scale:

Unfortunately, the illustration works only as a large graph, because graphed out on small paper gives us only two discernable lines, one on each axis.

— A practical model for analyzing long tails, by Kalevi Kilkki First Monday, volume 12, number 5 (May 2007)

The sports field graph is a clever way of showing how the fat head of a long tail distribution can be extremely higher than the long tail; this is normally not so clear on log scale graphs.

Continue reading →