A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This week was mostly about the AusCERT information security conference on the Gold Coast, although a few things relating to the previous week dribbled through.
Podcasts
- Patch Monday episode 88, “Social business + cloud != revolution”, based on material recorded at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference the previous week.
Articles
What a lot of articles we have this week! I was covering AusCERT as part of the ZDNet Australia team, and the Technology Spectator article was actually written the week before. There’ll be more AusCERT articles next week.
- AusCERT 2011: Firms ignore ID theft risk, for ZDNet Australia, which is based on some of Bennett Arron’s comments during the conference’s opening keynote.
- AusCERT 2011: Son of Stuxnet within a year: expert, ZDNet Australia. The source code for Stuxnet is out there. Security analyst Eric Byres reckons that’ll show everyone how to make sophisticated malware, and the “Russian business network” will be first off the rank.
- Privacy is a commodity, for Technology Spectator, in which I bite the hand that feeds me by criticising the comment they use.
- AusCERT 2011: Black hats and whitegoods, for ZDNet Australia. We’re creating the Internet of Things by turning everything into a network device. But when was the last time you heard an appliance manufacturer talking about network security? CBS Interactive’s Brian Haverty came up with the OARSUM headline.
- AusCERT 2011: Bank theft goes truly mobile, for ZDNet Australia.
- AusCERT 2011: Silent victims thwart cybercops: Qld Police, for ZDNet Australia.
- Qld cops denounce ‘ethical hacking’, for ZDNet Australia. This headline is a bit of a misdirection. Ethical hacking is generally when the target has given permission, such as when someone is hired to do penetration testing. The kind of hacking games at black hat conferences, which is what Detective Superintendent Brian Hay was talking about, probably don’t fit into this category.
Media Appearances
- I was asked to do a bit of trickery before Bennett Arron’s keynote at AusCERT. It didn’t go quite as planned. When Munir Kotadia produced the Day 1 Highlights video, he made sure that no-one forgot.
Corporate Largesse
- I travelled to the Gold Coast for the AusCERT Conference on information security. My air fares, accommodation and breakfast were covered by CBS Interactive, ZDNet Australia’s parent company, as is normal for freelancers so that doesn’t count as largesse. AusCERT provided free conference entry, as is normal for any media attending, and that included meals and drinks at the social events. In the goodie bag was: webroot Personal Security and Mobile Security for Android from, erm, webroot; notebooks from webroot and Juniper Networks; PostIt-style thingies from Symantec; pens from RSM Bird Cameron, Citrix, Netgear and M86 Security; a Rubik’s Cube from WatchGuard; 3D glasses from SecurityLab; a yoyo from McAfee; and, via a voucher, an AusCERT conference t-shirt. I’ll have more to say about this later. I was also given a t-shirt by Sophos and a stubbie holder from Splunk.
Elsewhere
Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.
[Photo: Sunrise over the Pacific, Surfer’s Paradise, taken from my room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in 17 May. I didn’t really bother trying to take a good photo, it’s just a snapshot from my phone. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.]
[Update 3 May 2013: Edited to fix broken link to Patch Monday podcast.]
I seem to be becoming a go-to person for commentary on hacking and information security stories. On Thursday I did a spot on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program, covering the basics of just how bad things are getting.
