Save a few

Just a reminder; Dutch lower gov’t agencies struggling with storage formats … (Here, in Dutch, but Alphabet Translate (heh that still doesn’t ring well!) may help)

There may be hope for (!) privacy. And:
DSCN1053
[Nice, functional (as / where it is), and certainly will look Old before you know it; La Défense]

Pebnickanic

Hey why are so many using PICNIC instead of the age-old PEBKAC ..? No, I’m not complaining ‘because’ old, nor on the ‘ …, got the T-shirt’ route. Just would want to know. Is it that the latter is too difficult to remember the meaning of ..? If so: Sad for its Shallows calibre. If otherwise: Please advise.

Well then…:
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[Trismegistus’ view on things. Obvious where.]

Human / Not

Of course Cerf is right. But also … is the opposite side; human error would be harmless (save the Almost part) when vulnerabilities wouldn’t be attacked. As long as they exist, they will. And human error will exist; that’s just the way our genes, and memes, and all of Nature, play it out. The instability of Nature (here and here!) means evolution happens, works. On the Changing-environment- and on the trial-through-error sides.

Hence, you’re still where you started. Still pursuing max fault-freedom but sure to not achieve it. I.e., in danger — the Condition Humaine since the dawn of Time (on that in a PhD thesis, some other time) and dismissing Hegelian progress fantasies, forever.

Well then, to leave in a positive tone:
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[No time ?? for R&R; outside Siena]

Overwhelmed by ‘friendly’ engineers

The rage seems to be with chat bots, lately. Haven’t met any, but that may only be me — not being interesting enough to be overwhelmed by their calls.
Which will happen, in particular to those in society that have less than perfect resistance against the various modes of telesales and other forms of social engineering (for phishing and other nefarious purposes) already. Including all sorts of otherwise-possibly-bright-and-genius-intelligent-but (??)-having-washed-up-in-InfoSec-for-lack-of-genuine-societal-intelligence types like us. But these being the ones of all stripes that ‘we’ need to protect, rather than the ones apparently already so heavily loaded that they can spare the dime for development of such hyper-scaling ultra-travelling foot-in-the-door salesmen. Is this the end stage, where none have a clue as to which precious little interaction is still actually human-to-human, and the rest may be discarded ..?

As for the latter … It raises the question of Why, in communications as a human endeavor… Quite a thought.

But for the time being, you’re hosed, anti-phishing-through-social-engineeringwise.

Just sayin’. Plus:
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[Retreat, a.k.a. Run to the hills / Run for your life; but meant positively! Monte Olivieto Maggiore near Siena]

Last night a … saved me (updated)

Just a repost, as due to some obvious glitch, the below didn’t get the chart storming air play it deserves (hence, it must’ve been a glitch).
[To the music of Indeep — somewhat outdated lyrics but what style …]

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Cause I was sittin’ there screen of death’d bored to death
And in just one breath he chatted said

You gotta reboot get up
You gotta reload get on
You gotta restore get down girl
You know you drive me #DIV/0! crazy baby
You’ve got me turning to another OS man
Called you on the VOIP phone

No one’s pinging back home
Baby why ya leave me all >dev/null alone
And if it wasn’t for the endless GitHub surfing music
I don’t know what I’d do

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life from a broken pipe heart
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life with a patch song

You know I hopped into my notepad car
Didn’t need to leave the coffee shop get very far no
Because I had you on my stash of data-breached X-rated pics mind
Why only give you a ticket and secretly close it immediately be so unkind?

You’ve got your hapless users women all around
All around this AD town, boy
But I was trapped in the SLA from hell love with you
And I didn’t know what to do
But when I turned on my RTFManual radio
I found out all I needed to key in know
Run the diagnostics kit Check it out

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life from a broken pipe heart
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life with a patch song

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life from a broken pipe heart
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life with a patch song

Hey listen up to your local information risk / security management professional
You better hear what he’s got to type so fast you can’t keep track say
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite mix
And if your crappy ol’ XP machine man gives you trouble
Just you step away from the keyboard move out on the double
And you don’t let it trouble your ‘brain’ brain
Cause away goes PEBKAC troubles
Down the drain
I said away goes PEBKAC troubles
Down the drain

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite mix
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite mix

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC life
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite mix
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite mix

Quite an improvement indeedp … And leaving you with, of course a new pic:

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[Old and new in one pic … Haut K again]

Wats’on your bug-hunting program ..?

Tinkering with some unrelated ideas …:
How would one go about setting Watson (Clone, III) to work on bug hunting ..?
Where the Beast would be fed all sorts of past code / code patterns (source~ or executable~, or whatever style you’d prefer) with known bugs / errors / exploits and the way in which they failed, and then have the Big W scan, e.g., Win10 source code and come up with a list (in this case, assuming sufficient storage ;-| ) of bug red flags. Probably, to be classified in a range of Sure Thing, via Commonly, to Maybe. As we’re discussing patterns, certainty can’t be had for all found points of interest per se.

That being the simple part, what about automated immunization ..? If some patterns are near-certainly bugs/errors/exploit-points always, can they be plastered ex ante ..? It might be easy(er), too, to throw in an extra development test in the first place (“Sorry Dave, I can’t compile that”). But this sort of scope creep could easily lead to creepy behavior, e.g., if (??) the (??) system would get hijacked.

Oh well. Would still be glad to have your thoughts. And:
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[“Tin”foil hat for actual protection (well, No.), at Haut K-bourg again]

All your Happen

Just a quick note, that the infamous What Happen — All Your Base Are Belong To Us now for some time already (as undercurrent for the non-attentives…) has a successor in

Dat Boi.

As detailed in this here piece. Go read and weep.
o shit waddup.

CfYleuDXEAA9HP2

Plusquote: Critique of the Pure Reasonlessness

This episode, by reference to the excellent Future Crimes (Marc Goodman, as here), one originally by G.K. Chersterton (The Blue Cross):

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic

To which we would want to add: And the auditor, only the disgruntled desk-bound traffic cop.
Since, the checker (and penaliser) of the trivial petty little rules, should remain in the third line, right ..?

Where by the way, the creativity of the artist is required to make the art work that sells — and hence all make their living off straightforward crime or would perish. The more you bureaucratise into totalitarianism, the more you see life wither, till death. Even if the crime keeps on being perpetrated — by laxity of the second and particularly third lines, in cahoots with the profiteers. … Maybe that’s a bit deep-but-overly-lapidary …
Hence, just:
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[Panopticon Central, Strassbourg]

Big Data as a sin

Not just any sin, the Original one. Eating from the ultimate source of Knowledge that Big, Totalitarian, All-Thinkable Data is, in the ideal (quod non).
We WEIRDS (White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich Democratic people), a.k.a. Westeners, know what that leads to. Forever we will toil on spurious correlations…

5ff77c8f-a5a4-4a23-b585-06acdec85a84-original

Miss(ed), almost ..?

One might have easily missed one of the most valuable annual reports … but if you trust it (you can) or would want to dismiss it (you can, for various reasons like the management babble leading to a great many missed threats and ~levels as here, always of course, but still), it is an important item when you’re in InfoSec despite #ditchcyber! so you’d better study it.
Oh, yeah, this being the thing.

OK now. Plus:
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[In “cyber”space (#ditchcyber once more), easily scaled. Haut Koenigsbourg again.]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord