Some months ago I bought a desktop system. I hadn't had one for years, but a very strange and unexpected need came up; I wanted to play games with my son who lives in Greece, in an attempt to spend a bit more time with him, even virtually. I bought and built a desktop system based on AMD's excellent Ryzen line, but that's for another time. On that computer, and as it would be used predominantly for games, I installed MS Windows. That is another thing that hadn't happened in my household for decades!
SSL certificate revocation gotchas
Posted on Wednesday, 4th of March 2020 • security • permanent link •Read time: 2
As you may have heard, Let's Encrypt revoked several certificates today that were issued through a faulty process. Read on for the details, and on how to identify the revoked certificates themselves.
What to do with the center of security?
Posted on Monday, 17th of June 2019 • security • permanent link •Read time: 7
Some years ago, during a (quite extended) phishing avalanche in the company I was at the time, the (then) CIO said: Let's fire every user that falls for a phishing mail! That will solve the problem for good. I considered it a joke, and I replied pretty much with a rhyme: Let's train them before we blame them and I didn't give it a second throught. We went on to deploy some training modules, but never really implemented the technical controls on the mail server; an activity that if had been implemented, several of those phishing mails would never have entered the company. I think that this is not strictly a user failure and I'm inclined to blame the IT deparment more than the user.
Fighting bias in security analysis
Posted on Tuesday, 19th of March 2019 • security • permanent link •Read time: 8
I am a huge fan of automation; I strongly believe that automation, machine learning and / or artificial intelligence (whatever these terms mean for different people) are our best chance to tackle one of the biggest problems we have in the cyber security industry: the human limitations.