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L0pht And The FBI

Posted by Hemos on from the say-it-ain't-so dept.

A reader recently submitted a story from The Reg concerning some questioning of l0pht ? , @stake ? , and the general business of security. The article itself is harsh, but raises some interesting points.

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Word on the Street... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Word on the street (well, on theregister.co.uk) says that Gweeds is way the hell up there on the hacker STD chart.

    Attaboy, Gweeds!

  2. Re:Who cares ? by PooAGoGo · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ahh, the ultimate in security is to not only stop a would be attacker, but also to make that attacker not want to attack.

    Look at this example:
    "The Smirnov Metrization deal is going down at 8 Jordan Separation Theorms"

    See? There is a hidden message here that no-one but the greatest security minds can crack. All others see this and go into a drooling daze as they're flooded with memories of high school algebra. Not only do they stop the attack, they will never try again for fear of visions of two trains traveling at different speeds...

  3. Re:Who cares ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm guessing that he's just read Cryptonomicon.

  4. Re:Who cares ? by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 5, Funny

    For being a real security expert you need extremely broad scientific knowledge and not just a long list of memorized UNIX commands. And these dudes don't have this knowledge at all, e.g. I would be surprised if one of them knows the Riemannian Zeta function at all.
    You said it! Why, just the other day I was busy building a ruleset for a new firewall and I had a coworker give it a look.

    "Hey! You forgot the 'Riemannian Zeta function'", he noted.

    Talk about a professional faus paux - that changed my entire ruleset. I knew then was the time to lock my screen and go get a coke from the break room. If I forgot such a mainstay to information security, I obviously needed a break.

    The odd thing is that I was using the "Riemannian Zeta function" to harden a server that was going on the DMZ just that morning. And its also prominently featured in many of our infosec policies and best practices documentation - some of which I helped write. Hell - many arguments over infrastructure issues with the rest of the IT department has been solved by getting everyone in conference room and hashing out a zeta function on the whiteboard. I mean... sure, you still have a few dissenters. But its hard to maintain a rational stance in the face of pure mathmatics.