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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.

1 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. 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.