Security Hackers Interviewed

An anonymous reader writes "SecurityFocus has published an interview with Dan Kaminsky. He was guest-hacker at Microsoft Blue-Hat event. At the same time, Whitedust is running an interview with Richard Thieme from back in April. Richard is best known for his column 'Islands in the Clickstream' which is syndicated in over 60 countries." Thieme also wrote a column or two for Slashdot back in the day. From the Kaminsky interview: "Corporations are not monolithic -- there is no hive mind that can one day change every opinion towards some sort of 'rightthink'. Microsoft has said the right things about security for years, but then, who hasn't? Security requires more than PR, or even proclamations from C-levels."

Comments

"Blue hat" hackers

[tpgp]

Note to Microsoft

We have more then enough hat colours as things stand.

Blue Hat hacker sounds like an IBM employee anyway (or an Anti-Fedora agent?)

Just like Customer Service

[WebHostingGuy]

Duh.

Security is a neat buzz word lately. We all "need" to do security, blah, blah, blah.

Security is just like customer service. In order for it to be effective you have to ingrain it in a culture which places it as a top priority. It's obvious that most developers and corporations think of this as an after thought.

Okay, we need functionality x and y. Great, now that we have it ... oh yeah, put a firewall in front of it. What, we were hacked? We had a firewall ...

Just reading the article it shows that the developers were surprised someone can reverse engineer their code; they were "annoyed" someone created a graphical exploit. Annoyed? How about pissed? What about "motivated" to plug the hole. Obviously we weren't there to hear this first hand but it sounds like just an oh well we should do something about this. The article talks about a priority shift. Just another corporate slogan.

If it was a true culture shift you would see something like: x company has announced the hiring of 1,000 new software programmers to create a new division of security. This new division will audit all code for potential security problems before any new programs are released.

Re:Just like Customer Service

[Nytewynd]

If it was a true culture shift you would see something like: x company has announced the hiring of 1,000 new software programmers to create a new division of security. This new division will audit all code for potential security problems before any new programs are released.

That would be followed immediately by "On IRC, 10,000 hackers were recruited to find holes in X Company's security measures."

Security is a concern, but it is mostly exclusive from features. For 99.9% of the features you add, there is a way to make them secure. Unless the feature is to upload and execute random code I guess.

The biggest problem with security is that you can't guard against things you don't know about. Hackers find holes, and then they get closed. It's hard to fill in a hole if you don't know it is there. In a way, for every hack that is exploited the fix makes things more secure than they were. Unfortunately there is a window of opportunity in between the finding and the fixing during which your pants are around your ankles.

Re:Just like Customer Service

[Effugas]

Lesse...

1) Metasploit isn't a graphical exploit; it's a Perl shell, very well done, that made exploit development and deployment a far more reliable endeavor.

2) They're pretty damn motivated -- not perfect, but way more than I've seen any corp. Like I said -- the "intro to security lecture" (people WILL find your holes, you WILL get attacked, etc) just didn't happen.

3) 13 open reqs for just one consultancy I know of that's got security auditing gigs at MS. Yeah.

4) I hadn't made the link between customer service and security. You're completely right about it needing to be a cultural element.

--Dan

Who is this clown?

[fdiskne1]

The interview with Dan Kaminsky, while heavy on the car/computer analogy still comes across as "okay". He provided some insight into what happened at the "Blue Hat Hackers" meeting with Microsoft. The interview with Richard Thieme left me awestruck. He is a spittin' image (interview-wise) as Jon Katz. Lots of buzzwords that didn't provide any information or insight. I feel as though I was a security expert forced to listen to a marketing person tell me why he is a security expert. That was painful and I'm not a security expert.