News in the Category "Text"
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Book Review: Data and Goliath (Bruce Schneier)
I finally got around to finishing Bruce Schneier’s latest bestseller: Data and Goliath. I’ve read a few of Bruce’s books over the years (and own most of the rest, waiting patiently to be read). I’ve watched Bruce on many TV news segments, lectures, interviews, and web videos. I follow his blog and Twitter posts. I’ve even had the pleasure of emailing him from time to time. Some day I’d love to meet the guy. So… what I’m trying to say here is: fair warning, I’m a bit of a Bruce Schneier fan boy.
However, I feel this is completely justified. I tend to have the most respect for the even-keeled, professorial types—the ones who are passionate about what they do and highly knowledgeable about their field, but at the end of the day are most concerned with getting it right and avoiding hyperbole. That’s a small camp of people, but Bruce is definitely in it…
Video: Cloud Computing Trade-Offs
“As a business or as an individual you have to make a choice. Should I do this thing—whatever it is—on my computer and on my network or on a cloud computer on a cloud network,” asked Bruce Schneier (@schneierblog), CTO of Resilient Systems, Inc., in our conversation at the 2015 RSA Conference in San Francisco.
Whatever you choose, you’re going to be making a trade-off. Schneier recommends you first look at who your adversaries are.
“If your adversaries are a cybercriminal, I bet Google can do a better job at securing your stuff than you can. If your adversary is the U.S. government, Google will respond to court orders and not tell you about it, so maybe you’re better keeping it. It’s going to depend on what you’re worrying about,” said Schneier, who runs his personal email on his own computers, not so much for security reasons, but for control. He doesn’t want Google looking at his email or sending him advertising…
RSAC—Schneier Details Ways to Survive Catastrophic Attack
Catastrophic issues in security can occur, but there are ways to recover.
Speaking at RSA Conference in San Francisco, Bruce Schneier, CTO of Resilient Systems, highlighted the Sony Pictures attack as being an interesting case as it brings catastrophic risk uses to the fore, and not catastrophic as in a life ending sense, but in company terms.
He highlighted seven ways in which a catastrophic incident could be dealt with. Firstly he recommended keeping it internal to "incapsulate the catastrophic risk", secondly consider that attackers on two axes of skills and focus and with someone who is low skilled but has a high focus would use a basic APT, but in the case of Sony this was low skills and low targets. "Why this matters for security is the difference between absolute and low security; it doesnt matter how good security is, be more secure than the other guy and in a high skill high focus they want you," he said…
What Bruce Schneier Learned from the Sony Breach
After spending a lot of time thinking about the massive breach of Sony, security luminary Bruce Schneier came to a scary – but not really surprising – conclusion.
“The lesson is that we are all vulnerable. North Korea could have done it to anyone,” said Scheier during a packed session at the RSA conference in San Francisco.
While the IT security industry knows how to deal with high volume, low-focus attacks, Schneier said, security professionals have trouble handling highly skilled and focused attackers, commonly referred to as advanced persistent threats (APTs)…
What Do You Use to Get Stuff Done?
Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Bruce Schneier, security technologist. Basically, I think and work in the intersection of security, technology, and people. Most people think of me as a cryptographer, but these days I do more policy than anything else: security policy, privacy policy, the NSA and surveillance. I suppose that’s the natural evolution of things.
Right now I am thinking a lot about catastrophic risk. Technology empowers, for both good and bad. A broad history of "attack" technologies shows trends of empowerment, as individuals wield ever more destructive power. The natural endgame a nuclear bomb in everybody’s back pocket, or a bioprinter that can drop a species. And then what? Is society even possible when the most extreme individual can kill everyone else? Honestly, I don’t know…
Schneier on “Really Bad” IoT Security: ‘It’s Going to Come Crashing Down’
Security expert Bruce Schneier has looked at and written about difficulties the Internet of Things presents – such as the fact that the "things" are by and large insecure and enable unwanted surveillance—and concludes that it’s a problem that’s going to get worse before it gets better.
After a recent briefing with him at Resilient Systems headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., where he is CTO, he answered a few questions about the IoT and what corporate security executives ought to be doing about it right now. Here’s a transcript of the exchange…
Review of Data and Goliath
The Internet birthed unprecedented freedom of communication, interconnecting individuals from every corner of the globe and every walk of life. This free flow of information has the potential to establish a world of truly free and equal citizens, yet many politicians want to turn this technology inside out and use the Internet as a universal surveillance mechanism. This path would roll back centuries of civil rights and revive feudalism on a global scale. Sadly, this rush to oppression isn’t restricted to some backwater dictator massaging his own ego. The most powerful nations on earth are violating their own laws to continuously develop new and more invasive methods of scrutinizing everyone they can reach…
Ced Kurtz’s Techman Texts: Computer Surveillance Is a Trade-off
Bruce Schneier is a world-renowned cryptographer, computer security and privacy specialist, and author of numerous books on security. So when he speaks, TechMan tends to listen.
In his latest book, “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World,” his point is well worth taking note of: Surveillance and data collections are a trade-off between individual value and group value. You give Google personal information in return for free search, free email, free maps and all the other free things Google provides…
The Ends of Privacy
“Over the past twenty years,” complained Newsweek, the United States has become “one of the snoopiest and most data-conscious nations in the history of the world.” Part of the problem is that “the average American trails data behind him like spoor through the length of his life.” Another part of the problem is that the government and private firms “have been chasing down, storing, and putting to use every scrap of information they can find.” These “vast reservoirs of personal information” are “poured into huge computers” and “swapped with mountains of other data from other sources” with “miraculous speed and capacity.” As a result of these forces, “Americans have begun to surrender both the sense and the reality of their own right to privacy—and their reaction to their loss has been slow and piecemeal.”…
Collecting Private Information
A computer-security expert weighs up the costs and benefits of collecting masses of personal data
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. By Bruce Schneier.W.W. Norton; 383 pages; $27.95 and £17.99.
SOCIETY has more digital information than ever and can do new things with it. Google can identify flu outbreaks using search queries; America’s National Security Agency (NSA) aspires to do the same to find terrorists. But at the same time people are under constant surveillance by companies and governments, since the rules protecting privacy are hopelessly out of date.
In “Data and Goliath” Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert, does a fine job of laying out the problems caused by this compulsive collection of personal data, and suggests some steps that would help protect society from the most egregious excesses. The challenges are severe because modern technologies collect large amounts of information on the most innocuous of activities, which formerly left no data trace…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.