News in the Category "Text"
Page 50 of 64
Guru Beaks Farewell to IT Security Firms
They'll be absorbed by big companies as security gets built into products, Bruce Schneier predicts to OO GIN LEE
He is sounding the death knell of the consumer IT security market.
IT security guru Bruce Schneier is “100 per cent sure” that consumer security products will cease to exist in the future.
“Companies like Symantec, Network Associates and Qualis will be eventually subsumed as part of larger IT vendors,” said Bruce, who was in town earlier this month to give a talk to the local security industry.
Bruce who is mentioned in the Da Vinci Code novel as a modern cryptologist, gave the recent examples of IBM buying security company Internet Security Systems (ISS)and British Telecom (BT) acquiring Counterpane, the company he founded…
Criminal Hackers Gaining Advantage
But protection remains a hard sell with many companies, says security expert
EDMONTON – Technology’s becoming so fast and complex it’s outstripping our ability to keep out hackers and criminals, computer security guru Bruce Schneier said Monday.
“Complexity is the worst enemy of security,” Schneier told the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) conference Monday. “It’s getting worse faster than security is getting better, and we have no idea how to fix this.”
The hacker hobbyists of 10 years ago have been replaced by sophisticated criminals who can get into your computer or server without you knowing about it, said Schneier, whose latest book is Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World…
Interview: the Value of Bruce
BT Counterpane's Bruce Schneier talks to Eleanor Dallaway about why he hasn't been fired yet
Bruce Schneier has increased BT’s press mentions in the North American press by 21% since the UK telecom giant’s acquisition of his firm Counterpane one year ago. BT insists that the acquisition ran smoothly and that the two companies are working well together, and Bruce tells us that the Counterpane people are happy. But it seems there are a few creases in the BT Counterpane story that still need to be ironed out—Bruce’s job title being the first.
“I thought that by now I’d have had a BT title, but find me the person to give me one,” Schneier said, speaking to Infosecurity at the RSA Conference on 23 October. “You see I’m not going to lose my CTO Counterpane title—it’s a good title. But I think they’d [BT] be smart to make me something in BT. But it has to be a title equally good or I’m not going to give this one up. She [talking about BT’s PR representative who accompanied Bruce at the interview] says you just do it, but I don’t know what that means. There has to be someone who says yes and no-one knows who that someone is.”…
Everything about IT Security Will Change
Bruce Schneier, leading cryptologist described as a “security guru” and a “leading counterterrorism contrarian” by the media, shares his thoughts about the future of information security.
“Crime, Crime, Crime!” Bruce Schneier is adamant when asked to talk about the worst security threats. It’s not coming from fanatics, but from people out to steal for money, he insists.
“It doesn’t matter what form it takes,” he says. “It’s wrong that we defend ourselves against the tactics, because then these guys change tactics.”
He describes a worst scenario where “the crime is so bad that people stop doing commerce on the net.” Information security is there to prevent this from happening…
Schneier: Beware Security Products
A leading security expert has warned businesses to beware of buying shoddy security products.
Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technical officer of BT Counterpane, issued the warning at the RSA Conference Europe 2007 in London on Tuesday. He told delegates that they should not necessarily trust security vendors to give a fair representation of the security of those products.
“There might be a political bent to security decisions, or there might be a marketing bent,” said Schneier, citing as an example people selling smart cards who “do a lot to convince us that smart cards are the answer to security problems. For every company that’s secure, there’s at least one ‘me too.’”…
Everything We Know About Security Is Wrong
So says counterterrorism contrarian Bruce Schneier. And the Transportation Security Administration is listening.
In late July, Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley announced a change in his agency’s air travel screening policy: Effective August 4, cigarette lighters would no longer be banned from airplanes.
Explaining the measure in an interview with the New York Times, Hawley acknowledged that confiscating lighters at security checkpoints—the TSA’s policy for the last two years in the wake of a failed shoe-bombing attempt—had been a waste of resources. Terrorists, he noted, might just as well ignite bombs on airplanes using small batteries (or, as he didn’t note, matches)…
Interview with Kip Hawley
In April, Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), invited me to Washington for a meeting. Despite some serious trepidation, I accepted. And it was a good meeting. Most of it was off the record, but he asked me how the TSA could overcome its negative image. I told him to be more transparent, and stop ducking the hard questions. He said that he wanted to do that. He did enjoy writing a guest blog post for Aviation Daily, but having a blog himself didn’t work within the bureaucracy. What else could he do?
This interview, conducted in May and June via e-mail, was one of my suggestions…
Killer Ideas
O’Hare, Chicago, the day before Thanksgiving. The nation’s busiest airport is straining against the nation’s busiest holiday. Among the crowd grumbling through the lengthy security line is a lone traveler with an attaché case. He removes a laptop computer from the case and places it on the tray provided. The tray moves along the conveyor belt. Inside the case’s frame, a small ampul of dimethylmercury cracks and seeps into the X-ray machine. The traveler removes his shoes, passes through the metal detector, retrieves the laptop and the attaché. He’s careful not to let the case touch his clothes. He abandons his stuff in the nearest men’s room and then leaves the airport…
Getting To Blocked Websites Not As Hard As You Think
A screen shot of a blocked website in Iran (RFE/RL)
June 27, 2007 (RFE/RL)—A recent reportby Freedom House has detailed a “new form of censorship” that has taken hold in CIS states. A particular target of governments’ efforts to control what their citizens read is the Internet—and blocking websites has become common practice in some countries. RFE/RL correspondent Heather Maher asked Bruce Schneier, chief technical officer of computer-security company BT Counterpane, about how such blocking works and what can be done to counter it.
RFE/RL: How exactly does someone—a government official—block a website?…
Is Security a Solvable Problem?
Or is security the computer equivalent of the War on Terror? Bruce Schneier gives us the story.
Bruce Schneier is as close as you can get to being a rock star in the security industry. A cryptographer, computer security specialist and bestselling author of numerous books, he’s written countless articles and columns on security issues. He blogs about them at “Schneier on Security” http://www.schneier.com/, and publishes the monthly Crypto-Gram Newsletter that has a global readership of around 130,000.
He also finds time to be active in the industry as chief technology officer of BT Counterpane, http://www.counterpane.com/ a managed security services and consulting company he started in 1999 – plus he’s one of our …
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.