I’ve noticed that sometimes it takes two or three “pings” for an idea to seep into my consciousness. I just got my second “ping” on a potentially Big Idea: site-specific browsers (SSBs).
Cybersecurity
Tag ∙ 53 posts
Posts
If you are involved in your firm’s desktop security strategies (Windows in particular), you should read this:
Characterizing the IRC-based Botnet Phenomenon
This is a fact-filled but eminently readable paper about 3,290 IRC-based botnet command and control networks in China from June 2006 to June 2007. In addition to doing the normal things you’d expect to see in a botnet analysis, the researchers analyzed the extent of malware samples circulated within the botnets. They also attempted to determine the effectiveness of nine anti-virus engines in detecting the samples in circulation.
If you don’t want to read the whole thing, I’ve put together the Cliff’s Notes, at least from the perspective of a data junkie like me. Here are some of the more interesting metrics from the report. Some of these are from the report itself, and I’ve derived others. Editorial comments are in italics.
Dan’s a friend of mine, and we are both data junkies. Right about the same time I put the capper on a research report on malware trends (coming soon to Yankee Group subscribers), Dan releases this tour de force, a masterful synthesis of a lot of other people’s data.
I have always been a fan of the good work done by the CVSS folks. I have an obvious reason to like CVSS, of course: namely, to cheer on a former co-worker, Mike “Shifty” Schiffman, who was of the first version’s authors.
While I would not call this a trend, I have noticed that lots of security companies like to put together impressive-looking charts, graphs and reports that purport to compare various metrics by country. Here are two recent examples:
At security conferences and events, I have noticed that the distribution of operating systems seems to differ somewhat from what I read in the papers. As my last post showed, the Internet Identity Workshop skewed decidedly in the Mac direction.
I thought it would be fun to put together a quick poll asking the members of the securitymetrics.org mailing what operating systems they used. I sent out a note asking the membership to respond to two simple questions: