The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security

A Recent Interview, and other info

Friday, March 04, 2011 by spaf
in General, Policies & Law
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I have not been blogging here for a while because of some health and workload issues. I hope to resume regular posts before too much longer.

Recently, I was interviewed about the current state of security . I think the interview came across fairly well, and captured a good cross-section of my current thinking on this topic. So, I'm posting a link to that interview here with some encouragement for you to go read it as a substitute for me writing a blog post:

Complexity Is Killing Us: A Security State of the Union With Eugene Spafford of CERIAS

Also, let me note that our annual CERIAS Symposium will be held April 5th & 6th here at Purdue. You can register and find more information via our web site.

But that isn't all!

Plus, all of the above are available via RSS feeds.  We also have a Twitter feed: @cerias. Not all of our information goes out on the net, because some of it is restricted to our partner organizations, but eventually the majority of it makes it out to one of the above outlets.

So, although I haven't been blogging recently, there has still been a steady stream of activity from the 150+ people who make up the CERIAS "family."   

Tags for this post: attacks, cerias, computer-crime, cyber-crime, cyber crime, cybercrime, cyber policy, cyber security, cybersecurity, cyber security policy, education, hacking, infosec, Internet, internet, interview, network-crime, security, security, security-failures, security-flaws, security-practices, security failures, security research, spaf, symposium, updates, vulnerabilities

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Comments

Posted by Micheal
on Saturday, April 2, 2011 at 02:48 PM

Thanks for the info on CERIAS Sympositn. Thanks

Posted by Andrew
on Friday, April 8, 2011 at 01:27 PM

Thanks for writing this blog post. I hope both your health and your workloads improve.

I do agree that things need to be kept simpler.

Posted by Susan
on Friday, April 8, 2011 at 03:29 PM

I read the interview you posted with Mr. Spafford.  It was interesting but two things come to mind.  First, I personally think internet security is primarily dependent on the user.  On my windows laptop I do not have a virus protector, mainly because my past experiences with Norton and McAfee were so awful.  I decided to take a ‘risk’ and not have virus protection.  But when I surf I only go to well recognized sites like Amazon, Oracle, hotmail, etc…  I also turn my laptop off when I’m not using it.  Consequently, I’ve never had a virus and have not even had much of a slowdown from adware.  I guess its part luck, but I can’t help think that it depends what you do on the internet.
The second comment is that he is indeed right when he mentions that the young today are basically naive in loading their whole lives onto facebook and other social sites.  Parents today ought to be aware how risky that is and monitor what their teens/20’s are doing.  Even though it’s online, our parents would have prevented us from making copies of all our pictures and distributing them to everybody on the street.  Its the same thing, but worse.

Posted by Paul Smith
on Monday, April 18, 2011 at 01:44 PM

The problem is not only local but international. People who innocently leave their computers on all day are sometimes contributing to an immense zombie army which attacks various targets at the whim of their darkside commanders. Twitter was brought down a few times and an online form provider whom I subscribe to was attacked by a phishing group and caused all the forms on the server to malfunction. It is a growing tide.

Posted by dennis
on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 04:30 AM

firstly, I hope you get well soon as I would love to see more of your posts. Secondly the issue in my view is a lack of substantive software on users pc’s but also a real gap between what users think their antivirus, firewall software is doing for them and the reality of the limitations of the actual software. How many times have you got a virus even though you thought you had a so called leading anti-virus program installed.

Posted by Fred
on Saturday, July 9, 2011 at 05:18 AM

I would say that its a must watch interview about “Current security state” also, i must thank you for sharing your twitter profile name in this blog post. i am now following you on twitter and hope to see other informative stuff coming soon. In today’s scenario we can’t ignore the importance of windows security essentials.

Posted by Ernie
on Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 08:54 AM

The sad state of security is that sometimes it’s not even a home computer issues (Mac, PC, doesn’t matter) - we got a new laptop about six weeks ago with a full on security package, but my Hotmail account, which is housed elsewhere, got attacked and was still able to get junk into our system.

Here’s to hoping we eventually get smarter than the bad guys!  =)

Posted by Scott
on Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 02:55 PM

Security is key these days!  As an ISO, I see the need also for more employee security awareness training.  Our people are our weakest link.  I am not saying that in a bad way, just fact.  Thanks for sharing!

Scott

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