Mapping and Security Research

From the “We should have trademarked this” department: McAfee came out with their “Mapping the Mal Web“[PDF] report and are proving that innovation is best left for the smaller players to meddle with, only to be used later by the big guys.

Not that there is anything revolutionary about the report – it’s the same basic “look at what we could figure out from our logs” type, loaded with graphs and tables (as opposed to forward looking research, or one that dares to predict or create a disruptive technological/behavioral change). But the mere use of “MalWeb” is funny since I clearly remember starting to use it in an internal meeting some years ago back when we used to issue reports ourselves…

In any case – use this “with caution” (just as you would use last years financial news to base your investments on), or better yet – just use the graphs and maps to scare potential customers :-) Hope that the nest report would have a somewhat beefed up sections discussing “what to look for” (a mere single paragraph here), and more discussions on the thinking of how domain names are picked by eCrime operators to reach their target audience.

Keep safe!

AHA! A blast from the past…

I just ran across this great blog post from Lori MacVittie at Web2.0 Journal. Can’t say exactly why it sparked my interest, but after reading it I realized this may be Freudian… The proposed Anonymous Human Authentication (AHA – great acronym Lori!) proposed in it closely resembles a technology we worked on back in the days of BeeFence.

I’m not putting any links to BeeFence since it was a startup I had the honor to be one of the founders of (which obviously went down the road of many other startups…), but the neat thing about it was the technology (did I mention I was the CTO ;-) ). Basically – we had what we called “Active Validation” (or sometimes “Interrogation”) of sessions. We generalized it a bit more to cover additional protocols rather than just focus on Web2.0 (think what it can do to the NIDS/IPS world…).

Makes me think of getting back on the startup bandwagon, although I’d have to make some sense out of the drawer-full of ideas I’ve been filling over the past few years having been engaged in web security and cloud security recently… you never know :-)