Selil

Admiral Mullen (Joint Chiefs of Staff) tweeted “Meant what I said: Mr. Assange & his source might already have on their hands the blood of our troops or that of our Afghan partners.” I have some issues with this comment. First, the Admiral was talking about Wikileaks release of secret information dealing with the Afghanistan war. I haven’t commented on that, but I see some arrogance in the Admiral and think we should look at a few things. [Read more →]

This quick quip is a simple mark in the sand for a new principle of software development and information technology implementation. Herosourcing unlike outsourcing often is an unintended consequence, but it can be a planned obsolesence practice. [Read more →]

I have a chapter in a new book out. The Kindle edition was just released and the print edition will soon be released. With a bevy of top authors and edited by Dan Abbott this book is one of the first comprehensive looks at post fourth generation warfare. My chapter is based on unified theories of generational warfare and attempting to show how they are less than temporally linked but built upon numerous strategies and techniques that succeed (or more likely follow) each other. The generational paradigm has been debated extensively by many authors but this book takes a look at specific instances of conflict and attempts to bring them under one title. If you are interested in military strategy this is likely a book you will enjoy.

The following is a little thought experiment. It is not meant to answer any questions but to examine capabilities of cyber warfare from a metaphorical position (perhaps open). Using the principles of Schrodinger’s Cat (is the cat alive or dead) without harming any cats we ask a slightly different question. Is the electric light in a room on or off? Of course you could enter the room and look. Maybe you could peek under the door, or perhaps through a window. But, for our purposes let’s say the room with the light on is on the other side of the earth and you have to determine the condition of the light using other than direct observation methods. [Read more →]

There is a lot of talk in the federal government about how hard/expensive it is to have good information security. That narrative is also part of the cyber warfare discussion currently seeking rampant funding. When the political machine finds a mechanism for building empires the actual solutions often are obscured by the blatant profiteering. Solving the information security problem is fairly inexpensive but the solutions take some thinking. Don’t expect that from anybody who gets elected or takes money from contractors. So this is how you create a secure information system nation wide. [Read more →]

1. Cyber warfare is just like…. Pick your poison or bias. Heck pick strategic air warfare, pick some nuclear disarmament, get yourself some armor strategies. Talk about the Maginot line like it is actually a meaningful strategy in a networked world. Totally ignore the reams of academic literature that says “hey this is a new domain” and foist your lackluster stratagems off for your military service. Since civilians aren’t allowed on the Internet anyways.

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The information technology sphere of solutions is filled with advocates, fans, and outright addicts. Whether the solutions choices are segregated by closed source and open source the debate continues. The lion-share of end-point (laptop, desktop) solution market belongs to Microsoft Windows. However, some of that is changing with the increasing sales of smart phones (already ubiquitous in other markets) in America. The Windows Mobile solution and BlackBerry still have a large segment of the market. In to this mix over the last few years we add Apple. Apple represents a closed-source, tightly controlled ecosystem of applications and technologies. Can that model be considered unethical to support? [Read more →]

When writing papers it is sometimes a good idea to know the structure of what you are writing before you start. The American Psychological Association 5^th edition is the current requirement for classes on citation and style. There are a variety of templates out there to help your writing but as to writing an outline we want to achieve a couple of things. We want to know where things go, we want to know what the citation style is going to be, and we want to know the structure of the arguments we are going to make. The following almost totally can be found in the APA 5 style guide currently available. [Read more →]

It is interesting how we forget that information assurance and security is not always a technology problem. If you go to a major security conference there will be plenty of hardware vendors standing around but I’ve never seen psychologists or psychiatrists trotting out methods of determining insider threats. Sabotage, and destruction of company assets has been happening for a long time. Our own innate sense of humor at beating a rental car, driving the company van a little harder than we would our own car are symptoms of this perversion towards the company’s property. When we expand the scope out beyond our own actions and start considering the actions of hostile outsiders the risks becomes greater. With distance attribution as a capability is perceived to shrink. [Read more →]

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Where have we been? What are the effects of massive surveillance programs on society, but more importantly for our purposes on the enterprise? Companies use data mining and dataveillance technologies as techniques to increase profit share and that results in significant ethical and moral consequences. Beyond should we or shouldn’t we there is a question of how, why, and when? The various government agencies have written vision papers on where computer security should try and go, but are they being applied to the corporate enterprise? Each of the articles taken in the order presented here is a narrative constructed to examine various issues that return again and again to a theme of information security as a verb rather than a noun. Instead of being a passive hole we toss money into the principles expand to the point that information security as a process is an integral part of the enterprise instead of a layer. [Read more →]

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