• #security on software development security and web security, security best practices and discussions, break-ins and countermeasures. Everything you ever wanted to know about software security but were afraid to ask, for fear of not understanding the answer!

Management

They never learn password security: Domino Pizza

France and Belgium Domino Pizza password database was stolen by the hackers of Rex Mundi. They require a 30,000 euro payment to avoid disclosure. Well, Domino Pizza went to police, so the 592,000 French and 58,000 Belgian customer records will be in the open tonight. What is interesting though? This is 2014. Do you know what ...

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Software Security vs. Food Safety

My friend works in a large restaurant chain in St-Petersburg. She is pretty high up in the command after all these years. We talk about all sorts of things when we meet up and once she told me about how they have to deal with safety and quality inspections and how bothersome and expensive they ...

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Guard your secrets

I meant to write about the subject of spying and corporate information security for a while now but got around to it only now. The article Confessions of a Corporate Spy has provided an excellent background for the discussion and is absolutely worth a read. Twenty years ago the corporate spying was already abound and ...

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Security Assurance vs. Quality Assurance

It is often debated how Quality assurance relates to Security assurance. I have a slightly unconventional view of the relation between the two. You see, when we talk about the security assurance in software, I view the whole process in my head end to end. And the process runs roughly like this: The designer has ...

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Security Breach at Unique Vintage

There is news that women’s clothing website Unique Vintage has sent notifications to the customers that the site has been breached and the customer information was exposed. What is interesting is that the website is fully PCI compliant, i.e. it follows all rules for security set forth by the credit card industry. And still, it ...

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Coverity reports on Open Source

Coverity is running a source code scan project started by U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, a Net Security article reports. They published their report on quality defects recently pointing out some interesting facts. Coverity is a lot into code quality but they also report security problems. On the other hand, any quality problem ...

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Getting revenue on security?

I am looking now into arguably the hardest problem of security: how to make it pay off. Security is usually seen as a risk management tool, where increasing security investment lowers the risk of costly disasters. But the trade off between security and risk is hard to evaluate and there is a bias for ignoring ...

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Security training – does it help?

I came across the suggestion to train (nearly) everyone in the organization in security subjects. The idea is very good, we often have this problem that the management has absolutely no knowledge or interest in security and therefore ignores the subject despite the efforts of the security experts in the company. Developers, quality, documentation, product ...

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Ignoring security is not a good idea…

  I see that HTC got finally whacked over the head for the lack of security in their Android smartphones. I will have to contain myself here and will leave aside the inherent issues surrounding Android, its security and model of operation that will hurt … Ok, ok, I stop now. So, HTC got dragged ...

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The art of unexpected

I am reading through the report of a Google vulnerability on The Reg and laughing. This is a wonderful demonstration of what the attackers do to your systems – they apply the unexpected. The story is always the same. When we build a system, we try to foresee the ways in which it will be ...

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