Oh McAfee what have you done? Last week McAfee released an update for their antivirus software that crippled Windows XP SP3 machines. This is not the first time McAfee have had this problem, having crippled machines last year with a bad update as well.

Of course, the 'bad guys' have immediately jumped on the bandwagon as well, flooding google with links scareware sites promising to fix the problem.

What to do? Well I'm not here to bash McAfee (they have enough angry customers right now to do that), and all the big vendors make mistakes, but this does expose a serious problem in the quality control of another big AV vendor.

Last year I sat through a presentation by McAfee where they talked about the massive rise in malware and viruses, a comment that was echoed by Symantec in a presentation around the same time. The Sophos 2010 Security Threat Report [pdf] states that "Sophos’s global network of labs received around 50,000 new malware samples every day during 2009".

Combine that with the constant need to beat the competitors to market with the latest protection and it's no wonder a mistake like McAfee's recent one was made. It seems almost inevitable it will happen again.

But what can be done to protect your servers and desktops? Do AV updates need to be treated like patches and be run through a testing regime before deployment? Is this even feasible in an era of daily (or multiple times daily) signature updates?

I'm no developer and not in the AV business, but it would seem to me having a 'whitelist' of known good items (such as critical windows components) might be a way to stop something like this occurring again...

I came across this very cool tool, from Google while perusing the Tech section of SMH Online today, it gives a breakdown of the number of requests from governments around the world to Google to have content removed either from search results or sites controlled by Google and for information about users of Google's products.

A nice bit of transparency from Google with data which I doubt many governments would be as forthcoming with.

This goes squarely in the 'oh dear' category and comes only months after this lapse, it appears government bodies need to be a little more mindful of where they are putting sensitive information...

Just wanted to shout out a congratulations to fellow Security Circus blogger Richard on graduating (with distinction!) his Master of Information Systems Security degree this week.

Great work Richard!

Not strictly Information Security, but certainly pertaining to organizational security culture,
News.com.au ran a story today that just makes me sad..or is that mad? Or both?

A security gate at Dubbo Airport has been found to have the access pin number to a printed out and stuck above the keypad.

According to the article, Government officials will review security at Dubbo airport next week. I wonder what else they'll find?

Something this balantly idiotic is a sign of a generally poor (or non-existent?) security culture. Sure you may have one 'helpful' person who decides to post the PIN number (along with the helpful "please touch pad softly" message), but for others using the gate to not step in and remove the sticker is a worrying sign. Some more of those airport security dollars may need to be spent on basic staff security awareness and less on security theatre like confiscating nail clippers but not cigarette lighters...

Richard pointed out to me a great little blog post entitled "Does Software Development Have A Culture Of Rewarding Failure".

The post asks why those who bring home projects over budget and over time with a huge flurry of last minute effort seem to be more rewarded than those who get it all done on time and on budget.

Unfortunately it is not only during software development that this type of behaviour occurs, it can permeate many other industries and business environments. But why is this so?

Is it simply everyone loves a hero, the underdog, fighting against incredible odds to achieve the near-impossible?
They certainly are more visible, appearing incredibly dedicated, sacrificing their evenings and weekends as they struggle to complete that big project on time (or at all) as opposed to the other team who 'easily' got it all done on time and within budget.
The author makes the point "...everyone expected the project to go well and when it did, no-one was surprised, everything went according to plan, why would anyone reward or even acknowledge it when things go according to plan?"

It reminds me a little of the old Y2K bug (remember that one?). Lots of people working very hard to ensure nothing went wrong. And when nothing did go wrong (ie: success!) the question was asked by some management: "Geez what did we spend all that time and effort for? Nothing happened!"

Information Security is in a similar boat. Money and resources are allocated to security projects can seem to be wasted when, well, nothing happens! Which of course in many cases was the point of the expenditure; to stop the bad thing from occurring.

I'm reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's excellent book 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the highly Improbable'* at the moment, which discusses (amongst many things) our cognitive bias towards narratives. We like a story, a bit of colour, and this can affect our rational view of facts. In regards to the current topic, consider the following:

• The Project finished on time.
• The Project finished on time because we all worked 7 days a week, 16 hours a day for the last two weeks to meet the deadline.

Which statement seems more likely? I'd wager that, from the gut, for most people it is the second one.

There can also be a mindset of "if you're not running around in crisis mode at crunch time, then you must have budgeted too much time to start with!". We value effort, and in 'deadline crisis mode' the effort is more visible.
Some of this may also be the result of the vicious circle created by 'rewarding failure' in the past because in people's experience all the projects that arrive with a big bang and flurry of 'crunch time' activity to meet the deadline are the ones most valued (ie: rewarded).
Never mind the hidden costs of the project deadline death-march, which may be represented by cut corners, resulting in quality and security problems to be addressed 'sometime' down the track.

This whole topic brings to mind an old Dilbert comic about an employee getting an award for working overtime and weekends fixing the mistakes he caused in the first place.

I can only agree with Alan Skorkin on this one when he states "I for one would love to see a little bit more appreciation from everyone for projects where things go according to plan and especially for the people on those projects...rather than celebrating the belated delivery of the latest death-march, how about digging into it and trying to figure out why it was 6 months late and why people had to work 80 hour weeks to keep it from complete disaster".

*If you're involved at all in looking at (or trying to second guess!) future events or trends - like many Infomation Security professionals - I highly recommend Mr Taleb's book.

The Australian has reported that the Ponemon Institute has released a report on the Cost of a Data Breach based on data from the Australian market.

For those of us 'down under' it is great to see some reporting based on the local conditions, rather than the usual reports from the US and Europe. Unfortunately the report is only based on the 16 completed responses from the 114 companies that were asked to participate, however I see it as a good start that I hope will continue.