Adam Vincent

Cyber-attacks make headlines on a daily basis.   The news media commands attention by publicizing high profile cases – well-known companies, enormous losses, and serious consequences.   With all the focus on the big guys, it’s easy to overlook the fact that no business demographic is immune from cyber-attacks.  In fact, recent reports estimate that small companies, those with fewer than 500 employees, may be experiencing as many as half of all targeted cyber-attacks.  Half! Who is attacking the small business and why? The threat to the small business is the same as any business.  The adversary is after company information and customer data, and since small businesses don’t have multi-million dollar security budgets they can be a much easier target. The growing trend is for competitors to steal corporate information as an easy way to level the playing field.  Not on... (more)

Iranian Cyber Army Hacks Twitter

Twitter on Ulitzer Last night Twitter.com was hacked by a group purportedly titled the Iranian Cyber Army, at least that is what people think based on the fact that this group advertised they were responsible by displaying a redirected web page with an Iranian flag and text that takes credit, saying "This website has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army". This morning another website (mawjcamp.org), which appears to be a Iranian Reformist website based outside of Iran was also found to have been hacked. This event comes at a time when the United States Government is saying that ... (more)

Cyber Espionage – Knowing You Are a Target

The existence of a persistent cyber-espionage threat to the military, government, and defense contractors is nothing new. While the ability of these organizations to react and remediate attacks against their networks is still often demonstrably lacking, there is now at least some level of cognizance of the threat and even an expectation of serious, repeated attacks. Awareness is obviously a vital first step on the road to solid security and attack prevention. The widespread press coverage in early 2010 of the compromise of Google and several other companies’ networks brought the... (more)

Combating Sophisticated Cyber Threats

I was part of a panel titled “Developing Security Strategies to Successfully Combat Sophisticated Threats to your Network, while Protecting Customer Privacy” at the TM Forum conference two weeks ago.  Given the topic, and the interesting conversation, I wanted to highlight some of the ideas expressed around sophisticated threats. Verizon’s Marc Spitler, and AT&T’s Brian Rexroad. Daniel O’Donnel from Network Critical and Ajay Uggirala from NetScout, and Martin Huddleston from United Kingdom (UK) Ministry of Defense (MoD) accompanied me on the panel. In essence, cyber-attack is big... (more)

Creating New NIEM Services with Policy Based Integration & Governance

Problems with NIEM Enablement There are several barriers to adoption of NIEM that must be dealt with. The first is that Data is currently represented in terms that the enterprise has defined and semantics likely differ between NIEM and the currently leveraged legacy data formats. Second, requirements for run-time security and governance of new NIEM-enabled services adds new complexities to which the current enterprise may not be accustomed to. Database and Legacy Application Integration Our philosophy is to allow for data integration through a logical model, which provides a nec... (more)