Tech Talk Guest: Alan Paller Tech Talk Guest: Paul Renard Threats Found on the Internet Sans Network Security 2002 Conference Outlook Express Has Another Critical Security Flaw Microsoft Theme Song Connecting the Dots in Homeland Security Lovely spam! Wonderful spam! Man dies after playing computer games nonstop Stratford News
The SANS Institute, founded in 1992, is a cooperative research organization to deliver graduate-level education to the people who secure and manage important information systems.
Alan is responsible for the research programs that have reached community-wide consensus on how to secure Windows NT, Windows 2000, LINUX, and Solaris systems as well as Cisco routers, and how to respond to computer security incidents.
Alan met with President Clinton in the aftermath of the Yahoo and eBay denial of service attacks in February of 2000 and helped develop a global response procedure to such attacks. This work led to the development of the Internet Storm Center.
Alan co-founded (with Franklin Reed) the CIO Institute, a foundation that funds technology awards programs (the Government Technology Leadership Awards) and that fosters the sharing of experiences among CIOs in very large organizations.
Tech Talk Guest: Paul Renard
Director of IT Department, Stratford University
Prior to Stratford, Paul was VP for AMS
Worked on large distributed software projects and homeland security initiatives
The report was written by a bipartisan panel of experts headed by former Netscape chief executive James Barksdale and Zoe Baird, who was a member of President Bill Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and is now president of the Markle Foundation. Other members were former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark, former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith and Eric Holder, who was Clinton’s deputy attorney general.
Its theme can be summed up in this line, "We have not yet begun to mobilize our society’s strengths in information, intelligence, and technology."
The task force recommended that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should be a central hub for decisions about what information needs to be collected and stored—in the government or in the private sector—and about where the information should be analyzed and how
It calls for a networked information technology system to share information among local, state, regional and federal agencies and the private sector.
It calls for an end to "stovepipe" data collection systems that have all the disadvantages of privacy invasion, but none of the global intelligence advantages.
It all began with famous Monty Python skit revolving around a restaurant specializing in dishes involving lots of Spam. A group of Vikings sitting in the corner would sing Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam. Wonderful Spam!, drowning out the waitress and all conversation in the restaurant.
Since unsolicited e-mail is seen as drowning out all other communication, it made sense to call it spam (with a lowercase "s" to differentiate it from the Hormel meat product). At least it made sense in the 1980s to users in the MUD (multi-user dungeon) community.
In 1994 the first large-scale spamming occurred with the infamous Green Card spam. Two attorneys trying to drum up some clients hired a programmer to flood every USENET newsgroup. This unsolicited e-mail made people so angry that recipients began referring to it as spam.