TaoSecurity Blog

Amazon.com just posted a joint review by myself and my daughter of No Starch's new book Super Scratch Programming Adventure! . From the five star review : I asked my almost-8-year-old to share her thoughts on Super Scratch Programming Adventure! She chose five stars and wrote the following: "I think it's a very great book. I love the storyline, but my main concern is that I could not find a trace of the Super Scratch folder. How hard is it to draw the Mona Lisa? I have Scratch version 1.4, and I found it difficult drawing Le Louvre. On the flip side, I learned a lot. Who knew you could make Scratchy move with 1) arrow keys and 2) a medium sized Script? I enjoyed watching the Magic Star Web change colors. Overall, I think it's a very great book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in programming." I agree that this is a great book. My daughter wanted to learn how to program a video game, and I thought it would be a lot more difficult. Sho...

My friend Russ McRee pointed me to an article recently: WA National Guard focusing on cyber security . From the article: The Washington National Guard is leveraging a decade of investment in cyber security at Camp Murray in Lakewood into projects that could protect state and local governments, utilities and private industry from network attacks. The aim is to bring to the digital world the kind of disaster response the National Guard already lends to fighting wildfires and floods, said Lt. Col. Gent Welsh of the Washington Air National Guard. “Just as ‘Business X’ needs the National Guard to come in and fill sand bags, ‘Business X’ might need to call the National Guard if it’s overwhelmed on the cyber side,” Welsh said. The new task plays to a growing strength in the state’s National Guard, which draws on employees from companies including Microsoft and Amazon to provide special expertise in its network warfare units. I first learned of this initiative when Russ Tweeted abou...

I just watched a recent episode of 60 Minutes on CNBC and enjoyed the segment on oil production in Saudi Arabia. It featured a story from late 2008 on Saudi Aramco. You may recall this name from recent news, namely data destruction affecting 30,000 computers . A recent Reuters article said the following: Saudi Aramco has said that only office PCs running Microsoft Windows were damaged. Its oil exploration, production, export, sales and database systems all remained intact as they ran on isolated and heavily protected systems. "All our core operations continued smoothly," CEO Khalid Al-Falih told Saudi government and business officials at a security workshop on Wednesday. "Not a single drop of oil was lost. No critical service or business transaction was directly impacted by the virus." It is standard industry practice to shield plant operating networks from hackers by running them on separate operating systems that are protected from the Internet. While wat...