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Speaking at ASIS International Orlando, 20th September
For those in the Orlando area, you’ll find me presenting at ASIS International on the 20th – I’m talking about mobile security and consumerization, a topic close to most IT leaders hearts.
If you’re going to be there, please say hello, and of course my standing offer of a vanity http://mcaf.ee url in exchange for a good joke still holds.
Piggybacking WiFi at 60mph
I was in Madrid speaking at a conference a couple of months ago, and arriving after one of my favorite trans-Atlantic flights (you know the ones, where the ratio of screaming children to adults is not conducive to rest or even playing Angry Birds) I was excited to take one of the citi-cabs which have free wifi onboard to my hotel, a 45 minute journey away.
It was an interesting experience to say the least – though getting completely car-sick in the process, I managed to clear my inbox, answer a dozen questions on Community.mcafee.com, and also catch up with the news care of Google and the BBC. All in all, it was a most productive journey. Read more…
Take Two Of These Pills And Call Support In The Morning…
“McAfee launches a range of pharmaceutical anti-viral medications to thwart the growing problem of Biological computer viral attacks”
Sounds far fetched? Maybe not given that researches at Caltech have successfully engineered a biological computer which can calculate square roots using DNA replication.
Given that the researchers Lulu Quan and Erik Winfree have successfully demonstrated AND and OR logic gates at the biological scale, it’s inevitable in my mind that more and more complex systems will come in the future. Read more…
AutoDomain 5.60…
NOTE – Production-ready version 5.63 (as far as I am aware) is now available on CTOGoneWild
This version is a real departure from the 5.2 and before series, as I got rid of the dependence on IE for the UI – it was becoming a real pain, with IE trying to display first run screens, telling me it was not installed etc. Generally the IE object was unreliable to say the least.
Instead, I used a whole bunch of HTAs – This is nicer architecturally as each stands alone and can be modified as you see fit, so you can change the UI without changing the logic of the script, plus they run independently so if they crash and burn, again, no problems for the script.
Other than that, there were some more changes to make the “Run On Logon” code asynchronous, so it does not stall the user experience when provisioning them. You can find a full list of changes at the top of the autodomain.vbs script.
Finally, if you enjoy this tool and it saves you a whole bunch of time and effort, you might want to send me something from my Amazon Gift List? Thanks!
You can read more about the current version on my previous blog on this topic.
Mobile Device or Not? That is the question…
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been presenting around the U.S. at events such as Secure360 in St. Paul, and the McAfee Executive Summits in Boston and New York.
One question I was asked at every event, was “What is a mobile device?”
The flippant answer of course which after two weeks of middle seats and hours of flight delays comes easily to my lips, is “A device which moves from place to place” – but is that strictly true any more? Read more…
Underground Economies – The rise of Intellectual Capital Theft.
By now I hope readers have seen the latest latest report from McAfee that I was involved in – “Underground Economies” where McAfee and SAIC collaborated to investigate perceptions around intellectual capital – the “secret sauce” of companies. The report surveyed over 1,000 senior IT decision makers across the world, getting their opinion on where they thought their valuable data was, their attitude to outsourcing control of it, and questions around how it was protected and the risk of it being “misplaced”.
You can read more from the actual report, or see my corporate blog. There’s been a lot of press on this report, such as
ToastCache for EEPC/EEM v5
I finally got around to posting ToastCache to my CTOGoneWild site. This is a simple script which uses a couple of tricks, and a kludge to force the EEM v5 Name index to rebuild on demand.
The EEM Name Index is one of the most useful performance enhancements you can enable within the product – certainly any database running more than 2000 machines needs it turned on to give reasonable performance. The Index speeds up Name>ID resolution. Without it, the server has to crawl the entire database searching for an object which matches the name it’s looking for – This means that logging on slows down for new users (they are placed at the end of the db), and also creating new things takes more time (as the DB has to be trawled end-to-end looking to see if the name is already in use).
The index resolves both of these, and more scenarios by maintaining a “bucket list” of hashed names>IDs. Read more…
Improving Security On Solid State Drives
This post originally placed on my McAfee Blog – http://blogs.mcafee.com/corporate/cto/improving-security-on-solid-state-drives
Well, One week into the Intel/McAfee relationship and I am pleased to say it’s already bearing fruit. Over the last few days I’ve been reaching out to all my Intel peers, making the connections with people which were simply impossible while the deal was going through all the evaluations.
I had an interesting discussion with Knut Grimsrud in the Intel storage division today about “clever” things we can do to improve performance and security on the Intel SSD hard disks. Read more…
Two London, UK councils fined $100,000+ each for lost laptops..
Reported by Julien Weston of WIREDvc today, two London councils, Ealing Council and Hounslow Council, were fined over $100,000 each for failure to properly protect personal information of a total of 1,700 individuals stored on stolen laptops.
Even though the laptops were password protected, the Information Commissioner of the UK declared the protection isufficulent, as no encryption was in place.
Even though, both councils had policy which mandated encryption on such devices.
You can read more on the WIREDvc site.
EU Close on Intel-McAfee Deal
Another hurdle out of the way in McAfee’s plan to acquire Intel. Yes, $7.68billion is a lot to pay for a company who just makes silicon widgets, but we’re sure that McIntel will rise to greater things!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704881304576094161244883424.html
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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