It is in closed beta right now, but I have to admit that I am overly impressed with Newsvine. It has a lot of buzz in the tech circles and it appears to be warranted.

For those in the beta, my promoted stories can be found at terrorism.newsvine.com.  If you aren’t in the beta and are interested (and I know you), send me an email.

And a not so decent write-up or our BlackHat Federal presentation. A few misconceptions that don’t track with the point we were trying to get across. However, this quote says a lot about the problem space. I hope that this attracts some attention and gets Tom Parker some support for the models he is working on.

“The inability to characterize is a vulnerability, and the ability to characterize is a deterrent,” because if you can characterize a threat, you can attribute it to an attacker, Devost said.

A decent write-up from my BlackHat presentation.

“Obviously, nation-states have greater capacity to finance attacks,” Devost said. “We need to ask ourselves, ‘Who are the threats,’ because they all look the same in the exploit.”

Effective risk management requires greater granularity in identifying our attackers, their motives and their capabilities, Devost said. 

I’ll be speaking at Black Hat Federal on January 23-26, 2006.  If you are going to be in town for the event, let me know.  Conference site.

The flaw, which allows hackers to infect computers using programs maliciously inserted into seemingly innocuous image files, was first discovered last week. But the potential for damaging attacks increased dramatically at the weekend after a group of computer hackers published the source code they used to exploit it. Unlike most attacks, which require victims to download or execute a suspect file, the new vulnerability makes it possible for users to infect their computers with spyware or a virus simply by viewing a web page, e-mail or instant message that contains a contaminated image.

FT.com / By industry / IT - Windows PCs face ‘huge’ virus threat