Security Pie

So Yahoo! is taking down Geocities.

Still among the top 200 networks, Geocities which was up for more then a decade and was the first example of an open, simple to use, free personal Internet is now being closed. 2,000,000+ sites hosted on Geocities will be gone forever.

There are many morals for this story, but I’d like to point you to just one. Only 10 years ago Yahoo! acquired Geocities for ~ $4,000,000,000 (in stock….) to get this site.

The agreement, which combines two of the World Wide Web’s most popular destinations, would be the largest acquisition involving a Southern California Internet start-up. It also would solidify Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo’s position at the head of the portal pack.

Can it happen again? Can one of today’s web-based leaders will be taken down and its content will be lost forever?

Will anyone pay such amount today?

11.22.2009 Update:

Almost a month later and the site is still pretty high on Alexa…..

Change log

11.22.2009 12:35 am Changed So Yahoo! is taking down Geocities today to So Yahoo! is taking down Geocities..

Recently, I have been enjoying the tower defense (TD) genere game on my iPhone. In the game, I try to prevent little animations of monsters from arriving at my castle and doing some malicious deeds like devouring the cute, helpless inhabitants of the castle.

Now I am not aware of any monsters that are scary, so to get into the mood I imagine that the monsters are packets with malware. Scary.

Also, since I have little experience with bows, arrows, cannons, balistrades and other primitive weapons, I imagine a sequence of firewalls, clusters of network IPS/IDS, proxies and host security apps.

After setting up the defenses, I then watch helplessly as those sinister packets slowly (but determined) make their way towards the castle eventually devouring the residents. In the world of TD you mostly fail. Success means you move onto the next level to spend time yet again watching malicious packets devouring your residents. But then nothing happens. This is where my metaphore for security as a TD game collapses:

1. In TD, you have many failed attempts and one success. As a security expert, you’d better succeed more!
2 In TD, the monsters end by eating the residents. In security, the malicious packets must create value for the hacker: either sabotage, or data theft.

In a data theft scenario, the malicious packets will have to walk back past the defenses with the data. That gives us a whole new opportunity to find and disable the attack vectors.

In security, we are usually told that building the anticipated attack trees and ensuring all branches are covered makes for a safer network. Anticipating attack paths is hard. Anticipating intent is easier (steal or damage). Adding the escape path branch to the list of monitored points just makes sense, even if TD doesn’t.

/al

According to HBP statistics, quoting the Kauffman Foundation, entrepreneurs have been key drivers of economic recovery in past recessions. In fact, since 1980, companies less than five years old have accounted for virtually all net new-job creation in the U.S.

Considering myself as an entrepreneur I read the Entrepreneurs’ Gloom Contradicts Wall Street Optimism.

The Foundation’s September 2009 study of more than 400 entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs shows that 75% think the United States cannot have a sustained economic recovery without another burst of entrepreneurial activity.

Duh. Isn’t that clear? Elementary…

The following statistic tidbit got my attention:

75 percent think the United States cannot have a sustained economic recovery without another burst of entrepreneurial activity.

Duh. Isn’t that clear? Elementary…

Reading the survey summary  (pdf) the following slide was not surprising:

The US is not doing enough

I found out that many successful, talented entrepreneur that are currently in the US with  H1 visa are unable to start a business in the US, even if they willing to go through this difficult process.

The vast majority of entrepreneurs think it should be easier to start a business:

Starting a business in the US

For many entrepreneurs, starting a business in THE US, is NOT an option. You don’t need a Nobel Prize in economy to understand why the US economy need to make it easier to H1 visa holders to start a business in the US and help boost economy.