Monitoring Matters

Stop me if you’ve never heard of it, but "The Wizard" is a quintessential movie for the millennial who loved and grew up with video games. Just like Jimmy Woods in his quest to win a video game tournament, there’s another Wiz on its way to California, only they’re more interested in buying up Lacework. That’s the news that I’ve had my eye on for the past week anyway as the cloud security unicorn startup looks to buy up their rival to the tune of $150-200...

I’m writing this after completing the first leg of my journey towards ISC West 2024, and I can safely say that “She Sells Sanctuary” by The Cult is the best road song of all time. What are some good runners up you might ask? “Roundabout” by Yes, and “Last Train Home” by Pat Metheny for sure. Late night drive? “No Sleep till Brooklyn” by the Beastie Boys, easily answered questions. What might not be an easily answered question is what programming...

This week we’re talking about a subject near and dear to my heart, well, near at least if you count proximity. That’s right, we’re discussing the recent semiconductor investment in Arizona. I usually go to the well to find the most current security topics for my blogs, but things dry up the closer you get to a major industry show since everyone wants to play their cards close to their chests. I think the major semiconductor news isn’t too long in the tooth, however....

A dozen lawsuits later and it sounds like Airbnb has finally put the kibosh on indoor security cameras in its policies. I’m not an aficionado of the rental properties lifestyle but I suppose I assumed that it was, at the very least, frowned upon beforehand to install security cameras indoors at places like this. Obviously, bathrooms and bedrooms were already a no-go but having a bunch of Norman Bates’ peeping on tenants while having a somewhat ambiguous policy on indoor surveillance...

The return of dreaded continuity. I swear that three is our lucky number and this will be the last time I discuss ransomware in this space, at least for a little while. BlackCat/ALPHV is apparently falling apart this week if you’ve been following that story closely. The official word is that they stole the $22 million payment from UnitedHealthcare and collectively ghosted the world. Which, you know, that money is kind of already stolen? I mean, that’s what blackmail basically is, guys....

Oh man, I really don’t like doing the same topic two weeks in a row, but we have to talk about ransomware again. It should be about the ADT webcast, but we’ll save that one for next week, as a treat. Instead, today we’re going to take our medicine and I get to say I told you so while discussing the ransomware attack on UnitedHealthcare by BlackCat. You’ll remember BlackCat (ALPHV) because we’ve covered it before, but also because in this very blog spot last week I...

This week international members of law enforcement patted themselves on the back for slaying the proverbial dragon of LockBit, but in reality, it’s just one head of the Hydra. I don’t mean to lessen or downplay that accomplishment either. This has been a serious blow to global cybercriminal activity and a victory against destabilizing actions taken by politically aligned criminal organizations (because let’s not pretend the ransomware gangs are largely state sponsored)....

It’s Valentine's Day and I’d love to mention that I have a sweetheart of a topic to share this week, but I’m sorry to say it’s left me a little brokenhearted. Since the beginning of February, I’ve been watching a lot of Q4 2023 reports roll out and while we can still safely call it the year of AI, it’s also the year of the residential security market falling flat on its face. I talked about this a bit in my last blog post where I discussed ADT...

After a week of being under the weather I could use a little sun to brighten my outlook. Unfortunately, following some news last week, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. I’ll get to that point in a moment, since it’s a little detour from normal security news. The actual news I wanted to discuss this week is the often discussed but still unreleased ADT smart home security system made in collaboration with Google. It so happened that my boss asked me earlier this week what was...

Now that CES is behind us let’s step back from smart home security products for a minute and talk about AI-based surveillance platforms and what an impact they’re making. By impact of course I mean that with AI everything being so en vogue it’s been particularly popular for surveillance where it’s being used to do everything from authenticated visitors and license plates to identifying dangerous patterns and harmful devices. That last one is especially notable since...