A look back at posts in March 2009

Here is a quick review of my posts from this time last year.

Some dramatic news that eventually came to my attention was the The Great Laptop Giveaway at US Airports, where a study sponsored by Dell concluded that over 12,000 laptops go missing each week in US airports. More big numbers were reported in The Flap over Twitter where new statistics for Twitter showed that almost every metric was growing exponentially, and the micro-blogging service was dominated by power laws. I also posted on Twitter and Extremistan, discussing how Twitter provides the basis for extreme behaviour since we are connecting a viral technology with social media. Extremistan is a mythical country introduced in Taleb's Black Swan book to characterize non-Gaussian dynamics.

I had spent some time tracking down a copy of the paper Randomness Tests for Packed Malware which proposed statistical tests to distinguish packed malware from purely random data. Sticking with statistical arguments, there was also a New Birthday Attack on DJBDNS, a secure version DNS.

I had also come across a presentation The Positive Trust Model and Whitelisting discussing the general merits of whitelisting. Whitelisting is gaining credence, and while it may not be rapidly replacing blacklisting technologies, several companies are opting for hybrid solutions as the exponential growth of malware variants is simply outstripping the scan-and-detect (sometimes called the block-and-tackle) paradigm.

There was also a repost of The Wisdom of a Random Crowd of One describing how Google uses link data to create the PageRank algorithm. The post was created in the context of answering the question of how we in IT Security can make better use of data. Finally, I uploaded a few more of my FreeMind maps for my posts to the FreeMind Flash server, which provides an online navigation service. Now you can get all the FreeMind sources here.

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