Dan Geer just gave his keynote at SOURCEBoston. Have you heard Dan Geer speak? If not, I highly encourage you to watch the video of his talk as soon as it is online. I will have to go back and listen to his talk a few more times to absorb some more of it. Dan throws out so many thoughts and concepts that it is hard to follow him, without knowing some of this stuff already. I am sure those of you who have been following Dan were able to retain much more of his talk. I mostly know about Dan’s work from his postings on the security metrics list.

Risk management is a topic that is often discussed by Dan. “Risk management is about affecting the future, not explaining the past.” says Dan. To do effective risk management we need to measure things as best as we can. We need security metrics. We can’t make much progress in security if we don’t have good metrics. We’ve exhausted what we can do with firefighting. Dan has an entire slide-deck of over 400 slides about the topic of security metrics that is incredibly interesting to read up on security metrics and risk management.

Do you need security analogies from other fields? Read the transcript of Dan’s talk as soon as it is up on the SOURCEBoston site. It’s really worth it.

Richard Clarke, during his keynote at SOURCEBoston, talked about the 2007, non-public Presidential cybersecurity directive. One part of the directive is rumored to talk about building an offensive cyber capability (see also Jennifer’s post). Is the fact that the AirForce has changed their recruiting commercial to contain cybersecurity aspects already a first sign that they are looking for talent that can execute on those objectives?
– Live from SOURCEBoston!

We are frantically preparing for the SOURCE Boston conference which starts tomorrow morning.

You can keep track of the happenings via Twitter. It’s pretty interesting how this Twitter thing is taking off. I will try to update my feed (@zrlram) regularly over the next days so you can keep track of what’s going on.

There are a lot of other Security Twits here who hopefully keep their feeds up to date. I am sure @mediaphyter (Jennifer Leggio) is keeping her feed current with the latest gossip. Careful though, she is not always saying the truth 😉

I will be at Source Boston next week, which is going to be probably one of the coolest conferences this year. The speaker lineup is absolutely fantastic. And I am not saying that because I am going to be speaking there. You can keep up with the conference on the Source Boston Blog or on the Twitter @SourceBoston feed.

My presentation carries the title: All the data that’s fit to visualize. Recognize this? It’s the New York Time’s headline. I am going to talk about what security visualization can learn from the NYT. I am very excited about the talk. I am going to try out some new presentation methods. Come and see it!

[ tags]security visualization, source boston, applied security visualization[/tags]

A bunch of log analysis professionals started blogging on a new blog, located at: http://www.loganalysispros.com . Let’s see how much people actually are going to contribute there. I did my first post today about the new CEE Field List that was just posted on the CEE mailinglist. Here is where you can get more information about CEE and the newly posted field list.

According to IPO Home, ArcSight is going to go public next week – The week of 2/11/08. Here some data:

• Market Cap: $309.4 million
• Revenue: $75 million
• Price range (expected): $9 – $11 / share [mind you, there was a 4:1 reverse split]
• Shares offered: 6.9 million
• Symbol: ARST

I am curious how it’ll go! Good luck!

This week I finally attended Edward Tufte’s one-day visualization course. It was a great day, filled with inspiration. I had seen Tufte’s books before and read a lot about his theories and principles. I have been very inspired by a lot of them and I am trying to make use of them in my own book on “Applied Security Visualization“. Tufte has a certain way of pondering a topic that makes you think hard – even about the most controversial things; such as: “Forget PowerPoint”. He has some good arguments and maybe I will try some of his principles in my next presentation.

I was definitely impressed with the two books he brought along to the course. He showed one of the first prints of Galileo’s book. An absolutely beautiful piece of work! Notice how E.T. holds the book in his bare hands (picture below), while his assistant is wearing gloves.

The other book he brought along was one of the first prints of Euclid’s book where all the Euclidean geometry is explained. Note the three-dimensional pyramids in the book. Amazing for a book that was printed hundreds of years ago!

OnSecrity just released another video of the conversation we recorded last year during RSA. I am talking about security visualization in light of the book I am working on. This video cast is the sequel to the first one that I posted a few days ago.

One of the topics I am discussing in the video is the “false dichotomy” between security and visualization. This is a topic that I talked about during a talk at the MIT Lincoln Labs at the beginning of December. The presentation showed how there are really two disciplines that come together in security visualization: Security and Visualization. The problem with this is that visualization people don’t know much about security and the other way around. It’s a very interesting topic to explore and it explains some of the mistakes that are being made with visualization tools and is also reflected in visualization research.

[tags]visualization, security, videocast[/tags]

I have been using Linkedin for quite a while now. Today marks the day where I actually have 500 connections. I wonder whether I would be able to go through all of them and remember who each and everyone is. I would probably get a 95% hit rate. I don’t think I am actually making complete use of my network on Linkedin network, but one of my New Year’s resolutions is to get a bit better with my networking.

Connect to me if I know you and you are not in my network yet!

It is pretty much exactly a year ago that I signed my contract with Addison Wesley to write a book about security data visualization. Now, a year later, I am getting really close. I am in the process of assembling my review committee and I a very excited about a couple of people that already accepted. Thanks in advance!

There is still a lot to be done. I have one more big chapter to write: “Perimeter Threat” and a couple to finish up. But I can see the end! It’s nice to see the end being close!

A little more than a month after I signed my contract with my publisher, they recorded a video cast with me. I am talking about security visualization and a little bit about the book. Beware, this was a year ago. It is interesting, however, that I would probably still say about the same things! This shows that the market has not really changed much. I hope this will change soon though!