Author Archives: C. Warren Axelrod

Security Metrics, Recency Bias and Availability Heuristics

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I “recently” came across an article by Tom Chatfield with the title “The Trouble with Big Data? It’s Called The ‘Recency Bias,’” which is available at http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160605-the-trouble-with-big-data-its-called-the-recency-bias The article was published on June 5, 2016, which is not so recent in comparison to many other articles on the fast-moving subject of big data, so that, […]

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Team Communications—Same Tune, Different Song

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There’s an interesting article in the September 2016 issue of the Communications of the ACM by Kate Matsudaira with the title “Bad Software Architecture Is a People Problem: When people don’t work well together they make bad decisions.” The article essentially describes many issues with the design, development, testing and bug fixing that arise because […]

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Ron Ross and a “New” Approach to Cybersecurity

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No sooner had I finished my latest “Are We Secure?” piece than I read an August 23, 2016 article on Fedscoop by Shaun Waterman with the title “New Approach Needed to IT, Says NIST’s Top Cyber Scientist,” which you can find at http://fedscoop.com/ron-ross-cybersecurity-comission-august-2016 The article describes a presentation by Ron Ross, a Senior Fellow at […]

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Are We Secure? And Other Ridiculous Questions

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I would expect that practically every infosec professional has been asked at one time or another “Are we secure?” by non-technical senior executives. Technical executives know better than to ask the question. But what is an appropriate answer? If you say “Yes” you have assumed all responsibility and let senior business management off the hook […]

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Self-Driving Software … Test, Test, Test

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A spokesman for Mobileye, the company that developed the Autopilot software for Tesla, remarked that they hadn’t tested their software for the particular scenario in which a Tesla car slammed into a tractor-trailer, proceeded under the trailer and drove independently for some distance, decapitating the car and killing its reportedly distracted driver in the process. […]

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Techies, Newbies and the Preservation of Privacy

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No sooner had I submitted my May 30, 2016 “Facebook Fallibility—Algorithms vs. Judgement vs. Ourselves” BlogInfoSec column about Facebook having used newbies to select items for “Trending Topics” than Jim Rutenberg published an article, “Facebook’s Troubling One-Way Mirror,” on the front page of the Business Day section in the May 23, 2016 issue of The […]

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Privacy, Secrecy, Free Access … Misinterpretation?

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The pity of it all is that many of the issues that we face with privacy rights, national security and freedom of information are a result of misinterpreting underlying concepts. Unfortunately, our “brilliant engineers,” as politicians like to call them, are the ones who appear to be the most confused of all when it comes […]

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Encryption and the Dark Side

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The saga continues … as it should and will. A front page article appeared in the May 17, 2016 issue of The New York Times, by Paul Mozur and Jane Perlez, with the title “Chinese Panel Quietly Grills Silicon Valley: Apple and Others Face Security Checks.” It describes the retaliation that was entirely expected. The […]

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