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Author Archives: Tirath Ramdas
Performance-based contracting for cybersecurity
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” — Charlie Munger Have you heard the one about how all the viruses are written by the antivirus companies? This joke makes the rounds at cocktail parties because it … Continue reading
Podcasting: 5 dos and 5 don’ts
About 10 years ago (or was it 11 years… or 12 years… let’s cap it at 10 before I start to feel too old), I got a Sansa Clip. I loved my Sansa Clip. The killer app for me was … Continue reading
The cyber killchain: wrong, but is it useful?
All models are wrong, but some are useful. The trick is to determine in what circumstances a model may be useful. This is where mistakes are made. Today I was at a seminar on cybersecurity in the context of individuas, … Continue reading
Should Australia join ASEAN?
Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating believes that Australia should join ASEAN. This is a call that he has repeated since the surprise victory of Donald Trump. There are concerns about whether or not Australia could join ASEAN – certainly … Continue reading
A high-level evaluation of the OpenBSM audit system in OS X
One of the BSD legacy security mechanisms included with OS X is OpenBSM. This is an audit mechanism. In contrast, TrustedBSD (also included with OS X) is a mandatory access control mechanism which can block system calls based on some … Continue reading
Disabling revoked cert checking for malware research on OS X
Malware research involves running malware samples, typically in VMs. Because developer codesigning certificates are trivial to acquire in the Apple ecosystem, OS X malware samples are very often code signed. When malware is discovered, Apple can and often does revoke … Continue reading
httrack for downloading websites
Scraping web pages for offline hosting can be handy for testing. I’m a long-time wget fan, but for pulling down entire web pages, CSS/JS bits and all, it just trips up too easily, so I needed something better. Some quick … Continue reading
Do you really need a blockchain?
There’s a scene in Angels and Demons where the Camerlengo asks Robert Langdon if he believes in God. Professor Langdon replies “faith is a gift I have yet to receive“. I found this interesting because, despite not being part of … Continue reading
libproc for process listing on OSX
On OSX if you need to manage other processes, a sensible place to start is NSRunningApplication class. You can instantiate one of these with a pid: An NSRunningApplication object has amongst other things, the following properties: executableURL bundleURL bundleIdentifier That … Continue reading
The data-dev-ops triangle
For a while now I’ve sensed the emergence of a new species of software engineer, adding a third node to the DevOps dichotomy (though from a skills/capabilities perspective it’s actually more of a continuum). The third vertex joining the Dev … Continue reading
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