Babar Mahmood

The State of Security

The elephant in the room is the viability and sustainability of blockchain technology. Cryptocurrency mining, for instance, requires specialized rigs that consume electricity. In certain estimates, at the time of writing, the bitcoin network’s energy consumption came in at 41 globally if it was a country. This means the bitcoin ... Read More

As discussed before, the blockchain-based solution is built to provide strong integrity and independent verifiability. An exception to the independent verifiability is private blockchain solutions. In this part, we discuss both of these technological dimensions and detail their applicability and limitations. Public distributed blockchain provides the most robust integrity assurance ... Read More

Integrity assurance that a piece of a binary is not modified, whether it is related to data or software, remains a significant challenge in the IT industry. Integrity assurance is built into many databases; it helps ensure that data will not be changed unless done in a well-regulated/controlled manner. Furthermore, ... Read More

It amazes me how many people confuse the importance of vulnerability scanning with penetration testing. Vulnerability scanning cannot replace the importance of penetration testing, and penetration testing, on its own, cannot secure the entire network. Both are important at their respective levels, needed in cyber risk analysis, and are required ... Read More