Branden Williams

Branden R. Williams, Business Security Specialist

Or, how a travel website’s newsletter clued me in to a huge security gap in a popular email protection service. tl;dr: I discovered URLs of sufficient length (over 770 characters) would bypass Proofpoint’s URLDefense service leaving the original link untouched, allowing malicious links directly into users’ email inboxes. Proofpoint let ... Read More

When I want to learn a new programming language, my typical method of doing this is to either take an existing small project and port it over to the new language, or come up with a small, yet practical problem to solve. I’m kinda like Johnny Five, in that I ... Read More

“Oh sorry, I missed your email. It got dropped into my SPAM folder for some reason.” Isn’t that frustrating? All you did was send over a proposal and it got dropped into the SPAM folder. Perhaps it was word choice, perhaps you ended up on a list somewhere, or perhaps ... Read More

Postini was a technology darling in the mid-2000s that sold email filtering technology as a service to companies struggling to combat the onslaught of SPAM and malicious emails that were sprayed at corporate inboxes. For small companies or small footprints, the price was right as well. $1/user/month translated to super ... Read More

I’m not afraid to point out misleading or bad research that is funded by marketing groups strictly to gain headlines. Studies from firms like the Ponemon Institute come to mind here that give us excellent, shareable headlines supported by a house of cards. The information presented is unusable for risk ... Read More

SMS-based authentication continues to be a great way to placate a user into thinking they are safe while creating an avenue for attackers to gain access to their accounts. Fabio Assolini and Andre Tenreiro from Kaspersky published some research that puts numbers in fraud losses to these threats. SIM Swaps ... Read More

I’ve had a few folks ask me if I could attribute any big life lessons that have helped me get to where I am. Things like the Golden Rule or an extremely healthy amount of respect for karma (both of which would be true for me) came to mind, but ... Read More

Last year I released a blog post and a GitHub repository with some code to calculate how much money the PCI Council brings in annually, with an estimation of lifetime revenue. There are some MAJOR assumptions in there that can swing the revenue in either direction. And, of course, there ... Read More