A roundup of stuff...

Seagate ships hard-drives with viruses...Hrm, I wonder if they will take the path of another vendor and blame Microsoft.

Vulnerability auction site WabiSabiLabi's founder was arrested for involvement in spying on several corporate officials. Some people are pointing to this as an example of why a vulnerability market is "shady" and you should just give information to the vendors. I am torn on this because to swallow that you have to believe that the vendor will do the right thing. I have reported flaws to vendors that haven't not been fixed a year later. This is mostly because they know we don't drop 0day so there is no rush to fix the problems. Its seems almost like the mindset has set in that you should ASSUME the researcher is a bad guy and the vendor is a poor victim. I don't buy into this school of thought and think its time for "responsible disclosure" to start holding to task just like they do researchers.

On the flip side you have this guy who is obviously bad.

Apple releases security updates to patch a libtiff hole in the iPhone. People are already reporting the phone is re-broken. You have to love cat and mouse games. I am happy the iPhone is here because until now nobody really though mobile vulnerabilities were a big deal. The best thing Apple has going for them the most is that they can release updates directly to the device instead of waiting for carriers to do it like Windows Mobile.

The Cyber-Jihad didn't happen, no one is surprised but yet everyone is talking about it.

Blackwater founder Eric Prince now has SIGINT and information warfare capabilities. The company, Total Intelligence Solutions, provides a range of services from penetration testing to SIGINT to OSINT for clients. They are basically an outsourced NSA and CIA rolled under one umbrella without the inter-agency rival. If you look at the people who make it up, they come with some pretty hefty bios with significant amounts of CIA experience. A thing to note is that they list former carnivore producer Netwitness as a partner. Netwitness is also headed up by Amit Yoran, the former head of the CIA VC company In-Q-Tel. Quite an old boys club there...