A Brief History of the Internet in Northern Virginia

Earlier today I happened to see a short piece from the Bloomberg Businessweek "The Year Ahead: 2016" issue, titled The Best Places to Build Data Centers. The text said the following: Cloud leaders including Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and upstart DigitalOcean are spending tens of billions...

A Different Spin on the Air War Against IS

Sunday evening 60 Minutes aired a segment titled Inside the Air War. The correspondent was David Martin, whose biography includes the fact that he served as a naval officer during the Vietnam War. The piece concluded with the following exchange and commentary: On the day we watched the B-1 strike...

I Wrote a New Book for Corelight

TLDR: I wrote a new book for Corelight called NDR Essentials. It's free at that link. This is the 10th book that I've authored or co-authored. The rest are all posted at taosecurity.com. Why? It was time. That’s what I thought when I heard that Corelight wanted to update its 2021 book on network...

We have achieved FreeBSD 15.0-REL with KDE Plasma

Houston, we have installed FreeBSD 15.0-REL with KDE Plasma 6.4.5 on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 6 laptop. I have come full circle. I used to daily drive FreeBSD 5.x on a Thinkpad a20p in the early 2000s. Today I used the "technology preview" method for pkg installation, too. I posted this fr...

Company Wrecked by Ransomware Only Spent 120,000 Pounds Per Year on Cyber Security

Do you remember the story of the UK-based logistics company that closed due to ransomware and laid off 730 workers? Today in an article about a warning to UK businesses about cyber incidents, their “director” said they “were throwing £120,000 a year at cyber-security with insurance and systems an...

For the PLA, Cyber War is the Battle of Triangle Hill

In June 2011 I wrote a blog post with the ever polite title China's View Is More Important Than Yours. I was frustrated with the Western-centric, inward-focused view of many commentators, which put themselves at the center of debates over digital conflict, neglecting the possibility that other...

Stop Shoddy Academic "Research"

When someone cites one of my works, I get a notice from Research Gate. Today I got one, from an article from the "IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society." It cited my first book, which is 21 years old. The PDF was available. I noticed the article referenced Prelude, a project I talked...

Happy 23rd Birthday TaoSecurity Blog

Happy birthday TaoSecurity Blog, born on this day in 2003! The best way to digest the key lessons from this site is to browse my four volume Best of TaoSecurity Blog book series, published in 2020. It's available in print as seen here, or as a properly formatted HTML-based digital book -- none of...

Mandiant Global Median Dwell Time Deteriorates from 11 to 14 Days

Oh snap. My single most important cybersecurity metric deteriorated again. In the M-Trends report for calendar year 2024, Mandiant’s global median dwell time metric worsened from 10 to 11 days. In the newest report, released today, for calendar year 2025, that metric worsened again, from 11 to 14...